Fast Food Review: Premium Chicken McWrap

Wraps. They’re so 17 years ago.

But fast food takes time to catch up, and McDonald’s especially, where inoffensive and utilizing the same flavor-enhancers in every item is the rule. To McDonald’s, a “wrap” has meant “ingredients from one of our other things thrown into a tortilla,” but these new Premium Chicken McWraps appear to mark a divergence from the norm. I came upon them by accident, but knew once I did that my assessment was a sworn duty. Here we go.

The most innovative thing about this newer, bigger wrap is the packaging, which suggests to me that it may be here to stay in some form or another because otherwise, why not wrap it in paper, say fuck it, and move along? This thing is cleverer than that. The part around the middle with the arrows on it? That’s a pull-off strip that goes halfway around, after which you bend the top part of the container over backwards, so that you’ve got half the wrap unveiled, and the other half sheathed in cardboard. It’s like a sweded lightsaber of calories.

Cripsy chicken or grilled are both options, and the crispy is breaded, rather than McBattered in nugget fashion. It’s tasty. It’s also dry, because whoever made mine either put all the sauce at the bottom, or let it sink there. They need better sauce guns, like the ones at Del Taco, where I seldom have this issue. Variations on this wrap include Ranch and Chicken Bacon, but I went with Sweet Chili, because whenever that’s an option one should always take it.

Additional ingredients are: lettuce, and a long, thin slice of cucumber. Not a pickle; a cucumber. Something of which I am not generally fond. Yet faced with dry, breaded chicken, the moisture it added felt essential, like a tiny shower of rain in the desert of my mouth. That would make the whole effect akin to an oasis, I suppose.

Finally, we get down to the chili sauce, and to my surprise, it is not the same Sweet Chili sauce made for McNuggets as a gimmicky Olympics tie-in. Nay, this is that, but mixed with mayo for what is pretty much the same flavor, but whiter. Mayo perplexes me, as it only takes one or two ingredients to bump it up the evolutionary scale like a Pokemon to become Remoulade or tartar sauce; however, by itself, it is, as Undercover Brother pointed out, the most awful kind of white-people food there is. And hot sauce can be the antidote.

The Sweet Chili mayo works, is what I’m saying in the most roundabout of ways. The application of it needs improvement, and perhaps an additional dipping sauce of the pre-mayo’ed variety is worth the extra nickel or dime purchase (whatever…if you’re nice to the cashiers, they usually don’t charge you anyway).

I applaud McDonald’s on finally doing something akin to a legitimate facsimile of a wrap nearly two decades after they were relevant, and recognize that now that the trickle-down economics of taste have indeed finally dripped and dropped there way down to my level, they are, in a sense, relevant yet again.

“Premium,” though? I do not think that word means what you think it means.