Review: White Castle’s Impossible Slider Is One of America’s Best Fast-Food Burgers

A USA Today headline recently asked whether White Castle was going “highbrow.” It’s an interesting observation for a chain whose chief cultural point of reference is a movie about two Jersey stoners who survive encounters with a rabid raccoon, a hooligan who screams like a velociraptor, a molly-popping Neil Patrick Harris, and a pot-smoking cheetah (which they ride like a horse), all for the purpose of feasting on the chain’s signature burgers. Those burgers are dollar sliders grilled over onions and sandwiched between rolls so insubstantial they could blow away in a gentle wind gust. There is nothing fancy or ambitious about any of this, nor should there be.

As the larger fast-food industry pays lip service to healthier offerings and builds cushier environs, White Castle remains a cultish, ultra-affordable, bare-bones outlier. There are no kale salads because, heck, there are no salads. There isn’t even an option for lettuce or tomato on burgers. The dining room, with fluorescent, blue tiles, and white walls, feels like a Greek flag-inspired military commissary.

The chain, in other words, seems an unlikely candidate for the “highbrow” moniker — or anything with vegetables. But alas, White Castle is now serving Silicon Valley’s Impossible Burger, a plant-based product that’s recently found its way onto menu at New York’s Momofuku Nishi, Wahlburgers, and Umami burger.

Here’s what’s even more surprising: The White Castle version, called the Impossible slider, and which is being tested in Chicago and the New York area, might be the best of the bunch. In fact I’ll go even further: It’s one of the country’s best fast-food burgers, period.

The Impossible slider costs $1.99, a price that shouldn’t jeopardize White Castle’s status as one of the lowest-priced fast-food chains (Shake Shack launched its own vegetarian burger for $7.29 in test markets earlier this week). But the patty is also nearly twice the cost of the Castle’s one-ounce slider, which is fair enough because it contains twice as much meat.

Meat, incidentally, is the right term here. Plant-based burgers have been enjoying a resurgence of sorts amid the culinary world’s vegetable-heavy zeitgeist, and they tend to taste like their excellent component ingredients — typically a mix of beans, grains, and soy protein (White Castle also has a more typically vegetarian burger; it tastes of mushy frozen peas).

The Impossible Burger is made from familiar components: a blend of wheat, coconut oil, and potato protein. But the Stanford biochemist who founded the company manufactures the ingredients in such a way as to mimic the aroma, texture, and taste of beef. Think of it as the vegetable version of an industrial canned sausage. The addition of leghemoglobin, a protein found in leguminous plants, is what supposedly imparts some variants of the Impossible Burger with a pink or even “bloody” interior.

The White Castle Impossible sliders are cooked well done, on the griddle. The searing process imparts them with a golden, caramelized, Maillard-style char. This stands in stark contrast to the chain’s standard slider, where a paper-thin beef patty, plagued by a sickly gray hue, looks like someone shaved the wrong end of a cow over a mandoline and microwaved the result.

Take a bite. Once you get past the salty cheese, sweet onions, and handsome char, unequaled by virtually any other fast-food burger save Shake Shack, you’ll notice a grey interior that has the same uncomfortable springiness and chewiness as a McDonald’s burger. The flavor is the same as I remembered it at Nishi, the nutty flavor of caramelized maitake mushrooms, followed by textured salt water. In other words, it doesn’t taste like a whole heck of a lot at all.

If that doesn’t sound like a compliment for what I’m calling one of America’s best fast-food burgers, well, it’s not. But the Impossible Burger’s indistinctness works well here at White Castle. In a restaurant, you’re paying for big flavors in your expensive burgers, whether they be made of lamb, beef, or beets; at a fast-food outlet, the flavors of dry-aged steak, funky lamb, or olive-oil roasted vegetables are probably the last thing you want.

The fast-food burger is an ode to fake cheese, white bread, condiments, and a salty slab of generic cow. No bovine bliss here. And so the genius (or insidiousness) of the Impossible Food folks is not that they’ve created something that tastes like beef — they haven’t — it’s that they’ve taken discrete ingredients from the natural environment and transformed them to mimic the artificial awesomeness (or awfulness) of American processed food.

And that’s right on brand for White Castle; I can’t think of a single other other fast-food chain where the center page of its website is dedicated selling a Crave Case of 30 sliders, which works out to 5,100 calories, for $20, or where executives recommend Monster Energy as a breakfast drink for “an early start to a fun-filled day ahead.”

So as much as folks from Impossible Brands like to talk up the environmental benefits of eating fewer cows (it’s also nice to think that fewer animals might be killed if we eat less meat), it’s worth keeping in mind that White Castle is still the type of place involved in the desecration of the human body. That I can’t wait to go back is a sure sign the chain’s drugs are working well.

Update: As of September 12, this burger is available at White Castle locations nationwide.

• White Castle Is Now Slinging Meatless Veggie Sliders [E]
• Shake Shack’s First Veggie Patty Attempt Needs a Lot More Work [ENY]

Ryan Sutton is chief critic and data lead of Eater NY.