Just time for the Hallowe’en season, a spooky specter has been making the rounds on the Internet, scaring people with its pallid, gray appearance. We’re talking, of course, about McDonald’s new Modern China Burger that recently debuted on the Chinese market, and what’s more, we here at the Nanfang had ourselves a taste test to let you know if the Modern China Burger lives up to its name.

Recently, McDonald’s China has taken a number of risks with its menu including offering pink and black-colored hamburgers as well as creating a new branch of the restaurant in which customers can custom-build their very own made-to-order hamburger. However, a willingness to make changes to satisfy local tastes is exactly how KFC became the undisputed champion of foreign fast food franchises in China, providing satisfied Chinese customers with food they are familiar with.

With this in mind, McDonald’s China can only remain competitive if they are able to push aside the Big Mac in favor of giving Chinese customers what they want. And that’s where the Modern China Burger (called 馒火的 in Chinese) comes in, a bold departure from anything else on the McDonald’s menu, that asserts its presence with a proper English name, something that not all menu items can claim.

The first thing about the Modern China Burger is likely going to be the only thing people need to know about it: it’s a terrible hamburger. The Modern China Burger is most likely to sow disharmony at any dinner gathering. Any Westernized person who grew up eating hamburgers will be sorely disappointed with the Modern China Burger, mainly because it’s hardly a hamburger at all. Even though it looks like one, and is sold like one, it isn’t a hamburger, even one “with Chinese characteristics”.

Instead, the Modern China Burger has more in common with Peking duck or roujiamo (肉夹馍), a ground beef paste mashed inside unleavened bread. It’s this familiar connection with Chinese food that McDonald’s is betting its Chinese customers will gravitate towards. At its most basic, the Modern China Burger is a sandwich whereby a Western concept is used to deliver Chinese cultural familiarity.

The big difference between the Modern China Burger and a traditional hamburger begins and ends with the bread, gray as it is.

Most people from the West are likely repelled by the sight of grey bread, but Chinese are very familiar with it. Besides white, speckled gray is one of the colors of the Chinese mantou (馒头), a steamed bun that is often eaten in place of rice or noodles. We here at The Nanfang couldn’t figure out how McDonald’s was able to slice a mantou in half and use it as the basis for a sandwich, because that would ruin its elasticity, easily one of the best traits of the mantou since it’s essentially flavorless.

But upon opening up the Modern China Burger, we found out its secret: it doesn’t use one mantou, but two separate ones, separately steamed instead of toasted. (seen below)

This is important as McDonald’s has found a way, for the first time in fast food history, to use the soft, pliable mantou as the carbohydrate-delivery system for the meat patties within. And the brilliance of the Modern China Burger is that the mantou is paired with an extremely pliable pair of ground-up pork patties to deliver the easiest eating experience you’ll have in recent history. By eating this burger, you’ll suddenly realize how much “work” it takes to chew other food.

It’s a bite that dances around your mouth before exiting the backstage of your throat. The burger capitulates to the lightest bite, and yet still gives a satisfying chew from the elasticity of the mantou rather than the meaty patty that the traditional burger offers.

Like other Chinese food, such as abalone soup and the aforementioned roujiamo, the Modern China Burger is an eating experience that has more to do with texture and “mouth feel” than taste. Although beef jerky is hard to chew, the Modern China Burger is much the same in that part of the fun is actually trying to chew it.

Which brings us to the other must-know fact about the Modern China Burger: it is definitely not a tasty burger. It does not have the “juiciness” of traditional hamburgers. We couldn’t believe it ourselves, but we only realized there was bacon in the burger when we saw it at the end. The Modern China Burger is very bland, its two fried spicy pork patties topped with shredded lettuce and a Thousand Island-type sauce that just gave up somewhere past a dozen. It’s strange to be describing a burger fried in oil and loaded with fat as bland, but it seems the mantou has the effect of cancelling out any punch the burger might have had.

Even though it’s never happened before in sandwich form, Chinese eaters are very familiar with this juxtaposition of texture over muted flavors. It’s the same way the chewy pan-baked bread has an effect upon the soft, mashed beef and fat of the roujiamo, or how the floury wrapping that houses a cut of Peking duck continues to linger in both texture and taste that won’t be overshadowed by the heaviness of the latter.

While we can’t say if the Modern Chinese Burger represents the future of burgers in China, it’s certainly the most innovative attempt we’ve seen by a Western fast food franchise to cater to Chinese tastes. For this reason, we can see the burger becoming immensely popular with Chinese customers.

The Modern Chinese Burger costs 28.50 yuan as a combo meal with four “Fish Veggie Tofu Nuggets” (chewy!) and a drink, and will be sold in China until November 3.