Japanese convenience store teriyaki donut hamburgers are definitely weird, but are they good?

Family Mart combines the two categories of combini bread in one strange package.

In every Japanese convenience store you’ll find a bread corner, and you can loosely group the baked goods there into two groups. One are the savory breads, with fillings like ham, curry, or yakisoba noodles, while the other is the sweet breads, like melon bread or various chocolate or cream-filled confectionaries.

And then there’s the newest bread aisle offering from Family Mart, which qualifies as both.

The Donut Burger went on sale last Tuesday, and the name is slightly misleading. Unlike, say, a chicken burger or a fish burger, where the chicken and fish are what’s between the buns, Family Mart’s Donut Burger still has a meaty patty, not a donuts, in the center of the sandwich. It is still a hybrid of donut and burger, though, as it replaces the hamburger’s bun with a sliced-in-half donut.

Its full name is the “Donut Burger (Teriyaki and Spicy Onion Mayo),” and sure enough, when we removed it from its wrapper we could see a swirl of mayonnaise peeking out from the donut’s hole.

Lifting up the top donut half, we saw that Family Mart avoided any temptation to shortchange us and kept the patty intact, with no hole in its center.

Replacing the top half of the donut and lifting the sandwich up to take a bite, we braced ourselves for a bizarre shock to our taste buds but instead our surprise was that it didn’t taste bad at all. It didn’t blow our mind, but it didn’t shatter our spirit either. We think part of that is because even though the donut is, as expected, sweet, it has, by donut standards, a soft and fluffy consistency, making it a viable bread substitute. The teriyaki sauce was palate-pleasing too, and the sauce’s sweet notes make for a pretty good harmony with the donut part of the package.

All in all, we give the Donut Burger (Teriyaki and Spicy Onion Mayo) a rating of “pretty good,” which, considering how weird the concept is, is actually rather impressive on its part. As with many unique convenience store creations, this one is probably sticking around for a limited yet undecided amount of time, and with a price of 158 yen (US$1.20), neither your taste buds nor your wallet will be mad at you for indulging your culinary curiosity.

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