So let me bring you to the second floor, the grand pavilion. This is a complete McDonald s with a tw

The first time I wrote a letter to the president of McDonald s it was about breakfast. I m not a huge fan of most of the lunch and dinner options at McDonald s but I love Sausage Egg Cheese McMuffins and I love hash browns. I have gone into that McDonald s in Union Square right around when they close down breakfast and put in low-ball bids on the whole remaining hash brown rack. What do you got left hash browns-wise? Ten? Twelve? I ll give you five bucks for the lot. It s a great hangover remedy. Giant Coke, tons of ice, bag of hash browns. rental cars with dvd player in nyc Why can t they serve hash browns all day? They come out of the freezer, a McDonald s employee dumps them into a robot, rental cars with dvd player in nyc and the robot cooks them, just like the fries, right? So when I suggested they serve breakfast all day, I expected they would do it. What s the big deal? When I wrote to Starbucks to ask them to serve more savory breakfast foods, they did it. (I sent them a link to John Thorne s stone classic In Defense of the Savory rental cars with dvd player in nyc Breakfast. 1 It s worth reading just for the bit where Thorne blithely tosses off a delightfully Safirian Eggs McMuffin reference, miraculously published before the famous Onion joke .) When I wrote to every other fast food company, they at least would send back some coupons or something. McDonald s just said, We ll look into it. Here we are, years later, and you still can t get hash browns after breakfast ends.
So that s why I m taking a different approach with my current rental cars with dvd player in nyc McDonald s dream. I figure if a bunch of nerds on Facebook can get Betty White onto Saturday Night Live, together we can make my McDream a McReality. I would like to introduce you to a concept I call McWorld.
Sometimes, I see it like Epcot Center: there d be a central courtyard, maybe a water feature (McOcean or something), rental cars with dvd player in nyc and surrounding rental cars with dvd player in nyc it would be a variety of pavilions, each replicating the McDonald s experience from a different country. Pop over to Taiwan for a McRice burger (the rice, oddly, is formed into cakes that replace the buns, not the fillings), back to Brazil rental cars with dvd player in nyc for a side of nachos, and wash it all down with a frosty cane-sugar Coke from Mexico.
The central attraction of the ground floor level is a huge mega-menu that lists every item from every McDonald s in the world, because rental cars with dvd player in nyc this McDonald s serves rental cars with dvd player in nyc ALL of them. There would probably have to be touch screen gadgets to help you navigate the menu. There would have to be whole screens just dedicated to the soda possibilities. A concierge would offer suggestions. Celebrities on the iPad menus would have their own meals combining favorites from home ( Manu Ginóbili says Try the medialunas! ) with different stuff for a unique combination rental cars with dvd player in nyc ONLY available rental cars with dvd player in nyc at McWorld. You could get the India-specific Chicken Mexican Wrap ("A traditional Mexican soft flat bread that envelops crispy golden brown chicken encrusted with a Mexican Cajun coating, and a salad mix of iceberg lettuce, carrot, red cabbage and celery, served with eggless mayonnaise, tangy Mexican Salsa sauce and cheddar cheese." Wherever possible, the menu items descriptions should reflect local English style). Maybe a bowl of Malaysian McDonald s Chicken Porridge or The McArabia Grilled Kofta, available in Pakistan and parts of the Middle East. You should watch this McArabia ad for the Middle Eastern-flavored remix of the I m Lovin It song if for nothing else.
The Chicken Mexican Wrap is an example of my favorite type of McDonald s menu item: it is only available in a country rental cars with dvd player in nyc that is not the USA, and invokes an additional foreign place in its name. The double indirection is great in the same way round-trip machine translations or ordering Japanese spaghetti at those places on St. Mark s is great. In Germany, McDonald s sold a Honolulu Chicken Sandwich (with Maui Cheese rental cars with dvd player in nyc Potatoes ). Finland has a salsa-topped burger called El Maco.
Similarly, McDonald s has offered a Big Xtra Brazil burger in Germany, and, in Europe, a Grilled Texas Bagel. ( Texas. Bagel. That s like the part in Sneakers when Ben Kingsley is like A COMPUTER MATCHED YOU, TYPICAL STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY CHARACTER, WITH YOU, LADY CHARACTER WHOSE NAME I CAN T REMEMBER, BUT OBVIOUSLY NO COMPUTER WOULD SET YOU UP ON A DATE WITH STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY, except I m Ben Kingsley and the German McDonald s is that lady and she s trying to convince us she knows anything about America. Also the Texas Bagel comes with Broccoli Cheese nuggets.)
In Japan they have a whole menu of Big America burgers and they re for a limited time only. One year you get the Miami Burger, which has tortilla chips on it for some reason, the next, the Beverly Hills Burger, topped with an equally mysterious Caesar dressing and egg. The Idaho Burger had a HASH BROWN on top, but that one makes some sense to me (and it sounds rental cars with dvd player in nyc awesome).
Spam and eggs from Hawaii, lobster rolls (that s The McHomard in Montreal!) and blueberry shakes from Maine. Montreal also has poutine. (Poutine with McDonald s FRIES?!!? THAT IS PROBABLY CRAZY!!!) I could go on and on about the mega menu. I could explain how it will look like the fast food place in Cloud Atlas the movie except grander. But you can imagine all that. You got the basic idea. You would just gaze upon the Big Menu for hours. The Wasabi Filet O Fish. The Pizza McPuff. The McSatay. The Cypriot Shrimp Burger. The Croque McDo.
So let me bring you to the second floor, the grand pavilion. This is a complete McDonald s with a twist: every month or quarter or so, it is redesigned to provide the exact experience of dining in a different country s McDonald s. Did you know in some places, like including Paris and New York, McDonald s has experimented with table service? McDonald s in Germany serves beer but charges for condiment packets? Best of all, McDonald s in Hong Kong HAS WEDDINGS . ( The package includes a budget version of the usual trappings: a cake made of stacked apple pies . ) To ensure that the experience is exact, crews will have to be imported from local staff. Like, if you work at a bustling McCafé in Argentina, and you are the best, you might one day get called up for the big trip to New York, where you will stay in the McDorms, have a musical montage, and so on, all to make sure details like handing back the credit card with two hands in the Korean McDonald s get taken care of. 3 Maybe sometimes it would also shift not just in space but in time. We could see what a typical McDonald s of 1970s Idaho was like. With actors dressed up and stuff. There would be segregation. Happy Meal toys based on racist cartoon characters. School kids would take trips there to learn Important Lessons.
Everyone talks about how globalization McDonalds-izes rental cars with dvd player in nyc the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* rental cars with dvd player in nyc whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing rental cars with dvd player in nyc than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald rental cars with dvd player in nyc s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants rental cars with dvd player in nyc within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say School of Keith McNally. But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque rental cars with dvd player in nyc McDo.
As I ve thought about this more, I ve started to consider that maybe we would have to cast actors rental cars with dvd player in nyc to play customers as well. So like if you are in the Times Square representation of the Riyadh McDonald s, there are men trying to send pics to your phone via Bluetooth. Or if it s Singapore, loads of kids just have homework spread all over the place. In some countries where American stuff maintains its post-WWII aspirational branding, people go on fancy dates to McDonald s. Maybe when you went into the Hong Kong McDonald s, there would be actors staging a wedding at which you could be a guest: a happy couple, some parents, rental cars with dvd player in nyc a drunk cousin or two.
I have a few less-practical dreams for McWorld. One is that there would be discontinued menu items available, rental cars with dvd player in nyc like the McLean Deluxe, even though rental cars with dvd player in nyc everyone says it was horrible. It s culturally significant. I am positive there was a commercial for the McLean Deluxe in around 1991 that went The new McLean Deluxe: 100% DEF! ON TASTE! and I maintain that this is what ultimately led to the famous Al Sharpton-led Funeral For the Word Def organized by Rick Rubin in 1993, but I can find no trace of this on the internet so it may have been a fever dream. It was, however, the official sandwich of the NBA.
The most important one of these call-back menu items would be Old School Fries, from before they switched from beef tallow to vegetable oil for frying. Everybody says those were insane. I mean, I must have had them when I was little but I don t remember.
My second impractical dream is for a special third floor McDonald s Labs experience. rental cars with dvd player in nyc This wouldn t look like the rest of the store, or like a lab. It would probably be like…some insane beyond-Cloud-Atlas-The-Movie rental cars with dvd player in nyc meets Gaultier-for-Luc Besson type thing. There are two thoughts behind this part: First, everyone who s ever worked in any kind of a restaurant that doesn t do proper family meals gets insanely sick of all the food on the menu, even when it s awesome, right? I came across this LiveJournal thread about what people who work at McDonald s cook for themselves for snacks and it is crazy. They re in a McDonald s. They only have a few minutes. They can t really cook, but they can heat stuff up certain ways, and blend it, and they have access to this weird mix of hyper-processed rental cars with dvd player in nyc foods. They are so creative! rental cars with dvd player in nyc It s like readi