Customers Love To Hate This Burger King Sandwich — And We Get It

Burger King has had some serious flops over the years. Any fast food chain trying to innovate through the decades is bound to make mistakes here and there, though. And given the diversity of desire among fast food customers, even the worst of those mistakes are likely to please a few palates and develop an underground fan base. Interestingly, however, one of the earlier introductions to the menu — a mainstay for nearly 50 years now — still also manages to garner significant distaste from customers. The Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich has stood the test of time, but, frankly, we're not exactly sure how.

From the moment you peel the wrapper back, it is clear that Burger King's chicken sandwich is not like its competition. Actually, even before unwrapping it, the strange oblong shape gives this away. Once you're looking at it directly, though, the strangeness is even more clear. It is long and thin, a sandwich in the shape of a hoagie but with the makeup of a hamburger, filled with a piece of fried chicken confusingly shaped exactly the same. Burger King doesn't use just chicken for these sandwiches, either. The makeup of that patty is more like that of a chicken nugget, with processed chicken and fillers, that include isolated oat product. Add to that the way it's constructed, which leads to hot mayo and wilted lettuce (which are both common complaints), and the surprise is that this sandwich has stood for so long as the flagship chicken product of a major fast food chain.

It perhaps comes as no surprise that this sandwich wound up near the bottom of our ranking of Burger King chicken items (we thought Chicken Fries and the Royal Crispy Wrap were worse). With the competitive nature of fast food chicken sandwiches in recent years — the Chicken Sandwich Wars were an iconic fast food feud — it's hard to see how it holds on. "Chicken tasted stale and awful, almost sour. Lettuce d*** near wilted," one Redditor writes of their first experience with BK's chicken sando. Someone else agrees, stating, "The lettuce is always wilted on them." General commentary on the internet isn't much better. For many, the Original Chicken Sandwich that lives in their memory is delicious, but the real version doesn't hold up.

Not everyone sees the idiosyncrasies of the OCS as a problem, however. "By all measure it's terrible," one Redditor shares. "Processed parts chicken sandwich. That being said I do love it." And they are anything but alone in this belief. The weird shape, the hot mayo, the nugget-like texture and flavor, for some, it is all just right. When folks congregate online to deride this potentially underrated Burger King chicken sandwich, others arrive to defend it, often claiming to eat it weekly, or as often as multiple times a day.

It may not make sense to all of us. It is undoubtedly an outlier in the field of fast food chicken sandwiches. But the eccentricities of the Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich do give it a unique place in the market. It isn't for everyone, but for some, it can't be beat.