I worked at a Burger King for one halcyon summer during high school. The Whaler was very popular at our store, especially if you ordered it as “a Whaler made like a Whopper.”
I’ll also note that even today, McDonald’s is the only one of the major fast food chains that actually puts too much tartar sauce on their fish sandwich*. I can’t eat one of those things without spilling some sauce on my shirt.
*unlike “too much cheese,” it turns out that “too much tartar sauce” *is *a thing.
I must’ve just ordered them without the cheese as a kid. The tartar sauce, I remember. But not th echeese.
Looks like I got screwed two ways. I just saw an ad that not only showed cheese on the sandwich, but you can get it as part of a $5 mix and match so I could have gotten a second one, or a Big Mac, or Quarter Pounder with Cheese, or 10 piece McNuggets. I paid something like $5.22 for one sandwich and small fries. Basically I could have gotten twice as much for a dollar more.
I know they aren’t obligated to tell me how to save money but they normally do.
Like robby I worked at a McD’s in the mid-1980’s and the filet was my favorite menu item. So when on lunch break on a few occasions I “jazzed up” my sandwich by using an actual full slice of cheese like all those rich people eat.
Honest to God, it was distinctly inferior to the standard model. The cheese to fried fish ratio just didn’t work as well. Those McD food’gineers got it right the first time.
The perfect filet-o-fish would have no cheese and about 1/3 the tartar sauce. Also a bit of black pepper.
The whaler was the bomb, but the Wendy’s fish filet is second only to Marconi’s* lobster rolls.
*In Portsmouth NH. Or used to be. Don’t order the roll at Yoken’s, they are really only good at hot stuff.
I eat something like 4 Filet O Fishes per week, and they always have cheese on them. The only inconsistency that’s problematic is the amount of tartar sauce, which appears to vary a lot depending the the location and/or preparer. And yes, the Whaler is now the Big Fish. Decent sandwich, but I rate the FOF as the best fast food sandwich ever (with The Whopper Jr. at #2).
One of the guys at work regularly sits near me and eats 2 Filets-o-Fish® for lunch. I often remember how I used to get one when I took my kids for McDonald’s. I was travelling earlier in the week and decided to stop for a toilet break at a convenient McDonald’s and have my first Filet-o-Fish® for a long time.
As they now have touch screen ordering, to allow you to avoid the queueing, I thought I would check it out. What a treat. You can order an extra filet for your Filet-o-Fish® and either an extra slice or half slice of cheese. The double filet Filet-o-Fish® was all I hoped it would be.
That’s interesting, since McD’s uses a handheld pump-action dispenser that always delivers a “standard” portion of sauce. Any employee caught giving out more than one pump’s worth would be reprimanded for breaking protocol.
If there’s any excess sauce on the sandwich or in its wrapper, my daughter and I scoop it up with French fries. I got hooked on the fries+tartar sauce combo when I lived in Czechoslovakia.
That’s what I thought, but I’ve received FOF’s with barely a coating of sauce and others with too much. At one particular location that is notorious for sauce stinginess, I’ve asked for extra sauce and ended up with way too much. I hate opening up sandwiches after going through the drive-thru just to check, but have started having to do it.
Probably calibrated wrong. Mayo, tarter sauce, and big mac sauce are all dispensed by caulking gun type devices. But they all do different amounts. So if you put the tarter sauce in the big mac gun, you get way too much.
I dunno the exacts of the cheese, but it’s definitely better stuff than velveeta or kraft singles “cheese”.
It’s high-grade aged Stilton. Shhhhh…don’t tell!