Brace Yourself... Today is the Final Day of the McRib!
I’ll keep this short and sweet: Today is the last day to get the McRib. I understand if you can’t finish the rest of this because you’re stomping into your shoes and running out the door. Go! Enjoy. Come back and finish this with a face smothered in that tangy barbecue sauce!
I remember eating the McRib as a kid. It was similar to the Fillet O’ Fish sandwich and the Big Mac: a niche sandwich that I might get only when there was a discount. Otherwise, I’d always rock a #2 (two cheeseburgers, fries, and a drink) and carry on with my day. I feel like most people frequenting McDonald’s don’t need something flashy. McDonald’s has always been about convenience rather than an exquisite dining experience and since most of the sandwiches look like they were tap danced on before making it out the window, looks never mattered much. Eating anything in a paper wrapper will take most of any eye-candy away so outside of the Big Mac’s cardboard box display, I’m eating this with speed and without much eye contact.
Sometime in high school (mid 2000’s) I remember the McRib ads making one of their big, annual campaigns. My mom was delighted seeing the commercials and when it made its return, she was there on Day One to get McRibs for the whole family. I remember eating them with my mom. It felt like we part of an elite class of society: the first to enjoy the McRib before the rest of America even knew what they were missing.
I don’t know if it was my mom’s overall excitement or if I just never noticed how much I needed it in my life, but my mom has always been great at helping me to cherish the little moments in life and she made eating them seem grandiose. I remember how it made me feel eating a McRib with my mom year after year, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember if I actually liked the sandwich or just sharing a special moment with my mom.
Today, while reminiscing about the sandwich, I realized that I hadn’t had one since my mom moved back to South Korea in 2013. So I decided to get one and hopefully it’d feel like hanging out with my mom again.
I went through the drive-thru and ordered the McRib and I realized a few things (since I hadn’t been to McDonald’s since before the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic). First off, McDonald’s has one of the slowest drive-thrus rivaling Hardee’s for most aggravating experiences to get mediocre food. I contemplated leaving the drive-thru line three or four times while maneuvering their two-lane obstacle course-like ordering process just to wait another 15+ minutes to get my sandwich and fries. It took so long that after getting the food and driving less than 5 minutes to get home, the sandwich and fries were cold. Now I don’t know about you, but McDonald’s french fries are inedible once cold so after eating a few of those and getting that weird fry residue coating in my mouth, I now needed the McRib to deliver in more ways than before.
Going into this I knew a couple of things:
This is not a great sandwich. I think of this sandwich like a “dirty burger” and while not being delicious in its individual ingredients, the sandwich as a whole is supposed to be a nostalgia vessel that scratches a specific itch.
This is not supposed to be a beautiful sandwich. Don’t be fooled by the photo on McDonald’s website; even though it comes in a cardboard box, I know this is just to help make the sandwich feel more important and helps to avoid sauce dripping everywhere like it would with a regular paper wrapper.
The sandwich is described on McDonald’s website as “seasoned boneless pork dipped in tangy BBQ sauce, topped with slivered onions, crunchy dill pickle chips and served on a toasted homestyle bun".”
In actuality, the pork is like a salisbury steak pressed to look like a mini rack of ribs. The tangy barbecue sauce was more sour than tangy, but worked with the pickles to add an extra level of sourness to the sandwich, like a small amount of piss made its way into the batch at some point. The sliced, raw onions tasted just like onions so that was the item that kept me sane while the toasted homestyle bun wasn’t noticeably toasted and seemed more dense than it should, reminding me of the pontoon-like “bun” Burger King uses for it’s “Original Chicken Sandwich”.
Burger King’s Original Chicken Sandwich
I’d hoped that the ingredients would culminate into a sandwich that was greater than the sum of its parts. I wanted it to remind me of those times I spent eating McRibs with my mom. I didn’t need to be blown away, I just wanted a carnival-like sandwich that made my trip to McDonald’s worth it. I didn’t get any of that.
It was so different than what I expected that I didn’t get any nostalgia from eating it. It felt like I was eating this sandwich for the first time and I didn’t enjoy any part of consuming it. This was puzzling because it’s supposed to be the same sandwich as before. Like Bagel Bites and pizza rolls, I should be able to come back to it 10 years later and immediately get junk food with a side of nostalgia. Eating Bagel Bites always makes me feel like I’m about to play Nintendo 64 with my sister and a big plate of pizza rolls reminds me of watching football games with my friends and playing Madden during the commercial breaks.
I didn’t write this meaning to shit all over the McRib. It’s fair to say that the McDonald’s I went to may not be the best McDonald’s in America, but this sandwich isn’t made fresh to order. It’s supposed to be packaged parts that are heated and assembled to be the same everywhere. If that’s the case, and you’ve been eating one while reading this article, I’m sorry that you went through what I did. If you enjoyed it, then great. You’re blessed with a better set of arches than I. If after reading this and are still considering going out and trying one today, get a large drink to accompany the sandwich. The taste tends to linger and every drop of that drink may be required to get that taste out of your mouth.
