British and American “Food Wars” hosts Harry Kersh and Joe Avella swapped places to try each other’s fast-food menu items and find all the differences between the two. This is “Food Wars: Foreign Exchange.”
MORE FOREIGN EXCHANGE VIDEOS:
US vs UK Subway | Foreign Exchange | Food Wars | Insider Food
US vs UK Papa Johns | Foreign Exchange | Food Wars
US vs UK Starbucks | Foreign Exchange | Food Wars
——————————————————
#food #fastfood #insiderfood
Insider’s mission is to inform and inspire.
Visit our homepage for the top stories of the day: https://www.insider.com/food
Insider Food on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foodinsider
Insider Food on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderfood
Insider Food on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoodInsider
Insider Food on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@foodinsider
Food Wars on Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/discover/Food_Wars/9045577297
US vs UK Foreign Exchange Season 2 Marathon | Food Wars | Insider Food
Joe: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Wingstop. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." All right, let’s start by comparing the classic wings. Over here is the plain, unflavored classic wing. Looks smaller than what I’m used to in America. For a sauceless wing, this is better than I was expecting. I guess going in plain, I thought I wasn’t going to taste anything, but yeah. Not bad. Here is a 10-piece from a US Wingstop. These ones are not plain. I think they’re Buffalo. I gotta say, I was expecting bigger wings. I thought American farming was all about, like, pumping your animals with as many chemicals as possible to make them enormous. But no, this is kind of a tiny, scrawny, scrawny little wing. We’ll give it a try anyway. It has a pretty good flavor to it. Quite crispy on the outside, which is nice, although maybe slightly overcooked. A little bit dry on that. I have no interest in sitting here eating just plain wings from Wingstop. So let’s take a look at some of the flavors you can get in both countries, starting with lemon pepper and garlic Parmesan. You know, lemon pepper, going to be honest. Not my first choice. It’s just OK. Personally, I like my wings to be a little saucier. Seems like if you pay for the flavors, they give you the bigger wings. That’s more like what I was expecting. That is a hefty drum. Good amount of seasoning on there. Like, a big dosage of lemon pepper. I know it’s lemon pepper, but it should be more like lemon salt because, my God, it’s an aggressively salty wing. Here’s my thing with American lemon-pepper wings. Compared to the ones I’ve had in the UK is that I don’t think in the US, you guys are actually putting much lemon in there. I think the lemon is much more of a lemon flavoring, and it tends to remind me more of, like, an artificial cleaning product that’s lemon-scented, like a lemon-scented spray or cleaning wipes rather than actual lemon. I feel the garlic Parmesan in the US, the flavor is very overwhelming. So what do we got here in the UK? Not overly garlicky or Parmesany. Feel like you guys have subdued the flavors on yours knowing that we were going to, or we should be dipping our wings in sauce. Weaker than what I would expect in America, but it’s been a minute since I’ve had Wingstop, so let’s see how Harry’s reacting. Next up we’ve got the garlic Parm wing. Again, like, you’ve not skimped on the seasoning. I’m not actually getting a ton of Parmesan flavor despite the fact that it’s covered in the powder. These are much crispier than any wings that I’ve had in the UK from a Wingstop, and I do like that. You get a real crunch on the outside. And the chicken on the inside isn’t too bad. Now, the last time we shot a Wingstop episode, Joe kind of made fun of the tenders, and I really like them, so I want to see if the US ones are any good. UK tenders are better. They’re just better. I don’t know what it is about these. They’re not very crunchy. I bit into these, and it almost made, like, a squeaking noise on my teeth. I don’t know what’s going on there. I thought you guys were better at fried chicken, but. Here are those tenders that Harry was so fond of. Let’s see how these taste. That is a fantastic tender. Really crispy, right? You picked up that crunch, right? Wow. And, of course, when you got tenders, you know you need to dip it in something. So we got ranch. Ranch is in the UK! Here it is, everybody. Let’s see how your ranch tastes. Our ranch has way more flavor. It has more intensity to it than yours, which I think is a reoccurring theme with US versus UK. Portion sizes at Wingstop, if we exclude the combos and the platters, the biggest portion of wings you can get in the UK is a 12-piece. However, bring the boxes. Bring them all up. Bring in the boxes. Let’s go. There is an online combo in the UK called the Crowd Pleaser, which comes with 50 regular boned wings and 50 boneless wings and three large fries. It’s meant to be shared between five people. Excuse me. It’s meant to be enjoyed by at least five people. In the US, excluding combos, the biggest portion of wings you can order is a 100-piece. Yeah, it’s just funny to me that you can order that many wings not explicitly as part of a sharing platter. Like, feasibly, that could just be kind of them saying, "Hey, you want 100 wings? Have 100 wings. Don’t worry about sharing." When it comes to drinks, Wingstop in the UK offers co*ke products, and you can get them in a 22-ounce cup, but we got this delivered, so we didn’t get fountain drinks. Just the 500-milliliter bottles. And in the US, drinks come in sizes of 20 ounces or 32 ounces. Here is everything you can find at Wingstop in the US that we can’t get in the UK. Here’s everything at the UK Wingstop I can’t get in the US. In the US, they have a few exclusive wing flavors. Three, to be exact. First up, we have mild wings. As far as I can tell, these are just, like, a milder version of kind of Buffalo wings. Yeah, that’s pretty good. It’s got that, like, Buffalo sauce, vinegary kick to it, but somehow with almost none of the heat. Then in this box, we have the other two flavors. We have Cajun and original hot. So, here is the original hot wing. I imagine, as the name suggests, it’ll just be a hotter version of the mild wing. Yeah, it’s original hot for a reason. It’s basically just a Buffalo wing. And then finally, we have Cajun wings. Lovely color on this, like a really deep orangey-red color. I don’t love Buffalo wings that much. I think particularly when they’re coated in a vinegar-based hot sauce, for me, I just get too much of that kind of vinegary, acid tang to it. Whereas with a wing like this one, with a Cajun wing, you still get the heat, but it’s not that sort of, like, like I say, acidic tang. I think you just get a bit more depth of flavor. I really like this. This is great. One thing that I do find funny is that we have Cajun fries at the UK Wingstop, so I’m not really sure why they don’t just take that seasoning and put it back on the wings, because I think it would work. Two exclusive wing flavors here at the UK Wingstop. First is the original, which I feel is probably what we would call the Buffalo mild. Some decent heat to it. All right, Brazilian citrus pepper. Citrusy. Some pepper flavor to it. Not bad. Nothing’s jumping out at me on the flavor, I would say, personally. One other thing that’s worth mentioning with the wings is that you can get a bunch of different combos on the menus. In both the US and the UK, they even have a wing calculator on the website to figure out how hungry you are and how many wings you should order. A funny thing is that the recommended portions from the calculator vary depending on where you are, and it’s exactly in the way you’d expect. On the website for Wingstop, we asked them to recommend what would be good for one person who is hungry, and they recommended for me, here in the UK, eight wings. On the US website, the recommended order for one hungry person is 10 wings. You guys have sandwiches, aka burgers. Just the one, the Big Flavour burger. So, this has slaw, pickles, ranch, and also, of course, chicken in any sauce or flavor that you want. We went for barbecue. Let’s go. Wow, this is great! The slaw is really good. UK Wingstop, let’s go. The US version is the chicken sandwich. This comes with pickles but no slaw, and also it’s one big piece of chicken rather than chicken tenders. Also, look at the funny distribution of pickles there. Going to quickly reorganize these. It seems like this one’s been tossed in the original hot sauce. I like the look of the bun. Very shiny bun. That’s really good. The chicken is really juicy. I like the amount of heat that you get from the piece being tossed in the sauce. Pickles are good. I love pickles. Happy to see them included pretty much anywhere. This might actually benefit from the UK’s slaw because I think it’s just a little bit dry. Some kind of slaw or mayo or some kind of sauce on the bottom, I think, would go a long way here. But pretty good. Not bad. The US has a few exclusive sides that we can’t find in the UK. First up, we have these Louisiana voodoo fries. So, these are fries which are covered in cheese sauce, ranch, and Cajun seasoning. They’re not terrible. Yeah, they’re not too bad. I quite like the Cajun seasoning. I liked them on the wings. I like it now. I think maybe the cheese sauce and the ranch might be slightly overkill. Next up, we have Cajun fried corn. Which part of this is fried? Fried corn, not just pop up like popcorn. Mm. That’s pretty good. Yeah, I think texturally, I was expecting maybe something different from the frying, but don’t really get too much of that. I do like the seasoning, though. Quite salty. A little bit of heat, a little bit of smoke. Works well with the sweetness of the corn. I like it. And finally on the US menu, you will find veggie sticks. The veggies in question here obviously are celery and carrots. I think these are pretty commonly found alongside wings in bars and diners. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if people actually ate this stuff when it was served with wings, but I’m now being told by the crew that they do. Not that much of a celery guy, but carrot sticks, I do love. You got sweet-potato fries. You guys and your chips. By the way, you call them sweet-potato fries here. I thought you called them chips. Sweet-potato chips? When there’s sweet potato, they’re always soggy. The honey-mustard slaw. I had some of this slaw on that burger a second ago, and I loved it. So, just solo slaw. Not good. What happened? I guess the slaw only works as a topping and not on its own. One other thing to note is that we actually can get the cheese sauce that’s found on the fries as a separate menu item here in the US. Obviously in the UK, we do have the cheese fries, so I’m not sure why they can’t just give you the sauce on the side. But in the US, they do do that. Both countries have their own exclusive desserts. In the UK, they have two exclusive churro flavors. We have Oreo crumb and Lotus Biscoff crumb. Jesus. Oreo. Fantastic. Lotus Biscoff. This is very good. Wow, these are awesome. These are really good. Yes to these. Wow. Then we’re on to the desserts, where in the US, you will find this triple-chocolate-chunk brownie. That’s really good. That’s gooey, chocolaty. All right, moving on to drinks. If you’re eating in-store, you can have all of these beverages. You know what you can get at the Wingstop in the UK that we did get: couple of brewskies, baby! Camden Pale and Camdem Hells Lager are available at the Wingstop in the UK. Cold, frosty brew with your wings. Sounds good to me. Then, finally, we’re on to the drink options from US Wingstop. First up, we have an unsweetened tea. Obviously, I’m from the UK, and I’m very passionate about my tea, so I’m going to have to try this out and check that you guys aren’t butchering it too badly. That has no flavor whatsoever. Apprehensive to try this now, but this is the sweet version of the tea. It’s just sugar water. There’s no tea flavor to either of these. What the hell is going on? That’s just like syrup. That’s not tea. You’re drinking effectively just water with sugar in it. In the US, they can also get Dr Pepper and blue Powerade. Finally, we have this enormous container of Simply lemonade. This is US-style lemonade. So, for the Brits out there, Americans consider lemonade this cloudy, still, lemon-flavored beverage. Whereas we consider lemonade much more like a Sprite, like a clear, carbonated, lemony beverage. There are also two more teas on the menu at a US Wingstop, but we didn’t get them today. These are a Gold Peak sweetened green tea and a Gold Peak raspberry tea. Although if these two teas are anything to go by, those will also be bad. I know I was dogging on some of the wings earlier, but I liked the sandwich a lot. The churros, both churro things were great. The Lotus Biscoff churros, absolutely loved. Oreo one’s great too. Really wish those would come back to the US. And you guys got beer, so good on you, UK. Your Wingstops are very nice. Your garlic Parmesan, not garlicky and Parmesany enough. Definitely have the smell, but the taste … Having now tried the US and the UK Wingstop, I think broadly they’re pretty similar. I think the UK does a pretty good job of replicating the American version. I think one thing that the UK might actually be doing better is maybe balancing some of those wing flavors. I think, for example, the lemon pepper over here was aggressively salty, and, again, I think the lemon flavor was just a bit too artificial and a bit too harsh. Whereas the UK version I actually think was probably better and a bit more balanced. I think if there was one thing I could take back from the US menu and put on the UK menu, it would probably be the Cajun wings. I think compared to the classic hot-sauce wings, I just preferred the flavor. I think it was more of a deep flavor. The heat was there, but it was balanced. It wasn’t just kind of the acid in your face on your tongue. A nice smoky flavor to it from the paprika. Yeah, I think it was just a very well-balanced, delicious wing. If I could cut one thing from this menu and all menus around the world, I think it would have to be that god-awful attempt at tea. Both the unsweetened and the sweetened tea were kind of equally bad. The unsweetened one just didn’t taste of anything. The sweetened one just tasted of sugar. I think you guys are really, really underusing tea. It’s so good. It isn’t just me being a biased Brit. Well, it kind of is, but, you know, tea’s excellent. You guys are currently messing it up big time. Get rid of it until you can figure it out. Joe: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Pizza Hut. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." We’ll start with the classic-crust cheese pizza. This is a US large. Visually, there’s a few differences with the UK one, actually. I think the classic crust in the UK is actually more the pan crust. I’m liking the little bits of cheese that are kind of on the crust and have baked in a little bit there. In terms of the size, I actually don’t think this is, like, ridiculously large. This looks maybe slightly bigger than a UK large might be. This pizza is also cut into eight slices. Here is the UK large classic cheese pizza, or, as the Brits call it, a Margherita. I would say this looks more like a US medium. I’ve also noticed that this was cut into 10 slices, where ours is probably eight. You guys have smaller slices and smaller pizzas. It’s good. It’s just a very standard cheese pizza. Like, when your brain kind of pictures what a cheese pizza should taste like, this is kind of it. Quite a thick layer of cheese, quite an airy dough, but got a satisfying chew to it. I like the sauce, actually. It’s quite sweet. Smells all right. It has this dustiness on it, on the crust. Does anyone know what this is? Pretty close to the American. The American definitely has a lot more flavor to it. I would say a stronger sauce flavor. This just tastes like cheese and bread. I’m just not tasting the sauce at all. And let’s see what’s on the end here. That’s good! I eat the crust because I’m an adult, but I know some people don’t, for whatever reason. Here’s everything at Pizza Hut in the UK I can’t get in the US. And here is everything you’ll find at Pizza Hut in the US that we don’t have in the UK. Before we get into the preset pizzas, let’s take a look at the exclusive customizable options on offer in the UK. When it comes to the crust, the UK exclusive is a cheesy-bites crust. Look at this thing. Yeah. This thing looks like a nightmare. Starting with the crust, the cheesy-bites crust. Now, I’m not quite sure why this didn’t take off in the US. We love hiding cheese in bread, in pizza, so that actually doesn’t really bother me that much. It’s everything in the middle here. Exclusive toppings, we have vegan cheese, spicy pork, green chilies — the US has mixed peppers — red onion, sweet corn, and sun-blushed tomatoes, and we’ve combined all that into one pizza that’s absolutely horrifying. This is what I assume was floating in the sky that made everyone in that movie "Bird Box" go crazy. Not very garlicky. Not that exciting. Not that flavorful. In the normal pizza consumption already, everyone take a look at this. So I’m like, "Oh, I totally ordered this on purpose. I think I’ll get a slice while I’m hanging with people." I got to cut a knot in half to get it off. This other knot wasn’t cut all the way through, so I lost knottage taking this off. And now, how the hell am I holding this? I think the thing that’s throwing me off is the vegan cheese. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just like, I’m not tasting any cheese on this. Oh, yeah, it’s actually spicy. I like the green chilies. So it looks more intimidating and awful than it really is. Your spicy pork tastes a lot like American sausage, more than your sausage. Yeah, that’s the most flavorful sausage I’ve had since I’ve gotten to this island, is on a Pizza Hut pizza. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t eat any more of this, and I’m not going to. There’s one exclusive crust option in the US, and it’s this one, the thin ‘n’ crispy. Does look pretty crispy around the outside. Neither country has an exclusive sauce base, but if you order a big New Yorker crust in the US, then it does come with a slightly sweeter marinara sauce. Then they have a bunch of exclusive toppings in the US that we can’t get in the UK. These include a crispy cupped pepperoni, Italian sausage, meatballs, black olives, banana peppers, and white onions. We have red in the UK. And, of course, we combined all the exclusives except the pepperoni onto one pizza, the US-only. Not thrilled about the meatballs. Meatballs on pizza seems to be, like, a weirdly American fast-food thing, and I just don’t think that meatballs hold up well when they’re being baked onto a pizza. I will say, like, just looking at this one, it doesn’t look quite so egregious compared to other US-only things that I’ve tried, so we’ll give it a go. Most of this actually kind of works. I’m still not a huge fan of the meatballs. I think they just end up being quite dry when you bake them on a pizza. But the Italian sausage is pretty good. I like black olives. Banana peppers are actually kind of growing on me. I know Joe kind of gets fed up with seeing them on US fast-food things, but I think they’re kind of good. Then we’re on to the exclusive preset pizza options. Surprisingly, there aren’t that many preset options in the US. I think maybe there’s just more emphasis on building your own. We’ll start with this one, which is the hot honey double-pepperoni pizza. That sounds really good. I want to see if it tastes good. This also has the other exclusive topping, that cupped pepperoni. It’s not something that you see super often in the UK, this type of pepperoni. It’s, like, a slightly thinner sausage cut into really thin strips so that when you cook it, it kind of curls up and then forms these little cups. It’s double pepperoni because you have the cups, but then you also just have regular pepperoni slices as well. There’s definitely some heat to it. I think some of it is just from the pepperoni, maybe the honey as well. It has a little bit of chili mixed in. I love these little pepperoni cups. They’re a little bit crispy around the outside. This one’s also, I think by default, given to you on the pan crust, which I really like. Pizza Hut in the UK has a lot of its own preset pizzas. I think that most of them look ridiculous. This one is the mushroom and sweet corn. Eh. This terrifying thing over here is the mac ‘n’ cheese pizza. Let’s start with the mac ‘n’ cheese. I have had mac ‘n’ cheese pizza before. This, to my knowledge, is the only, like, international chain that’s done mac ‘n’ cheese pizza. Usually this is something you see at, like, a standalone pizzeria that wants to have, like, fun toppings. Oh, this one, they even gave us the cheesy crust. Did you know that they were going to give it? I kind of like that. I don’t know what cheese is on here. If you can see, yeah, the cheese is baked on, but there’s also this, like, there’s cheese inside the pasta. The noodles don’t have a real defined flavor, so I think it would taste cheesier if more smaller noodles. That’s my note. But overall, I thought this was going to be like, ugh, too rich, or too, like, blah, but actually it’s balanced nicely. Next up we have the Meat Lover’s pizza. I’m pretty sure in the UK we have, like, Meat Feast or Meaty One pizza options, which are kind of our version of this. It’s different to our ones as well because it’s got that Italian sausage. There’s also some pepperoni, some bacon, and some ham. It’s a meaty boy. Try and get a little bit of all of the meats in one bite. As far as meat pizzas go, it’s pretty standard. I don’t think the Italian sausage adds a ton compared to the UK Meat Feast, for example. It’s just kind of fine. So, I’m going to just point out that this one is different from this one, which is different from this one. This is The Meaty One, this is the barbecue Meat Feast, and this one right here is the Meat Feast, probably. The ham and mushroom, it’s like, it’s just, like, a thing to, like, two toppings. It’s like no effort. Same with the mushroom and corn. But you guys are really trying to offload mushrooms. I think if it’s going to have a name, if it’s going to be "the whatever," bare minimum, three things. Three toppings. Meat Feast. All right, next, the barbecue Meat Feast, which I’m assuming has barbecue sauce on it. And I think you think American barbecue sauce is very sweet, so I’m expecting this to be a lot sweeter. Tastes exactly the same. I think they gave us two of the Meat Feast. The Meaty One. This is this, and possibly this, with chicken. OK. This one’s somehow flavorless. So, unless I got COVID 12 seconds ago, I can’t taste anything on here. Such little flavor on the chicken. I wouldn’t get any of these. But if I had to, this one. We also forgot the Texan barbecue, which is a barbecue sauce, chicken, and bacon pizza. Next up is the backyard barbecue chicken pizza. So, this one has the barbecue-sauce base option. There’s also some bacon on there, some chicken, and some white onion. I’m just not a huge fan of barbecue-sauce bases on pizza. I feel like the people who love it really love it, and the people who don’t, don’t. It’s quite divisive. That’s actually really not bad. As someone who, like I say, doesn’t really love barbecue sauce as a base on a pizza, they’ve actually been, I’d say, quite restrained with the amount of barbecue sauce that they’ve used. It’s not overpowering. It’s not too sweet. Next up is this Buffalo chicken pizza. Buffalo chicken pizzas seem to be a thing in America, whereas they are very much not a thing in the UK. I’m just not convinced of its merits as a base for a pizza. That’s just really not for me. That’s kind of bad. There’s a tiny bit of sweetness in there, but not nearly enough to balance that out, and the chicken’s just kind of there. That’s, yeah. That’s a whiff for me, I’m afraid. That’s a big womp-womp. And then the final option today is the Hawaiian chicken pizza. As the name suggests, it’s Hawaiian, so it’s got the pineapple and the ham, but then there’s also some chicken and some green peppers on here. Hawaiian pizza is kind of growing on me for some reason. My palate seems to be changing as I get older, or maybe it’s just been completely destroyed by four years of "Food Wars." But yeah, I’m no longer as much of a pineapple-on-pizza hater as I once was. Let’s give it a go. That’s really not too bad. I think the one thing that I’m a bit confused as to why they’ve included it is the green pepper, because for me that doesn’t really work. The pineapple’s fine. I think my mouth was also crying out for some sweetness after the abomination that was the Buffalo chicken pizza. Then we have some sizzler pizzas, which are topped with green chilies, roquito peppers, jalapeños, and red onions, plus the toppings of your choosing. We got the Hawaiian sizzler and the veggie sizzler. There’s also a beef sizzler and a chicken sizzler. Sizzler. I’m saying sizzler a lot. They’re really generous with the peppers here, hence the "sizzling" aspect of it. As suspected, the green chilies and the jalapeños are doing all the sizzling. Look, I love spicy food. I do take issue with stuff like this, where they go, "We have this thing. We have a spicy version." You’re like, "I’ll take the spicy version." They’re like, "We just put peppers on it." Like, doesn’t seem very considered. I defend Hawaiian pizza. I don’t like food police telling me what can and cannot go on a pizza. I get Hawaiian pizza regularly. I like pineapple on pizza. OK, Italy, chill out. But I can’t imagine Hawaiian and jalapeño going well together, so. Here’s how this could work. They need less jalapeños and green chilies on this and more pineapple. Like, if it was more considered, instead of just throwing jalapeños and spicy peppers on an already preexisting pizza, and they actually took the time for the balance, this could be killer. Good idea. Balance doesn’t work. And we’ve got the veggie one. I mean, I don’t … I’ll take a bite, but I just, I know what this is going to taste like. They should rename that the jalapeño and onion pizza. I like those things, but just that on a pizza? Now, the US has supreme pizza and a super-supreme pizza, but in the UK they have a chicken supreme pizza and also a vegetable supreme pizza, which we did not get. So I’m under the impression that supreme just means onions, peppers, and mushrooms. That makes it, like, supreme. Like, all right. So this is chicken, peppers, onions, mushrooms. It lacks flavor. It lacks, like, excitement. There’s actually several vegan options in the UK. The cheese they use is Violife-branded, with some Beyond Meat plant-based protein options. Now, what you can get on the menu in the UK is the vegan Margherita, the vegan vegetarian sizzler, the vegan vegetarian supreme, the vegan Beyond Italian-style sausage supreme, and the Beyond Italian-style sausage supreme. You know those weird simulator games where it’s, like, "Pizza Chef Simulator," where it’s really hard to make the stuff? This looks like a pizza that would be in one of those games when it comes out. It looks cartoonish. Like, the closer they make this stuff, they try to make this stuff look like the real thing, like, the less it does. This is uncanny-valley pizza. Completely flavorless. Here’s why they screwed up. Pizza, one of the two reasons a pizza with sausage on it tastes good is the cheese and the sausage. When we replace that with the fake stuff, it has nothing to stand on. If they wanted to continue doing this, they should have — I’m about to blow everybody at Pizza Hut’s mind — seasoned it. They got loaded pizzas here in the UK. I’m told that the cheeses are mozzarella, red le — lesher? Red lesher? Joe: Leicester. I was close. Red Leicester, and Monterey Jack. OK, everyone in the comments who’s not in the UK, let them know how we don’t know what this is. This whole time I’ve been here, you’re like, "You don’t know what blah is?" Like, no, I don’t. Here are the options they got: loaded pepperoni feast with triple-cheese blend, loaded Margherita with triple-cheese blend, loaded chicken supreme with triple-cheese blend, and loaded Hawaiian with triple meh, meh. This is the loaded pepperoni feast. This looks like it has more cheese, not that much more, but loaded pepperoni? Surely you jest. I see one, two, and maybe a third. This is not loaded pepperoni by any means. That’s regular pepperoni. Incredibly greasy. This might have the greasiest bottom. Can you see it there? This would be something you’d find in America. So I would get this to see — if you’re planning a trip to America, maybe, like, have a couple of these leading up to the trip to help your stomach adjust. I’d definitely want to be near a home base if I was eating one of these, if you catch my drift. Diarrhea. US Pizza Hut has a lot of exclusive wing options. I’ve got four in front of me today to try, and we’ll start with this one, which is hot honey. Sounds like it could be pretty good. Again, sweet and heat is a good combination, particularly when wings are concerned. That’s pretty good. The wings themselves could be slightly crispier. I think an issue with these containers that they come in, which look like little alien spaceships, is that they’re airtight, so when you put hot stuff in it, it just kind of steams. So I think maybe work on the vessel of delivery, but the wing itself is pretty good. It’s a big wing, quite juicy. I do like the hot honey as a flavor. Not too spicy. Mostly sweet, I would say. Next up are the Buffalo burnin’ hot wings. You know it’s burnin’ hot because they’ve got three of these little heat symbols on the packaging. So I’m wondering if this will finally kill me off with my weak British mouth. It’s definitely on the spicier side. It’s that same kind of, like, Frank’s RedHot, Buffalo type of wing sauce. This is Buffalo burnin’ hot. It’s on the higher end of my spice tolerance. I don’t really know. Get a good dunk of what sauce is in the pool. This is the hottest they have. Mm-hmm. It’s burnin’ hot, apparently. Three flames. That’s 1 ½ at best. Yeah, the verdict is it does build up on you a little bit, but probably not worthy of the three flames. Next up we’ve got this lemon pepper dry rub wing. It’s not too bad. I’m not really getting that, like, artificial-cleaning-product lemon flavor I’ve had in the past with some of these wings. Then finally we have Cajun wings. I actually think they could have been even more generous with the seasoning. I think in general the size of the wings from Pizza Hut seems to be really big, and one issue I’m running into is that that kind of creates a different ratio of seasoning to meat. Now, while we only got four wing options today, there are a bunch more US exclusive wing flavors. You can get garlic Parmesan, naked wings, sweet chili wings, Buffalo mild, Buffalo medium, and spicy garlic. All of them can also be ordered in the form of boneless wings, although, once again, do not get naked boneless wings, just order chicken nuggets from somewhere else. Pizza Hut in the US has six pasta options, and I got three of them. We’ll start with this one, which is the oven-baked Italian meats pasta. It seems to just be the Italian sausage and the pepperoni baked into a pasta with a tomato-y sauce. Ugh. I’ve got issues with these. While my body and brain are screaming at me to not try any of these, I’m going to have a bite in the name of science. It’s kind of just the most average pasta you’ve ever had in your life. I think if you gave this to an Italian person, they would probably throw it in your face, like a clown getting hit with a pie. Just get Italian food from somewhere else, to be honest. We also have the oven-baked cheesy Alfredo pasta, which to me looks kind of just like mac ‘n’ cheese. And here we have the oven-baked veggie pasta, which is pretty much all of the veggie pizza toppings dumped on top of that pasta. In addition to that, you can get an oven-baked chicken Alfredo pasta, which I imagine is just this with some chicken, and just plain pasta with marinara sauce, if you are 4 years old. UK Pizza Hut sides. Here are some of the ones that they have. We got the breaded chicken strips. There’s also hot ‘n’ spicy chicken strips. Those are somewhere over here. Oh, chicken strips, chicken tenders. Breaded chicken strips. There’s a bunch of dipping sauces here. It’s just chicken tenders, right? I don’t know what the difference between a strip and a tender is. Also, for dipping sauces, barbecue, garlic herb, sour cream and chive, and sweet chili. This is the barbecue bacon loaded mac ‘n’ cheese. You should go right to jail for ordering this. There’s also a carbonara loaded mac ‘n’ cheese and a Margherita loaded mac ‘n’ cheese. Guys, enough with the mac ‘n’ cheese, all right? Mac ‘n’ cheese is perfectly fine. Must everything be mac ‘n’ cheese? It’s weird that a pizza place is really going all in on mac ‘n’ cheese. But I guess you already got the ovens, so go ahead and bake it. I don’t think I’ve ever put barbecue sauce on mac ‘n’ cheese. Maybe I’ve gotten barbecue sauce on it, because mac ‘n’ cheese would be the side in barbecue. So I guess the logic of, barbecue’s popular, mac ‘n’ cheese is usually on a barbecue plate along with barbecued ribs and brisket and beef and all that, so let’s put the barbecue sauce on the mac ‘n’ cheese, but F-minus on this. This is like, blegh. Halloumi fries. UK, I’m about blow your mind and tell you that halloumi is almost nonexistent in America. Nobody cares about halloumi. I didn’t even know quite sure what it was till I came over here. That’s good, though. I actually prefer this to mozzarella sticks, because the halloumi has a way better flavor to it. I like it. I think Americans would like it if it was more readily available, it just isn’t. In the US, Pizza Hut has a bunch of breadstick options with various toppings. Again, for the UK audience, these are not breadsticks as we know them, the kind of crunchy snack things. These are breadsticks as in basically just pieces of dough with stuff on them. There are four types of breadstick on the Pizza Hut US menu. Firstly, we just have the plain ones. Even though they’re the plain ones, they do still come with quite a lot of this garlic Parmesan crust topping on them. And, of course, all of these will come with a little dipping cup of marinara. Over here, we have the cheese sticks. I’ve done that so badly. I think Pizza Hut is cooking these in the same pans that they cook the pan pizzas in, because you do get this really nice kind of crispy cheese crust on the outside. They are very bready, as the name suggests. Not lying. But it’s quite a nice, soft pillowy bread. In addition to the cheese breadsticks, you can also get some roasted garlic cheese sticks. That’s pretty good. It is garlicky. And the final breadstick option is bacon cheddar. We love our cheddar cheese in the UK. We invented it, in fact. These are dry. You can see why you kind of need the marinara sauce to dip them in. You guys have wedges. These are the cheese and jalapeño loaded wedges, smothered in cheese and jalapeño. Jalapeño. The jalapeño lobby is just killing it on this island, man. You guys can also get barbecue bacon loaded wedges and just regular potato wedges. There’s also Beyond Italian-style sausage tear-and-share topper? What is that? And a cheesy garlic tear-and-share, which is with garlic as one of the toppings. All right. Pizza Hut in the US actually serves fries as a side. I feel like it’s more common to find fries on UK menus where you might not expect them, but Pizza Hut in the US, holding it down. They did pretty good. They’re kind of textured, almost that kind of curly-fry coating that you would expect. Also in the US you can get fried mozzarella sticks. I’m going to attempt a cheese pull. I think they might be a bit cold for it, but, ah? Ah? Ah? [audience boos] Also, if you want to bring the pizzeria vibes to your home, you can buy these little shakers from Pizza Hut. They have a crushed-red-pepper shaker and a grated-cheese shaker, which is the Parmesan and Romano mixture. We do have the Doritos cheesy nachos. Oh, my God! United Kingdom, what have you done? Oh-ho-ho! Oh, and there’s, like, salsa underneath it! Oh, and some of the cheese didn’t melt all the way! "Look at the state of it!" is what you guys would say, right? Oh, the chips are chewy. That’s disgraceful. That is absolutely disgraceful. I hate those. I feel sorry for you guys. Strengthens my theory that there’s no good Mexican food in Great Britain. Garlic bread, which I don’t have, and cheesy garlic bread. They also have cheesy triangles, which are right here. Are these just, like, mac ‘n’ cheese bites? Oh, it’s just a wedge of cheese! Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, that’s all right, I guess. Also, you can get a mixed-leaf salad. I’m not getting a salad at Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut in the US has a bunch of exclusive desserts. I would say too many. First up, we have these chocolate doughnut bites. They look more cakey to me. I think in the UK we associate doughnuts with those yeasted donuts, whereas in America there’s kind of a divide between yeasted doughnuts and cakey doughnuts. I’m not a huge fan of these. The inside bit of chocolate cake is still quite nice and moist, but the outside has just gone, like, a little bit overcooked and dry. Next up, we have Cinnabon mini rolls. I think Cinnabon also partnered with Taco Bell. They seem to just be partnering with anyone. You get a tray of 10 Cinnabon mini rolls, and they are absolutely swimming in the cream-cheese frosting. I do love Cinnabon. I hadn’t really ever had it until we did the US-UK Cinnabon episode. They were very tasty, although I was in a sugar coma for about a week after that. Look, it’s Cinnabon. It’s delicious. If you’ve had Cinnabon, you’ll know what to expect. If not, it’s a really good cinnamon roll covered in icing. Exclusive dessert options in the UK. You can get a chocolate chip cookie dough. Well, I mean, this is a chocolate chip cookie. Is this considered cookie dough to you guys? You guys are calling a giant cookie that you didn’t bother to shape cookie dough? It looks like it’s still doughy in the middle. There’s also white chocolate chip caramel cookie dough, and they also have Ben & Jerry’s flavors here. We didn’t get them all because they have many of them. This one we got was the Choco-lotta Cheesecake. Bam. I’m not reading off all the names of the Ben & Jerry’s. We can get those on-screen. You get those on-screen. This doesn’t surprise me, having Ben & Jerry’s at a fast-pizza place. Because people, if they’re getting Pizza Hut, they’re probably expecting to eat a lot. So this makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense to me is what this is over here. An ice cream brand I’ve never seen before. And I don’t know if this exists outside of Pizza Hut, but a brand called Rob & Nick’s. Let’s get a look at that label. And let’s go ahead and get a look at the label of arguably the most famous ice cream brand. Update, we don’t know what this is. The guy gave it to us. This could be just his ice cream that he’s starting out. Kind of snuck it in there, like, "Yeah, I’ll throw a couple Rob & Nick’s." I mean, that actually is not the worst idea if you’re trying to get people to try your ice cream, like whenever someone orders ice cream at where you work, just kind of throw one or two of these in there. People think, "Oh, he made a mistake. Rob & Nick’s." But then let’s say we eat this and enjoy it. How can I ever order it again? Harry: It doesn’t exist. Joe: It’s not on the website. They also have Magnum-branded ice creams, which we did not get today, but we did get Rob & Nick’s. Magnum double salted caramel, Magnum double Starchaser, and Magnum double Sunlover. Next, we have the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. This thing is huge. It’s OK. It’s ultimate in size. It might not be ultimate in taste. Then we have the triple-chocolate brownie. That’s pretty good. It’s a fudgy brownie. They’ve been pretty generous with the chocolate chips. Can’t complain. The weird Death Star container things are back for the apple pies. These ones I am excited for. In the UK, McDonald’s still fries its apple pies. You can tell it’s fried because you get these little blisters all over the pastry. I know in America at McDonald’s, you guys bake your apple pies. Terrible idea. They’re way better fried. They do look like mini versions of UK McDonald’s apple pies, so I’m into it. I think I had a pretty clear expectation of what I wanted from those, and it delivered. Those are good. And then finally we have cinnamon sticks. So, these are the breadsticks, but instead of a savory one, it’s a sweet version. The cinnamon sticks also come with a side of icing. I was hoping to get more of a drizzle than a series of plops, but oh, well. Ultimately, I think by adding Cinnabon to your menu, you’ve kind of rendered any of your own cinnamon options useless. So probably skip these. If you want cinnamon, just get the Cinnabons. Pizza Hut in the US does have some exclusive sauces, which means it’s time for a Sauce Talk. Sauce Talk. On the US menu, you will find three dips which are meant to be eaten with your savory foods. I don’t want to eat any more breadsticks, so I’m going to finger-dip these. Apologies. Start with the ranch. Little pinky dip. Yeah, pretty good. Good amount of tang to that. It is really like eating a Cool Ranch Dorito. That’s kind of the only yardstick that British people can understand ranch by. Blue cheese, which I guess is kind of designed to be eaten with the wings on the menu, because I wouldn’t really put blue cheese on pizza. That’s kind of underwhelming. I want more, like, funk from my blue cheese dip. That’s just kind of like eating mayo. And, of course, the marinara. It’s not overly sweet, which, I think some of the fast-food ones can fall into that trap. We got sour cream and chive, and sweet chili. Oh, that’s good. I like the sweet chili. I would take this back to the US. Then Pizza Hut has two sweet dips which are designed to be eaten with the desserts. As we’ve previously mentioned, they have an icing dip, mostly designed to be eaten with the cinnamon sticks. And if you really love your Cinnabon, you can get more of the cream-cheese frosting as a dip. Exclusive drinks. You guys got Tango. We do not. You guys have 7Up Free? That mean it’s sugar-free? Put artificial sweetener, zero sugar. Lah-di-dah. And Pepsi Max. You also have Pepsi Max Cherry and Robinsons Refresh’d apple and raspberry. That’s pretty good. Here’s why this doesn’t work in the US: too tart. Finally, we’re on to the exclusive drinks. There are a bunch of them, but we only got three today. Firstly, we have a Pepsi Wild Cherry. I’m pretty sure we can get cherry Pepsi in the UK. I don’t think they describe it as wild, though. Next up, we have Mountain Dew. We did a Mountain Dew "Food Wars" a while ago, and Joe sent me some American Mountain Dew, and let me say, it’s very different to ours. In fact, I think in the UK, the only one we can get now is the sugar-free version. Whereas this one, this little bottle contains 154% of my daily sugar. Cheers. To those who haven’t tried this, it’s really hard to explain the kind of sensation that you get in your mouth when you drink it. It really is like you’ve kind of bitten into an electrical cord or something. And just in case my body hasn’t had enough sugar today, we also have Crush orange. Not quite as sugar-filled as the Mountain Dew. This one only has 142% of my daily sugar in it. In the UK, if you want an orange soda, you’re probably going for Fanta or maybe Tango. Those are probably the two biggest brands. Neither of them are this color, I’ll tell you that. Noticing our good old friends Red 40 and Yellow 6 in here on the ingredients. Won’t find those in the UK. Yeah, there’s just, like, basically no orange flavor to it. Joe: Ah! At least in the UK, I’m pretty sure the Fanta and the Tango actually do contain either, like, a small amount of orange juice, or at least just better orange flavors than this. Americans visiting the UK, please try our Fanta, because it’s actually pretty good. The other drinks that you can get which we didn’t get today include a Pepsi Zero Sugar, a Lipton green tea with citrus, Lipton iced sweet tea, Starry, Mug Root Beer, 1% low-fat chocolate milk, lemonade, and 1% low-fat white milk. OK, so what does the UK do better? OK, so I like the mac ‘n’ cheese pizza. I like the chili dipping sauce. Oh, I liked the powdered Parmesan crust. Thought that added a nice flavor to it. Definitely liked the mac ‘n’ cheese pizza. I have some few notes, but definitely worth checking out. What would I cut? Just about everything, but especially your nachos. Those are a crime. US, I mean, our stuff tastes better. Our pizza has more flavor. Maybe a little too much. If I could take one exclusive back, I would take back the chili dipping sauce and I would take the mac ‘n’ cheese pizza. But I have notes. I like the idea, but we got to adjust some noodle-to-cheese ratio, but I think it’d do pretty well. Overall, I think the US Pizza Hut, it’s actually done a pretty good job. I think, compared to the other pizza chains that I’ve tried while I’ve been out here, this one actually might come out on top for me. I quite like that the pizzas weren’t too complicated. There weren’t too many toppings on them. Also, when it comes to the mains, they didn’t really overcomplicate the menu. There aren’t that many options. I think the emphasis on creating your own pizza is actually quite a good thing. If I had to take one thing back to the UK with me from the US menu, I think I actually might take that hot honey double-pepperoni pizza. I like the hot honey as a topping, I think it added a nice sweet heat to the pizza, and I really like those smaller crispy pepperonis. I think they added some nice spice, some good texture, and would definitely be welcome on the UK menu. If I had to cut one thing from the US Pizza Hut menu, it would probably come down to either the Buffalo chicken pizza, that I really didn’t like, or maybe those pastas, because they were a little bit offensive. Joe: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Taco Bell. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." Start with the classic tacos. You can get a crunchy or soft tortilla. You can also get them in supreme or regular versions. And when you get supreme, that means it has sour creams and diced tomatoes. So supreme! Starting over here, these are the softy boys. Right here you have what appears to be a standard soft-shelled taco. That might be a little bigger than you get in America. And we got supreme. This thing is dripping with grease. And then the supreme version. We’re going to compare the same tacos here in the US. This is the classic crunchy-shell taco. One thing I think is worth noting is that usually in the UK, if you say taco, we imagine a hard-shell taco. Soft-shell tacos, I think, we would just more call tortillas. I don’t get a ton of flavor from that at all. Next up, we have the supreme crunchy-shell taco. I like the extra bit of texture you get from the tomatoes, and the sour cream tastes really good. Kind of annoyingly on both of these, they’ve immediately gone quite soft. If they’re going to have a hard-shell taco, it should be able to withstand a few minutes in a bag without immediately softening again. It’s not a hard shell really, is it? That’s just false advertising. Then of course we have the soft-taco versions. This is the classic soft taco with the beef. Doesn’t that look appetizing? Yeah, I actually like that. I think I prefer the soft shell to the hard shell. Quite a nice, pleasing texture on the tortilla. Flavors, again, pretty similar to what I’m used to. And then finally we have the supreme soft taco. Definitely my favorite of these four. I do think the sour cream might be slightly different in the US to the UK. It’s got a really quite thick, creamy texture to it, which I really like. I don’t think there’s a huge difference from the US to the UK based on what I can remember. Then we have the Crunchwrap Supreme. You know what it is. It’s basically everything you get in a Taco Supreme with an extra tostada chip layer, and they wrap it in a tortilla and they usually grill it shut. This one is not grilled, so it’s like your grandma’s change purse. Just opens right up. Uh, oh, God. It’s like when you see that picture of the lights turned on in Magic Mountain, and you’re like, oh, that’s what it’s like? So it’s better to not know how this works. This looks, oh, this looks horrible. Right? We can all agree this looks horrible? And then here we have the US version of the Crunchwrap Supreme. This is one of their most iconic items, I would say. The temptation to just, like, launch one like a Frisbee is always quite high. I still don’t really know the best way to eat these. I guess you have to pick a corner and go for it. So here we go. It’s basically just like a slightly-better-in-every-way taco, which I appreciate. If I bit into a UK Crunchwrap Supreme, that’s pretty much what I’d be expecting it to taste like. Taco Bell serves Pepsi beverages, and in the US they come in three sizes. We have a small, which is 16 ounces; a medium, which is 20 ounces; and a large, which is 30 ounces. For the UK audience, that’s around 900 milliliters of drink. So almost a liter of Pepsi. Usually a large in the UK caps out at around, like, 500 or maybe 600 milliliters. So to go a third bigger than that, to us, is kind of wild. I love fountain drinks, though. Fountain Pepsis and fountain co*kes always hit different. Now, in the UK, if you’re dining in, they have two fountain-drink sizes: the regular, which is 16 ounces, and the large is 22 ounces. We got this for delivery, so you have the choice of either can or bottle. Here’s everything you can find at a UK Taco Bell you won’t find in the US. And here are all the things on the Taco Bell menu in the US that we don’t have in the UK. Let’s start with the tacos. We’re starting with a banger here. It’s a Doritos cheesy gordita crunch. So, for those who don’t know what a gordita is, it’s a soft taco. They put some cheese on that and then use that to kind of glue it to a crunchy taco on the inside. However, the twist here is that the inside one is a taco made of Doritos, which is so American. Otherwise it has the same fillings as the supreme taco, so there’s lettuce, cheese, beef, sour cream, and I think some tomatoes somewhere in there. I know this is one of Joe’s favorite things on the menu, so let’s see if it lives up. Mm. I’m of the opinion that there aren’t many foods that won’t be improved by adding Doritos to them. This kind of proves that. Add Doritos to more things. You’ll have a good time. Next up, we have the black bean chalupa supreme. So, I believe the difference between a chalupa and, for example, a gordita is that the chalupa, they fry the taco. I feel like as we go, the menu’s just getting progressively more American already. And obviously, because it’s supreme, it contains tomatoes, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, and, in this case, black beans. See if frying it makes a difference. That’s really good. I think, to be honest, I could probably get away without frying the taco. Black bean filling, though, really good. Next up, we have the double stacked taco. I think the "double stacked" refers to the fact that you have, again, a soft-shell and a hard-shell taco in here. So you have all the fillings of the regular taco, the beef, the cheese, and the lettuce, but then you also have these crunchy pieces of tortilla, which I think they are calling fiesta strips. So hopefully this will be like a party in my mouth. I think I’ve also just found a bit of queso in there. That’s pretty good. I don’t think the fiesta strips are adding as much as I hoped they would. They’re a little bit of extra crunch, but I’m not really getting any flavor from them. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is the Nacho Cheese Doritos Tacos Locos Supreme, which is a lot of words, a lot of fillings, and hopefully lots of flavor. They clearly have the technology to produce giant Doritos. I think they should start selling just, like, giant, circular, flat Doritos. I think this is one of Joe’s favorite things on the menu. Compared to the standard hard-shell taco, that’s so much better. I don’t get a ton of flavor from the regular hard shell. Whereas this one, it really does have that kind of patented Doritos nacho cheese flavor. That was really good. Joe reliably informs me that it’s better when it’s hot, and I can see that, but still pretty tasty. And then finally for the tacos, we have a spicy potato soft taco. So instead of a meat filling, you can get these little cubes of potato, almost kind of like diner-style potatoes, I guess. They seem to be tossed in a spicy coating themselves. And also you get this kind of spicy mayo. I do quite like it. The flavors are good. I think for me it’s just a textural thing. It’s a little bit too soft and chewy throughout. The lettuce gives it a bit of crunch, but maybe not quite enough. Two exclusive UK tacos. Oh, God! The naked chicken taco and the crispy chicken soft taco. I don’t know why naked equals it’s a folded-over, fried piece of chicken. You know, nudity. Look how greasy this is. Just dripping. You want to put it next to nongreasy packaging. Do you see the difference here? These are the same color. Oh. No. Terrible. Moving on. This is really funny. I’m assuming this is the crispy chicken soft-shell taco. It’s just a chicken strip that’s in, right? Yeah. I mean, those are just chicken tenders. The US has a lot of exclusive burrito options. Some are similar to ones you’ll find in the UK but might have slightly different names or ingredients. We’re going to go through them now, starting with this, the chicken enchilada burrito. Very difficult to illustrate what’s in these until I’ve bitten in or just torn them apart. I think maybe the sauce is kind of inside, because it does look pretty juicy in there. Yeah, I’m going to be honest, they’ve really not put much chicken in here. That was basically just a mouthful of, like, saucy rice, which is fine, but not what I was promised. OK, there is some chicken in there, thank God. Chicken. I’ve been impressed with the chicken over here so far. Tasty, juicy. Just want more of it. This is the beefy five-layer burrito. I think when I think of a Taco Bell burrito, this kind of exact color and consistency is what I’m thinking of. Lots of cheese in there. It certainly doesn’t look like there are five distinct layers. Let’s give it a try and see if I can identify some. Mm-hmm. Beans, shredded cheese, liquid cheese, sour cream, and, of course, the beef. It’s kind of the archetypal fast-food burrito in many ways, so credit where it’s due. It’s pretty good. Although, I feel like we could replicate this pretty easily in the UK if we wanted to. This is the cheesy double-beef burrito. There is, as the name suggests, quite a lot of beef in there. Got some cheese, cheese sauce, and rice. Also has those fiesta pieces from earlier. Yeah, it’s fine. The fiesta pieces add nothing. That’s just kind of needless. Despite the name of "cheesy double beef," you’d think you’re getting a lot of that. I think the five-layer burrito actually delivers on the cheese and the beef better than this does. Here we have the Burrito Supreme. This thing feels hefty. This might be the heftiest burrito that I’ve had so far. [grunts] Damn, OK. Yeah, there’s lots going on there. So, as far as I can tell, it’s kind of like a Taco Supreme but in a burrito, as the name would suggest. It’s not bad. It’s saucy. That sour cream is dripping. I think I prefer this in the taco form. I don’t really know why. Something about biting into a sealed tube of tortilla and having those toppings, like the tomato in there, it’s just kind of odd. If I wanted a supreme form of something, it would probably just be a soft taco. Then the last one we got today was the cheesy bean and rice burrito. I love refried beans. Such a good flavor. See how it holds up in burrito form. It is tasty. I love the flavor of the refried beans. I will say, texturally, not a lot going on here. All just kind of chewy, claggy, and a bit mushy. Sometimes I want that from food. So I guess if I were in the mood for just that kind of texture, this would hit the spot. The US has a bunch more exclusive burritos, which unfortunately we didn’t get today, but they include a steak grilled-cheese burrito, a chipotle ranch grilled-chicken burrito, grilled-cheese burrito, bean burrito. Nobody wanted to see me try all of those, and my heart could not take it. Burritos, you guys have a bunch we currently can’t get. The seven-layer burrito. A lot of you watching, you’ll be like, no, they got the seven-layer burrito in the US. No, we don’t. Google it. It’s been gone for a lot longer than you think. I have this conversation with my wife every time we do a Taco Bell episode. She asks for the seven-layer burrito, I say, "It’s not on the menu anymore." I know we have the five-layer. One of the layers now is beef. Regardless, seven-layer burrito survived over here. I don’t know what happened in the US. Rice, black beans, lettuce, tomato, sour cream, guac. Oh, my God, one more! What is it? Would the tortilla count as a layer? Did I mention tomato? Like, what the heck is in this? Joe: It looks like it, yeah. OK. I’ll try a bite of this. Oh, no flavor. The double cheesy black bean cravings burrito. Oh, shut up. Uh, yeah, I don’t want to eat this. Crispy chicken burrito. How does that look, huh? Different than the other ones? No. This just says "beef." I’ll rip this one open. Yeah, this is definitely the volcano one. All right. See, this is a saucier one, so let me try this. Oh, yeah. That was in the US for a minute. I think it was a promotional menu item for the movie "Congo." Because, you know, the movie about a bunch of scientists go to the jungle because a bunch of primates are now supersmart, and they’re guarding, like, a diamond mine, and I’m almost certain there’s never a volcano, but they’re like, yeah, the volcano burrito. If there is, let me know in the comments. There was a talking monkey in it? But why were the evil monkeys there and killing them? Because they were taking diamonds there. It was in Africa. Yeah, there you go. Next up, we have a three-cheese chicken flatbread. It’s got cheese. Three cheeses, to be precise. It’s OK. I actually don’t think the flatbread’s adding that much to this. It just kind of makes it quite doughy and a bit dry. Quite like the flavor of the chicken. But yeah, I don’t know, this seems slightly pointless. I would probably just have this but with a soft taco instead. Then we have a stacker. I gotta say, it does not look like the picture on the website. As far as I can tell, this is kind of just like a quesadilla that they’ve folded up for you, I guess to make it easier to eat or, like, faster to eat. If you really want to eat a whole quesadilla but you don’t have the time to eat slice by slice, just fold it up and go. I think they also do give you slightly more filling as well. This one is a beef one. Let’s give it a try. I think the issue when you fold anything is that you risk just pushing all the toppings kind of into one corner of it. And that’s really happened here, because the bite I’ve taken there is basically just entirely tortilla. I can feel at the back here, it’s squishier, and I think this is where all the filling is. So I’m going to take a weird bite. Yeah, so much more filling kind of in the corner of this thing. So, their beef quesadilla, here it is, is ground beef. Ours is a steak quesadilla. Let’s take a look at the ground-beef quesadilla you guys got here. Ooh, nope. Can you hear that? You hear that? [cheese squishing] Yeah. The other quesadillas you guys apparently have here is a jalapeño grilled-cheese one. Oh, no. Why are they on the outside? Let’s get that picture up, how it’s supposed to look. The creative liberties they’re taking over there at Taco Bell marketing. That probably has to be the hardest job in food, Taco Bell’s marketing department, making any of this look edible. It doesn’t seem to be cooked jalapeños. Yeah, no! Oh, my God. Nope, not even close. OK, nice try. What’s this one? Bacon grilled cheese, ugh. On the outside! Why? And also, this is not convenient to eat at all, I don’t think. Really flimsy and greasy. Gross. And then I got the baby one. Ripped from its mother’s arms at an early age. Forced to be on the menu at Taco Bell. This next one I’m excited for. This is the famous Taco Bell Mexican pizza. How to offend multiple cuisines at once. This is one of their more famous menu items. It also kind of developed a bit of a cult status because it was taken off the menu for a while and then was only brought back in 2022 after mass outcry from the public. So, this "pizza" is made by taking two crispy tortillas, sandwiching some beef or vegetable filling in there, and then the topping is sauce, cheese, and tomato. So it’s kind of loosely hitting the areas, I guess, that are required for something to qualify as a pizza. I’m open-minded. Let’s give it a try. So, we’ve got the beef one, so there’s ground beef in here as well as, by the looks of it, some refried beans. I actually kind of like this. The filling is good. It’s basically just refried beans and beef, so you know what that’s going to taste like. The tortillas have actually maintained a surprising amount of crunch, which is good, because I like the textural contrast. Also, it does kind of hold up when you take a slice, which is impressive. And then the toppings are good. The tomato’s good, cheese is good. You can also get a cheesy jalapeño Mexico pizza and a cheesy jalapeño Mexican pizza with veggie. Plant-based Crunchwrap Supreme. Plant-based volcano burrito. Oh, man. Well, I taste the difference right away. Oh, no. Nope. Plant-based taco. I’ll have a bite. I definitely like the idea of the plant-based meat and usually think it’s OK, at least in America, because most of these fast-food sandwiches and tacos are just covered in a sauce and loaded up with so much sodium you really don’t even notice anyway. But for these, I can definitely tell. Ugh. I think it’s worse. You might like the flavor, and if you don’t eat meat probably can enjoy it now, but the difference is noticeable. And also plant-based quesadillas. The "meat" is plant-based, but it still has actual cheese and I’m assuming actual sour cream, so it’s more vegetarian than vegan. The US actually doesn’t have any fake meat on the menu. So, for example, if you wanted a vegetable Crunchwrap Supreme, you’re stuck with black bean. Taco Bell in the US has a range of breakfast options, which is cool because we don’t even have a breakfast menu at a UK Taco Bell. So, this is the cheesy toasted breakfast burrito with bacon. I know that people are crazy about their breakfast burritos, especially in LA, where we’re filming this. So I feel like if they’re going to have this on the menu, they should do a good job. It looks pretty generous with the bacon. There’s cheese in there. Let’s give it a go. I’m pretty impressed by that. That’s pretty good. Generous with the bacon, but they’ve finely diced the bacon, so it’s kind of interspersed throughout all the rest of it, which is nice. There’s egg in there, cheese in there. That really just kind of hits all the key areas that you want a breakfast burrito to hit. For the cheesy toasted burritos, you can also get them with sausage or potato as the filling. I’m a little confused because now we have a burrito which came in the same wrapping as the other breakfast ones, so I think it is a breakfast burrito, but it doesn’t look like any of the other ones that we’ve got. It’s got, like, one of those grilled-cheese skirts on the outside, but then it’s also got fiesta strips on the inside. From what I can tell, rice, beef, and cheese as well. I’m not seeing any egg in there, but, hey, it came wrapped like a breakfast burrito. If I had to hazard a guess, I would name it something like the beefy fiesta grilled-cheese breakfast burrito. I might have just completely made that up, but, hey, there you go. It’s pretty good. I like the grilled cheese on the outside. Next up, we have a grande toasted breakfast burrito. This is the one with steak. Looks kind of similar to the regular toasted burrito. Also, adding "grande" to it seems to suggest that you get potatoes included as well. Yeah, I think this kind of needs the cheese, especially when you’re adding the potatoes, which are quite dry. [coughs] Dry. They have a breakfast quesadilla on the menu in the US. To save myself having to get the entire thing out again, I will just try and tear a slice off. So, this is a slice of the sausage breakfast quesadilla. The sausage is nice. Kind of quite herby, meaty, just kind of, again, want a bit more of that, because right now with the cheese and the egg and the wrap, it’s a little bit dry. We got the sausage one, but you can also get this in options of bacon or steak. In the US, you can also get breakfast Crunchwraps. This one is the California breakfast Crunchwrap, which is fitting because we are in California. I don’t exactly know what’s in this. There’s, like, a tiny bit of green peeking out, which makes me think maybe there’s avocado in it. Hm. So, definitely avocado. Quite a lot of guacamole in there. Also got the eggs, bacon, tomatoes, and some cheese. That’s pretty good. I think partly just for the convenience of a breakfast burrito, grabbing something on the go and being able to eat it, I might lean towards that rather than a breakfast Crunchwrap. But I like the Cali option. I like the addition of the avocado. Not bad. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a fast-food breakfast menu unless they served hash browns. Not bad, but nothing beats a McDonald’s hash brown for me. There are a couple of kind of Cinnabon-y things on the dessert menu, but we’ll get to that. But first up, they have two Cinnabon drinks. They have a hot and a cold Cinnabon Delights coffee. I’m not really sure what to expect from this. I don’t know if I’ve had a Cinnabon Delight before. Ah, yeah. Certainly one of the beverages I’ve drunk. And then we have the iced Cinnamon Delights coffee. You guys love your comically oversized iced coffees, don’t you? The crew’s telling me this isn’t even that big, which to me is absurd. These aren’t great. Exclusive sides. They got chicken strips. Chicken tenders at Taco Bell, of course. Seasoned fries. Now, depending on when this is being shot, soon in the US, they will be having fries on the menu in some parts of the country. Depending on when Harry comes and visit us, visits us, the fries will almost certainly not be on the menu, but we’ll have to make a note of that. And if they are and you still have them, Harry, then sorry, we thought they were exclusives. They were when we shot this portion. Mm. So, this is the Fries Bell Grande. They have that in fries form. Nachos BellGrande in fries form. And this one is, what do we think this is? And then, what does this look like, guys? Looks like the same thing. Can we get post to put jalapeños on this? And there are your jalapeño cheesy fries. If you don’t want those, we also have bacon cheesy fries. Post, if you can … you know what to do. I see no bacon on this. And then you can also get seasoned chips. Did I already do these? The seasoned chips, crisps. So, over in the US, you get rice and beans, but here in the UK you can just get that rice. And also beans, but we didn’t get those. You can get your beans and rice separated, so you can mix them at home. And in the US we have cheesy fiesta potatoes. I just don’t know why they’ve called these fiesta potatoes when they don’t have the fiesta strips on them. I thought that was how you established if something was or was not a fiesta. These are just the potatoes covered with some cheese sauce and sour cream. Next up we have pintos ‘n’ cheese. Pintos of course being a bean, for those who do not know. It’s got the two types of shredded cheese on top, but they’ve kind of coagulated into a big disk that’s kind of just sliding around on top of the beans. In the UK, we can order a side of rice or a side of black beans, but in the US you can order a side of beans and rice. And we also have some loaded beef nachos. I think in terms of toppings, they’ve chosen well. There’s the beef on there, the refried beans, sour cream, cheese, guac, and I think a salsa as well. It’s actually against the rules to get a nacho with all the stuff on it, but just this once. OK, look, I’ll say these are probably better than any fast-food nachos I’ve had in the UK, although I do think that is just quite a low bar. So yeah, these are pretty good and would be better fresh. But right now, they’re just kind of any old slightly stale cold nachos. Just a few more things to go through. Firstly, the US has a couple of bowl options, the power menu bowl and the veggie power menu bowl. So, this is the regular power bowl. So this has chicken on the base, also some rice, and then a bunch of the other toppings. Things like the shredded lettuce, the tomato, some guac, some sour cream as well. I’m not 100% sure what purpose this serves. I thought it was a carb-free thing, so I didn’t realize that there was rice in it. Maybe it’s a gluten-free option, or, yeah, people just want to kind of at least appear like they’re eating healthy, even though they’re still just going to Taco Bell. Yay! Little churro sticks. They got churros with a little bit of a caramel dipping sauce. The US has cinnamon twists, but churros are where it’s at. Churros? Come on! The churros, eh! These are very good. Then we’re on to the desserts. We have an exclusive dessert option in the US, which is these: Cinnabon Delights. Again, it seems like Taco Bell and Cinnabon have some kind of partnership going on in the US. As far as I can tell, they’re kind of like tiny doughnuts. On the outside they have cinnamon sugar, and then on the inside they have little bits of Cinnabon cream-cheese frosting. It’s hard to actually make out the frosting in them because it’s kind of the same color as the dough, but it is there. It tastes good. I think they could actually stand to go even heavier on the cinnamon. Especially, you know, it’s a Cinnabon product. Cinnamon’s kind of almost in your name. As part of the partnership between Cinnabon and Taco Bell, you may also be able to find cinnamon rolls on the menu, although unfortunately we couldn’t find any today. So many exclusive UK options. I got three of them. They got Pepsi on the menu here. Also Tango orange. Finally, Tango makes an appearance. And Mountain Dew zero sugar. You can also get beer at Taco Bell. Sol beer, specifically. Tango apple, 7Up Free, and Robinsons apple and black currant. Look at the colors of these. None of these colors exist in nature, so I don’t really know what is in any of these. I’m going to go through them, sip most of them, and hope that my brain doesn’t explode. I think this one is just regular Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew in the US and the UK are very different. This color, again, alarming. Mountain Dew in the UK is still on the more sugary side as far as sodas are concerned, but does not look like this. Let’s see. The ice has kind of melted and diluted it, but that’s still got a real kind of punch to it that I’m not used to, as someone from the UK. Next up we have a Lipton unsweetened iced tea. There’s a vaguely recognizable tea flavor in there, but it’s just so weak. I don’t know what it is about Americans and their iced tea, but you guys clearly don’t actually want to taste any tea. I think you just want a delivery vehicle for sugar, which is fine. But don’t drag tea through the mud every time. Come on. They have a couple of Brisk-branded iced teas on the menu here. This one, we believe, is the Brisk Dragon Paradise iced tea, sparkling. Let’s give this one a try. I don’t know why it’s purple. I don’t know how you can call this a tea. In the UK, you got those ice poles in summer, and the blue one of those pretty much just tastes like sugar with a tiny bit of, like, artificial raspberry in it. That’s kind of what I’m getting from that. Again with the colors, guys. Like, what food colorings are you putting in? This is alarming. If you see a snake this color in the wild, like, run the other way as fast as you can. I think this is the G2 Gatorade fruit punch. I think there’s definitely a bit of, like, artificial cherry going on in there, which, again, might explain this absurd color on it. It’s fine. It’s OK. Next up we have this Dole lemonade strawberry squeeze. Yeah, that one’s actually fine. That one’s pretty tolerable. Mostly lemonade. Good strawberry flavor. That’s fine. We have another Brisk tea. This one is the Mango Fiesta flavor. Ooh. There’s mango flavor in there, but it’s just that extremely artificial mango flavor, and again, just too sweet. We’ve saved the best till the last because our last beverage is Mountain Dew Baja Blast. This is the regular one, and it also comes in a freeze version, which is like a slushy, which, as you can see, has now melted. Now, I’ve never tried this. Joe always has pretty strong feelings towards Baja Blast, so I think we should get him in here to try and explain it to me. It’s like drinking a Powerade Mountain Dew-flavored battery. Well, take a sip. See what you think. All right, man. Cheers. I’ll take a sip of this one. Joe: No? Harry: Ooh! And before you say anything, now try this one. OK, that’s kind of already powerful enough for me. Oh, then try that one. Oh, Christ! Right? Oh, that’s just like the syrup. You can feel that, right? You feel that on your teeth. Ugh. So now do you feel like you’ve won four video games? Yeah. Yeah. It pairs perfectly with a flashing screen. We also have a few more drinks that we didn’t get today. These include a Mountain Dew Baja Blast zero sugar, Dr Pepper, Diet Dr Pepper, Mug Root Beer, Starry, iced tea special, sweet tea special, Aquafina bottled water, Tropicana orange juice, and a premium hot coffee. I have to say off the bat, this Taco Bell wasn’t as awful as I thought it was going to be. This is the one I was kind of dreading. I didn’t like most of it. I did like your volcano burrito. I wish that was still in the United States. I also like the churros. Come on, we gotta have churros. Those cinnamon twists, eh. Churros are where they’re at. The plant-based stuff smelled the weirdest. I don’t know what’s going on with that. It could have been just the Taco Bell we got it from, but it had an odor that is a bit off. I wouldn’t take them off of the menu, really, but your standard stuff, your standard beef was just a lot less flavorful than ours. Another way of saying that is that it was flavorless. It was less more-flavorful. Throw a little more seasoning in there, for goodness’ sake. I think the moral is don’t go to Taco Bell in the UK. But I don’t know, I gotta try out some of the Mexican food here, because this continues my theory that there’s no good Mexican food in the United Kingdom. So we’ll see. I’m going to say something that I know Joe is going to disagree with, but I think overall I didn’t actually notice that much taste difference between the products here and the products in the UK. There might have been a few subtle differences in the amount of salt or the amount of seasoning in some of the products, but I do think overall Taco Bell in the UK does a pretty good job of hitting that spot, which is just kind of grease and meat. For example, I think a lot of the burritos are kind of the same ingredients, like rice, beef, and cheese, in different quantities and combinations. I think my honorable mentions would probably go to the Doritos Tacos Locos. I love Doritos. It was really good, added more flavor than a standard crunchy taco shell, and, yeah, I just would like to see that on the menu in the UK. I also liked the breakfast menu. I think overall the breakfast burritos did a pretty good job. I think my favorite one was probably just that standard kind of egg, cheese, and bacon burrito. If I could only take one thing home, I think I actually would have to go for, not one menu item, but kind of a common thing across the menu, which is just the chicken. Compared to the chicken I’ve had in the UK, which in my opinion has been quite dry in the past, all the chicken that I had today was quite thick, juicy, very well seasoned, and really just meant that any item on the menu that had chicken in it I knew was going to be quite good. If I had to cut one thing from the menu in the US and from any menu, I think it would probably be that stacker thing. Harry: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Starbucks. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." In the US, hot coffees come in four sizes. You can get a short coffee, which is 8 fluid ounces. You have a tall coffee, which is 12 ounces. The grande coffee here is 16 ounces, and a venti hot coffee in the US is 20 ounces, venti meaning 20 in Italian. And in the UK, you can get hot coffees in these sizes: short, which is the 8 fluid ounces; tall, 12 fluid ounces; grande, 16 fluid ounces; venti, 20 fluid ounces. Starbucks also offers its coffees in iced versions. In the UK, they come in sizes of tall, grande. I’ve been informed there was some spillage with Deliveroo. And venti. You can get a short version, but it’s not officially listed on the menu. You have to specifically ask for it. In the US, you can get iced coffees in four sizes. We’ll start with the tall, which is 12 ounces. The grande is 16 ounces. The venti jumps up to 24 ounces, so you’re no longer going by the Italian. And then we have this, which is the trenta coffee. This is 31 fluid ounces of coffee. Now, if we’re comparing classics, I really had to try the American version of an English breakfast tea. I need to see if you guys are doing it justice over here or if there are any notes that I can offer for you. Hm, OK. I mean, instant reaction there, I think they might have, like, frothed the milk, which is not something that Brits do for breakfast tea. I’m going to take the bag out of this because it’s already been sat there for too long. It depends who you ask. Sometimes you shouldn’t even put the milk in before the tea bag is taken out of it. I mean, honestly, that’s not too bad. I was fearing worse. Slightly on the milky side. I think my main notes here would just be don’t froth the milk and be quite sparing with how much milk you’re putting into it. Not the worst version of an English breakfast tea I’ve had by a long shot. And here’s a UK English breakfast tea with milk. Now, he wants to see how this compares to the US version. To be honest, I’ve never had an English breakfast tea at Starbucks. I’m not quite sure I’ve had an English breakfast tea ever. Ugh. It’s OK, I guess. Eh, it’s kind of growing on me. Yeah, not bad, what? Harry: Mine. Oh, OK, he’s grabbing it. There’s actually a lot of differences between the food menus in both countries, but there still is some overlap. You’ll of course find cake pops in both countries. Here is ours. Ready, everybody? Shameful. Shameful, Starbucks. Pretty close. This is good. Here’s the US version of the iconic Starbucks cake pop. This is the birthday cake flavor. That’s really good. I think actually that might be slightly better than a UK cake pop. In the US and the UK, Starbucks sells sous vide egg bites. Each country has slightly different flavors. I’ve got two of the American ones here. I’ll start with these ones, which I think are the classic. These are the bacon and Gruyère egg bites. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a Starbucks egg bite before, so I’m kind of intrigued. They’re not bad. I like the bacon flavor. You definitely get some Gruyère cheesiness from that. Not sure if this is the best delivery method for eggs, but. And the other version we got today are these kale and mushroom egg bites. Pretty good, not bad. I think I might actually slightly prefer these to the meat version, which for me is kind of unusual. Egg bites. I will say right off the bat, they do not come in a box in the US. Your guys’ egg bites come with the understanding that when you get to your destination or when they get to you, you cook them. Or you microwave them. I guess that’s cooking. Sounds like my egg bites are done. All right, thank you, kind sir. These don’t look like our egg bites. These don’t taste like our egg bites at all. They taste like microwavable eggs, actually. The egg bites in America, way better. I love them. I get them all the time. This is a disgrace. A bloody disgrace! On the US Starbucks menu, you can also find a crispy grilled cheese on sourdough. That sounds fancy. I want to see what it’s like. So, the issue with bagging sandwiches like this is that they lose crispiness pretty fast because they’re kind of steaming in the bag. As far as just a standard grilled cheese goes, yeah, actually pretty good. I like that. I like the bread. Over here in the UK, they call it a five-cheese toastie. Unclear which five cheeses they’ve used. Oh, is there cheese baked on top of this? Why is one cheese on top? I’m getting a hint of mustard on this. I like mustard, but I taste the mustard more than the cheese. For a five-cheese sandwich, I don’t taste a lot of cheese. Here’s everything you can find at a Starbucks in the UK I can’t get in the US. Here are all the items you’ll find at a Starbucks in the US that we don’t have in the UK. Now, while I was over here, I really wanted to try an Oleato coffee from Starbucks. We might actually be able to get these in the UK, but I definitely wanted to try the US version because it does still just baffle me as a concept. For those who don’t know, Starbucks Oleatos are coffees which then have a shot of olive oil added to them. The olive oil isn’t mixed in or emulsified. As far as I can tell, they literally just take a shot and drop it into your coffee. Apparently, the rumor is that the Starbucks CEO or someone higher up in Starbucks went to Italy, saw people in Italy having little shots of olive oil with their morning coffee, and thought it was such a great idea that he had to bring it to the rest of the world. So, the one we’ve got here is an oat milk Oleato caffe latte. If you look inside, it looks kind of like an oat milk latte, but then you do just see these bits of oil just kind of floating around on top of it. Pretty much like I expected it to taste, which is like an oily latte. The olive oil, whatever olive oil they’re using here in the US for this, doesn’t have that strong a taste. It’s more just the texture. Not great. Not for me, I don’t think. UK has three exclusive hot drinks. I was only able to get two. The one I did get was this, the toffee nut latte. Toffee’s fine. Nuts are OK, I guess. Lattes, sure. Yeah, this doesn’t work for me. Also here in the UK you can get a caramel waffle latte. We do have it in Frappuccino form, but we don’t have it in hot form. Sorry. Also you can get yourself a cortado, which looks like a little espresso shot with something special, I assume. I’ve been informed that it’s like a tiny cappuccino where it’s 50% espresso and 50% milk or cream. I actually would like that. Next up, we’ve got some Starbucks-exclusive hot coffee options. The first one I’m going to try today is this one, the honey almond milk flat white. I am not the biggest almond milk fan. If it’s honey in place of sugar, then I might like this. A lot of the issues that I have with Starbucks and the blended drinks that they create are more because they overdo it on the syrups and the sugars and it ends up tasting kind of artificial and horrible. Yeah, that’s actually not too bad. It’s very gentle. Flat whites are really popular in the UK, I will say. For some reason, that’s what a lot of people will now order by default in a Starbucks or a Pret, for example. It’s kind of like a latte, but they just change the ratios of coffee, milk, and frothed milk a little bit. Next up, we have the cinnamon dolce latte. Dolce, of course, meaning sweet; cinnamon, of course, meaning cinnamon. That’s not too bad, actually. It’s not overwhelmingly sweet, which is good. I was kind of surprised. I was expecting that to be worse. It’s exceeded my admittedly quite low expectations. This one I’m actually kind of excited for. This one is a pistachio latte. Pistachio’s great usually. It’s kind of a gentle, nutty flavor. That’s actually fairly accurately recreated the taste of pistachio. Next up we have a sugar cookie almond milk latte. Sugar cookies aren’t really a thing in the UK. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them in the US before. Are they those kind of quite pale, iced, brittle cookie things? So, in terms of sweet coffees, I am bracing myself for this one. Yeah, that’s bad. It’s just very sugary. Also, because it’s made with almond milk, I feel like you’re not getting quite as much creaminess from the milk itself. So it’s a little bit watery and very sweet, and for me, yeah, that’s not doing the job. The last hot coffee exclusive I got today was this chestnut praline latte. I’m not really getting much chestnut or praline flavor from that. Don’t love it, don’t hate it, it’s kind of just fine. Here are some UK-exclusive iced coffees and cold-brew flavors. Starting with this one right here, the before-mentioned caramel waffle Frappuccino. I am never kind to Frappuccinos. The whole Frappuccino thing, I’m not into it. I never want a coffee milkshake, ever. They’re way too sweet. Every caramel drink we’ve had at Starbucks has made me gag because I think it’s just too sweet and too gross and too syrupy. Let’s see if the UK got the formula right. Nope, this is bad too. Not as sweet. I’ll give it to you, it’s not as sweet. Just couldn’t get excited about drinking a whole one of these. Even two sips, I’m kind of like, ugh. The next drink that I have here is the clotted cream fudge cold brew. Clotted cream? United Kingdom, what does that mean? One thing I will say, that’s remarkable about how unsweet this is. I just realized our Starbucks is going to put Harry in a grave. Here’s what I like about this. If I was to get a fudge or chocolaty-flavored cold brew, I’d prefer yours to ours because this tastes more like a cold brew. I’ve just been informed that the fudge was maybe made with clotted cream, and that doesn’t help. And of course, being America, here we have a bunch of iced coffee options. For something pistachio-flavored, I would expect some green color in there, but very much just looks like a cold-brew coffee. Pretty similar, just not a lot of pistachio flavor. Just quite gentle, but not bad. I’m not sure I love the texture of the cream on top of the cold brew. Next up, we have the cinnamon caramel cream cold brew. All of these drink names just sound like tongue twisters. There are just so many words, and they all kind of sound similar. Something about the cinnamon flavoring or syrup that they’re using at Starbucks just doesn’t taste quite like cinnamon should. This one is a vanilla sweet cream cold brew. On the surface, I can get on board with this one. Yeah, that one’s pretty good. Gentle vanilla flavor. Here is the iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso. I’m getting weirdly similarly cinnamony flavors from this one and that one. Here we have the iced honey almond milk flat white. I didn’t hate the honey coffee from before. See how it holds up in iced form. Oh. It might be something to do with iced almond milk, but the texture and the flavor of that is way off. Then we have an iced cinnamon dolce latte. I think I get more cinnamon from that than I do from the cinnamon cold brew, for example. It’s not too bad, actually. That’s all right. I think my main takeaway from these so far is that I’m not a big fan of cold milk alternatives. I think if I’m getting an iced coffee, I need actual milk in there. The texture is slightly off with the almond milk, for example, and I think the flavors just kind of get carried better by actual milk. Sticking with the cold-coffee theme, we have a few Frappuccino options in the US that you won’t find in the UK. I got three of them here today, including the mocha cookie crumble Frappuccino. This one looks pretty appealing. It’s got actual crumbles of cookie stuff on top. Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty good. It doesn’t taste of coffee at all to me. This is kind of just like a Oreo milkshake masquerading as a coffee, I think. Next up, we have the caramel ribbon crunch Frappuccino. Not too bad. You definitely get a caramel flavor from it. The last one I got today was the pistachio Frappuccino. Again, I think it’s something to do with this in the iced form. Doesn’t seem to hold up well when iced for some reason. It’s like the pistachio flavor has been hijacked by the sugar in there, and neither flavor is coming out of that well. I know you guys love iced coffees in the US. I’ve got to say, from these ones, I’ve been disappointed. I’m not getting really any coffee flavor from almost any of these, and I think just in general, when you ice a coffee like this, you add so much ice to it, as soon as it starts to melt, any flavor that was in there just gets really diluted. The texture kind of goes as well. So yeah, I mean, from what I’ve had today, kind of underwhelmed by your iced coffee options in the US. Ah, yes, tea, United Kingdom. Tea is very popular here. I am not a big fan of tea, but we also have these iced teas. Two exclusive to the UK are the lemon iced tea and the peach iced tea. One thing I’ve noticed about iced tea in the US, not all iced tea, but usually our iced tea is also very sweet. I don’t know if that is the case here in the UK, and we’ll find out together. First one we got here, mix it up, is the peach iced tea. Not sweet and not good. Blegh! No. Oh, boy. And we’re going into the lemon one now. I can only imagine what this is going to taste like, so. OK, I was expecting that to be a lot worse. It’s just OK. You know when you go to a restaurant and you get water and there’s a lemon wedge in it? That’s closer to what this tastes like. Next up, we’re on to the teas, which obviously I feel very passionate about as a Brit. At Starbucks in the US, you can get a range of hot and iced teas. We’ll start with the hot teas down this end. Firstly, we have something that seems to be kind of a hybrid between a tea and a coffee. This is a London fog tea latte. I don’t know what a London fog is. This is not a British thing. Joe, can you please explain? So, watching the first season of "The Crown," [sped up] there was this fog that rolled in, and actually it was, like, smog or something, because of, is it, like, the first, not the first, but major environmental disaster, I guess, in that city because of all the coal and stuff you guys were using back then? Industrial Revolution, yeah. Yeah, so you’ve heard of the tale of the London fog, right? Like, killed a bunch of people and made Churchill look like a real dummy? Harry: I did not know. At least it did in "The Crown." I don’t know how factually accurate that is. [normal speed] What’s in it? Tea. And milk, because it’s a latte. OK. It’s Earl Grey tea, basically. Earl Grey tea. Grey, fog? Sure, yeah. As far as I can tell, this is kind of just like an Earl Grey tea with milk. I think maybe the milk has been steamed again. Is that another fog reference? Next up, we have a honey citrus mint tea. That sounds OK, but there’s just a lot going on. I’m either used to having a mint tea or tea with honey or maybe a citrus tea. They just combined all of them into one because Americans love flavors. I don’t mind that. I like that they’ve just put two tea bags in the same cup. You can see here they put the jade citrus mint tea in there, but then they’ve also just put a peach tea in there as well, which I guess is supposed to be that kind of honey sweetness. I don’t get a lot of the citrus. I think the mint is kind of overpowering the citrus, so you end up with kind of just a minty, peachy tea. Then beyond the hot drinks, we have some iced teas in the US. Here we have an iced black tea. Yeah, again, that is just water. Look how clear that is. It shouldn’t be that clear. Next up, we have an iced black tea lemonade. Even that doesn’t have a ton of flavor. I’m not getting much lemon from that at all. This one upsets me. I don’t know what’s going on here. This is an iced royal English breakfast tea latte. This looks just like a cup of milk. I don’t even know if I want to try this, but I’m going to have to for science. When Americans confidently state that tea is gross and that they don’t drink it, I think it’s because they’re basing it on this. That’s terrible. Like, what even is this? There’s so much more you can do with tea, and you’re really wasting the opportunity. On behalf of all Brits, stop doing this. It’s just such a waste. We also have an iced London fog tea latte, which I will take a small sip of, because, yeah, again, I’m … It’s just a very watery, very milky, and very sweet Earl Grey tea, effectively. And then finally for the cold beverages, Starbucks in the US offers a few exclusive customizations and flavors of the Refreshers. I’ve got three of them here today. The first one is a pineapple passion fruit Refresher. So, it does taste very pineapple-y. That’s refreshing. Does what it says on the tin. Lives up to the name Refresher. Next up, we have a strawberry acai Refresher. Also not bad. And then the last one I got today was a mango dragon fruit Refresher. That’s nice. That might have the most gentle flavor of these ones, but I think that’s kind of what I want from a Refresher drink. Moving on to food! The breakfast menu in both countries is pretty different. Starting with the savory stuff here in the United Kingdom, down here, signature breakfast sandwich. What the hell? Ha! The signature breakfast sandwich, what? First of all, what kind of bun is this? Brioche? No. What is this? Pretzel bun breakfast sandwich? Already, this country is upside down. Your sad bacon, oh, I called it ham a second ago because it looks like ham. Oh, no. I love pretzels. I love pretzels, and I love a pretzel bun on a burger or a sandwich. In the morning, and on this, no. Beyond Meat breakfast sandwich. Plant-based meat. The Beyond Meat is actually flavored well. Has a bit of a, like, almost sausage-y taste to it. Moving on, egg bites. I’m not heating these up, but we got them. Red pepper and spinach. A traditional sausage sandwich. Here’s what I love about this country. This keeps coming up. You people love your sausages so much that you’re constantly making things like this where you take a very specific shape of a sausage and try and cram it into different-shaped bread. Why? What is this? Just sausage and bread. The sausage, I can’t place my finger on it. It just tastes different over here. Smoked bacon roll. Your bacon is so weak. It’s so weird and flimsy. Smells weird. How did you manage to get the flavor out of bacon? How did you get — you pulled it off. You guys have no problem putting a skimpy amount of meat in a way-too-thick roll. We’ll start with the breakfast menu. Apparently Starbucks recently added a chicken option to its breakfast menu, which has got people very excited. Here it is. This is the chicken, maple butter, and egg sandwich. When I saw chicken, I thought maybe it would be more of a actual chicken breast, but it’s kind of like a big nugget. Fried chicken and maple with egg. Not a combination that I think you’ll find very commonly in the UK. I don’t mind that as a flavor combination. The texture of the chicken isn’t very good. When it’s in a sandwich with the other ingredients, the breading on the chicken has gone a bit soggy. There is a wrap option on the US breakfast menu. This contains bacon, sausage, and egg. The sausage in the US tends to be more like sausage meat. It’s kind of ground up, so you get these small pieces rather than, like, sausages running through it, like is probably more common in the UK. I can’t tell if there’s actually any bacon in here because I’m not really seeing or tasting any, but the sausage is good, the eggs are good. Scrambled eggs have a great texture to them. Next up, we have a bacon, Gouda, and egg sandwich. It’s quite dense. The roll is good, but it’s quite chewy. The US has an Impossible breakfast sandwich. I don’t know if I’ve really had much Impossible meat before. Yeah, I’m really impressed by that. I would honestly think if you handed me this and told me it was sausage, I don’t think I would correct you. This is the turkey bacon, egg white, and cheddar sandwich. It’s OK. The US Starbucks also has two bagel options. I know Americans love their bagels, so I’m excited to see how Starbucks have done. You can either get a plain bagel with cream cheese or you can get an everything bagel with cream cheese. "Everything" refers to the way that they just kind of combine all of the most popular American bagel toppings. So you’ll get things like poppy seeds, sesame seeds, salt, and garlic. I’ll try a bit of everything bagel with a bit of their cream cheese. Get a little schmear going. It’s not the best bagel I’ve had. They’re just a little bit bland, I think, for my liking, really. Cream cheese is fine, just pretty standard cream cheese. Here are all the UK sweet options I can’t get in the US, starting with this in front of me. Peach and raspberry overnight oats, and in parentheses, it says "(plant-based)." Yeah, OK. Not bad. I mean, I do have an American palate, so every time I’m about to bite into something that’s fruity, I’m expecting it to be also very sweet, but actually I would probably lean more towards this in the morning because I really don’t like sweets in the morning. Let’s go down over on this side. Caramel shortbread. Another cake pop. Caramelized, so I’m assuming it’s caramel. Caramelized Biscoff. Ooh, very caramel-y. Yeah, Biscoff’s all right, I guess. Ooh, what do we got here? Cookies and cream brownie bite. What the, you just get one? Fine. Red velvet cake. So it’s chocolate and cream cheese. I closed my eyes and thought of chocolate, and it was like, that’s exactly what chocolate tastes like. Oh, my God. Luxury fruit toast, ugh. That sucks. I don’t like that at all. There’s a few holiday selections over here. Christmas tree brownie. I know what a brownie tastes like, but fun little Christmas tree design. Chocolate twist. You get the little chocolate chips. I like that. Banana caramel muffin. Supposed it’d be all right, but banana and caramel, not really going that well together, I don’t think. Lemon and poppy seed muffin. That’s really good. Lemon flavor with the poppy seed. But poppy, does poppy have, like, a specific flavor? Ooh, cinnamon swirl. Why is it square? I know that seems like a moot point. Why is it square? Just like they do in the UK, Starbucks has quite a big bakery section in the US. We’ll start with another cake pop. This one is a peppermint brownie cake pop. It looks like it’s covered in broken glass, so I’m going to hope that that’s not the case. Again, that really chewy texture, which I really quite like, actually. Thankfully, the outside bits are not broken glass. I think they’re actually, like, crushed-up mints, which is where I’m getting most of the mint flavor from. That’s a pretty good cake pop. I like it. Next up, we have a marshmallow dream bar. So simple. So tasty. Next up, we have a slice of banana, walnut, and pecan loaf. That’s really good. It’s good banana bread. It’s got that real moist texture to it. Little bit of crunch from the nuts on the outside. Yeah, big fan. Thumbs up. This one I’m interested in. This is a blueberry scone. I’m intrigued to see how Americans approach a scone. Obviously, the shape is slightly different to what you’d expect in the UK from a scone. Ours tend to be circular, or more circular, whereas this one is kind of a triangle shape. It’s OK. It’s quite dry. I think maybe this with some cream cheese could work, actually, like a blueberry cream cheese thing, because right now, it is dry, as scones tend to be, but in a kind of bready way that I’m not used to. The final baked good we have here today is this cheese Danish. It’s very flat. Yeah, not bad. The texture and flavor I get from the pastry is kind of like those cheap supermarket croissants that you get. All right, exclusive hot sandwich-y guys. This is the oak-smoked ham and cheese toastie. So if you want your ham and cheese to taste like it just came from a forest fire, this is your sandwich. Chipotle chili tater tot bites. Unforgivable. Tuna melt panini. Bro, it’s got corn in it! And even though I hate this, there’s, like, no tuna in this. Moving on, tomato and mozzarella panini. I would say this was skimping on the ingredients. For saying, what is this, mozzarella? Right? I don’t see cheese anywhere in here really. I would return that. I’d be like, "You guys forgot to put the stuff in my sandwich." I’m wondering, why is the chicken Caesar wrap packaged like this? Charlie: Those will be prepackaged, and then they take them out to heat them up. Oh, these are. Charlie: Would be in a packet before. Gotcha. Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, chicken sandwich. Red Leh-sheh-stir? Lie-sheh-stir? Harry: Leicester. No, that’s not right. Charlie: Leicester. Cheese and pickle? Nope. Harry’s going to explain something to me. So, a ploughman’s lunch is pretty commonly eaten here in the UK. Generally, it’ll be a platter, and will include things like cheese, pickle, which is what you’re about to eat. Not pickles. Very key distinction there. Oh, OK. Yeah. It’s like a condiment, almost like a relish of some kind, and then other things as well. You’ll usually find maybe a pickled onion on the plate, some bread. Just random bits like that that you’d eat. And then you’d go off to plow your fields. And then this is the sandwich version of that. That’s the sandwich version, effectively, of a ploughman’s. It’s a cheese and pickle. So the pickle isn’t American pickles. This is like relish. We’d call it relish, even though our relish is greener. Thanks, bud. This does not taste like relish. I’m very confused on what it is. It isn’t bad, it’s just strange to me. So I’d like to learn more about this. There are lots of lunch options from a US Starbucks, and the one we got today is this one, the ham and Swiss on a baguette. Mm-mm. Mmph. That’s some hard work. Yeah, whatever bread they’re using there is extremely chewy. Flavors are pretty good. I like the ham flavor. Little bit of flavor from the Swiss. Overall, I don’t know how impressed I am with US Starbucks. I think the basic things we actually might be doing slightly better in the UK. Even the coffee was just kind of a little bit burned and bitter-tasting over here. I think in the UK, you’re generally getting a more reasonable portion, and the actual coffee itself might be slightly better quality. If there’s one thing the US is doing better, I’d say I was pretty impressed by the bakery section. I think pretty much all the baked goods I tried were great. Even just things like the cake pop had a really satisfying texture and flavor to them. I really liked that banana walnut loaf. I thought that was great as well. Honestly, I just wasn’t really impressed by any of the drinks you guys have over here. I thought the iced beverages were just all a bit weird-tasting and ended up just being very watery. I think the hot beverages, some of the flavors just needed a real rebalancing there because they were either way too strong or not strong enough. If I had to pick something to take back with me to the UK, I’m kind of split between a couple of options. There were some good things, particularly more on the food side of the menu. I thought the Impossible sandwich was actually really good. They really did replicate the texture and the flavor of the sausage patty. So I’d kind of like that in the UK as a nonmeat option that actually tastes really good and close to meat. I really like the cake pops. It seems like a really basic thing, but just in terms of the taste and the texture, way better here than they are in the UK. If I had to choose one thing to cut from the US menu, actually quite a tricky decision because there were several things that I thought were just bad. One thing might be the trenta iced coffee because I think that’s just an absurd amount of coffee. It’s excessive. That cannot be good for anyone’s health. You guys really aren’t doing tea very well in the US. I thought the breakfast tea with milk was actually kind of fine, but all of those iced tea options were really, really bad. Despite all of that, I think the item that I’m actually going to cut from the US menu, given the chance, would probably be the iced London fog latte. Just to reiterate, London fog is not something that anyone from London knows of or drinks, so that’s really bad to begin with. Also, just something about the ice, again, diluting it. It just ended up being like the worst cup of Earl Grey tea you’ve ever had, and then you’ve just added a bunch of ice to it. So, honestly, just appalling. If you’re going to keep that on the menu, just take London out of the name. Stop dragging us through the mud to have your disgusting, disgusting tea drinks. As you could see, it pretty much was a lot like what a Starbucks in the US is like. So kudos to Starbucks to having pretty good consistency. What would I keep? I liked the clotted cream fudge cold brew. Wasn’t too sweet. Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by that drink. And if I wanted something healthy, maybe the peach and raspberry overnight oats. It was nice. Yeah, I can get into that. What would I cut? Well, I know I did not like the tuna panini. I mean, I’m not a big tuna guy anyway, but ugh. It just smelled horrible, rough, no thanks. And that traditional sausage sandwich that’s just sausage and bread, ah! There’s nothing to it. I know other fast-food menus have just a sausage and bread sandwich, but Starbucks, you don’t gotta do that. Not a fan of that either. So those can stay in the UK. Harry: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Papa Johns. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." Let’s start with a classic cheese pizza. There are some slight size differences between the pizzas in the US and the UK. The US small is 10 inches. The US medium is 12 inches. The US large is 14 inches. The extra-large pizza is 16 inches across and cut into 10 slices. Here in the UK, you got the small, 9.5 inches; the medium, 11.5 inches; the large, 13.5 inches; and the XXL. We skipped the 1X, went right to the 2XXL. 15.5 inches. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. 12 slices. That should be eight. I know what you’re doing. You think if you have more slices, you feel like you get a little more pizza and you can dole it out, but no. People are just going to eat more slices a lot faster. You’ve accomplished nothing, Papa Johns. Nice try. Visually, the pizzas look pretty similar to what I’m used to in the UK from a Papa Johns. I feel like it’s pretty hard to mess up just a cheese pizza from a fast-food place. I will say each of the pizzas comes with this little pepper, which is not the case in the UK. Quite a thin crust, maybe a slightly thinner crust than I’m used to. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Again, I’d say pretty comparable to what I’m used to in the UK. I’m not massively noticing a difference. Not a ton of flavor coming through from the cheese. The cheese is just kind of there and offers some texture, but isn’t really giving me much flavor. They’ve also been quite light on the sauce on this one. It might just be the slice that I got, but not a ton of sauce. All right, let’s see how the cheese pizza tastes. Mm. This is better than most of the regular cheese pizzas I’ve had here. Better than Domino’s and Pizza Hut. More flavorful, with fresh ingredients. The sauce is kind of sweet. Yeah, OK. Papa Johns is good. Here’s everything you’ll find at a Papa Johns in the US that you won’t find in the UK. Here’s everything at a UK Papa Johns I can’t get in the US. Of course, in the US, you have the option to create your own pizza at Papa Johns, and there are some exclusive ingredients you won’t find in the UK. Today, we were able to find two of the exclusive crust options. Here, we have the XL New York-style crust. Now, I’ve been to New York, I’ve had New York pizza with Joe, in fact, so I feel pretty qualified to comment on whether or not this is actually New York-style pizza. A lot of cheese coverage here. Again, very little sauce peeking through. I just don’t see how this is New York style at all. Literally, all they’ve done is take their regular dough and stretch it slightly thinner. I’m not sure you can call that New York-style crust. Next up, we have a gluten-free crust. I’m always a bit scared when I see a gluten-free pizza on a fast-food menu. They haven’t figured out a way to get that chew without the gluten in there, so often they just end up as kind of crackers with some cheese and tomato on top of them. Little baby boy. Yeah, I’m going into this with low expectations. Some gluten-free pizzas I’ve had are worse than this. Not to say this is, like, amazing and great, but yeah, not too bad. They’ve definitely got a little bit of chew going on there. You may also be able to find a cheesy calzone epic stuffed crust, which sounds great, but unfortunately, we couldn’t get it today. Outside of the crust options, you can also customize your pizza with some other exclusive toppings. These include a Parmesan Romano cheese, which I don’t think exists. A three-cheese blend. In terms of sauces, you can get an Alfredo sauce on your pizza or Buffalo sauce. And for meats, you can get a salami and meatballs. I want to draw attention to these meatballs because that looks like one of the driest things I’ve ever seen. It’s like a ball of wet sand. Now, Joe has cooked this up for me, and it is the gluten-free base, Buffalo sauce as the base, which I’m not thrilled about, the Parm Romano cheese, which, again, I don’t think is a real cheese, salami, and meatballs. All right, I’m going to try and get a bit of everything in one bite. So cheers, guys. It’s not great. I can’t lie. The main issues: gluten-free base, not great, and honestly, the main thing I taste is Buffalo sauce. It’s a very strong flavor. It’s overpowering everything else on this pizza. Thanks, Joe, but no thanks. Here are some pizza ingredients exclusive to the UK. Starting with the cheese, they have the vegan cheese. Crusts, you can get an epic garlic-stuffed crust, a crispy cheesy base, and a wheat-free stone-baked base, which is gluten-free. Meats, you got spicy beef. Veggies, you got chestnut mushrooms. And also red chili peppers, not to be confused with the hot ones. Sweet corn. Other toppings! Feta cheese, no, hot sauce, no, jackfruit pepperoni, eh, premium cheese blend, red cheddar, tomatoes, tuna, vegan cheese, vegan sausage. Wah! All right. The part where we torture our "Food Wars" hosts. UK-only Papa Johns pizza. What is this? What is this? All right, we got the crispy cheese base. Oh, yeah, it’s really crispy. It’s like a dinner plate that you dropped. Spicy beef, chestnut mushrooms, sweet corn, tuna. I’m not seeing — oh, yeah, there’s tuna. F—. And hot sauce. Hot sauce? All right, let’s do this. It’s terrible. The end! Of course, if you don’t feel like creating your own pizza, you can choose from Papa Johns’ many preset pizza options here in the US. So we’ll start with this one down here, which is the zesty Italian trio. Zest-less Italian trio. I don’t think I’ve ever tried banana peppers before. I know Joe always moans about having to eat those in American pizza episodes. Banana peppers. I don’t know what it is with banana peppers. They’re suddenly on everything. I don’t get it. All right. Not really a thing in the UK, so let’s see how they go. I like the salami again. The banana peppers are good. A little bit of saltiness and heat. Sausage is pretty good. I think we’re off to a pretty strong start, actually. Zesty Italian trio, not bad. In the UK, Papa Johns has a lot of exclusive preset options. This many. Chicken club. Just going to do a lightning round here. Looks like it is chicken and onion and pineapple, huh, and tomato? Bland. Next up, we have the meatball pepperoni. As you can imagine, the meatball pepperoni has meatballs and pepperoni on it. It’s also got this Italian seasoning on it, which is going to be a bit of a theme, I think, with some of these pizzas. The meatballs are suffering from that same issue earlier, in that they’re just very dry and don’t offer a ton of flavor. Pepperoni’s good, though. America, I think, on the whole does do pepperoni slightly better than the UK. Next. Ooh, the Mexican. Very doughy. Break out the big guns here, guys. Whoa! This is your garlic dipping sauce? Oh, no, we have the buttery one. Uh-oh. Uh-oh, guys. Not liking the looks of the sauce. First we’ll do the Mexican sans sauce. It’s got a little heat because of the peppers. Whoa! No! Oh! Dip it in sauce there. Cool it off. Your garlic and herb dipping sauce, it’s like salad dressing. This is the fiery Buffalo chicken. So, the fiery Buffalo chicken has, as you can imagine, chicken. It’s got that Buffalo sauce base again. There’s also, I think, some onions on here and some little pieces of crispy bacon. Again, I’m going to try and put to the side my anti-Buffalo-sauce-base bias. Obviously, the US-only pizza was probably not the best representation of the Buffalo sauce. It’s actually much better on this one. I think it works well with the chicken, as you can imagine. Yeah, I still don’t think I’d be opting for Buffalo sauce as a base given freedom of choice, but, yeah, not bad. And the last in this row is pepperoni, sausage, and six cheese. Oh, gosh. I don’t know which six cheeses they’re using here. I don’t even know if I can name six cheeses off the top of my head. That one actually, that one had more sauce than most of the other ones, which I personally really like. I think that’s my ideal ratio. So more like that, please. This is the hot pizza. Is it just — jalapeños and pepperoni. Hm. Yeah, I like that. I think pepperoni and jalapeños are good together. Whew! We got the barbecue meat feast. OK, looks like we replaced pizza sauce with barbecue sauce. Now we’re talking. Yeah, that’s pretty good too. I don’t know if I could eat a whole one of these, but, yeah, for one slice, this is all right. It’s a good sharing pizza. You and your mates. Moving on, small vegan jackfruit pepperoni. Wait a second. I’m sorry. Are they saying that these chunks of jackfruit are supposed to mirror pepperoni? That’s not what that’s supposed to look like. This doesn’t taste like a pepperoni pizza. It tastes like the memory of a pepperoni pizza that’s not quite right. Yeah. If you told me a robot made this, I would think, "Yes, of course they did." Because this is not what this is supposed to taste like. I do not like this. The extra-hot veggie. Are you guys trying to kill me here? Oh, no. I actually really like that. Oh, f—! [crew laughing] Oh, f—! Ah! Oh, that’s really hot! Do we have any milk? Would a Pepsi do anything different? This one is a favorite just because I think Americans need to know. They’re not playing over here. Then we’re on to some meatless options, starting with the extra-cheesy Alfredo. To the Americans watching this, Alfredo sauce is not an Italian thing and it’s not a European thing. It’s got a weird taste to it. It’s quite tangy, which I’m going to assume is because there’s quite a lot of cheese mixed in with the sauce, because at the moment, it’s just kind of a chewy, mushy mess. So, this is the fresh spinach and tomato Alfredo. So let’s see if the addition of extra toppings helps the Alfredo sauce a little bit. Yeah, I think it does. I think especially with these little cooked tomato pieces, they at least offer a bit of sweetness, a bit of acidity, something to balance out just this absurdly creamy sauce that’s going on there. The garden party? [sighs] Yeah, OK, it’s fine. Veggies. Yeah, all right. Vegan one, here we go. They’re both so oniony. It’s just an oniony mess. Nah. It seems to be a theme on American menus that they eventually just say, "Screw it, we’re going to chuck all of our vegetables on one pizza." And here we are. It’s the garden fresh. Yeah, not bad. Again, I think it’s, like, for me, it comes down to a personal-preference thing in that I just don’t like bell peppers particularly. So without those, I think that would be a pretty solid pizza for me. But with those, yeah, not quite for me. The Greek. The Greek! Sorry, I’m touching all the slices. I apologize, everyone. Yeah, you know what? You know what’s a surprise here? It’s going to seem weird to say. Your feta isn’t very strong, but that’s better for this pizza because it works with everything else. The Greeks do it again! Here we have the Tuscan six-cheese. Because this one’s Tuscan, it has a pretty hefty dose of that Italian seasoning. That’s pretty good. I think I probably would order that over just a standard cheese and tomato. Vegan, the works. Oh, I see that jackfruit. [sighs] Nope. The vegan cheese and tomato. Ugh. The consistency of the cheese is like paste. And then finally we have the super Hawaiian. As far as I can tell, it is just a Hawaiian pizza but with more stuff on it. The ham is good. Like, thick-cut pieces of ham. And good chew to them. Bit of smoky flavor. Not bad. And finally, the Xtra-hot meat. All right, guys, with these titles. The hot meat feast. Ah! That’s good, that’s all good. Yeah. Oh-ho! There’s that heat. Hey. Yeah, that’s, I like that. This one’s good. Sorry, I can’t eat it anymore. Also in the UK, you can have your pizza delivered to you by helicopter. As you see, these were dropped to us from 500 feet in the air. Actually, we had an issue with our order today, and it came in several different deliveries, and the last one was in the back of an Uber. They even on the last thing said, "We R sorry." Here we have the large four-cheese. Is it really four cheeses? I can’t taste the difference between that and the regular cheese. It’s nice, but, four? I wonder. All right, and over here we got the chicken and pepperoni on the crispy cheese, you say? What is that? That just means it’s really crispy, crackery crust. It could be, like, two thin layers with cheese in the middle, but there’s not cheese at the bottom. These are Papa Bowls. These are pizzas but without the dough. There are three of these officially on the menu. You can get the Italian meats trio and also the garden veggie, which we have here. You can also get a chicken Alfredo Papa Bowl, or you can just create your own. So basically, any toppings that you like on a pizza, you can just have in a bowl. The fact that I can just hold it like that and nothing comes out. Do not ever, under any circ*mstances, order a Papa Bowl. So, these are Papadias. If we try to dissect the etymology of the word "Papadia" for a second, I think what they’ve tried to do is, obviously, take the "Papa" of Papa Johns and combine it with, like, "quesadilla," I think. Although they’ve not even spelled it with the double-L A. It’s just I A, so not really gone very well there. And honestly, I don’t think the actual end product has either. Just looking at them, these are a little bit weird. They take a small pizza and fold it over. My concern with the Papadia is mostly just that it’s quite a lot of dough for not a ton of filling. I’ll give it a try, see what it’s like. It’s kind of confirmed my fears in that there’s quite a lot of dough. I already complained about the meatballs being dry. So when you have quite a dry, chewy exterior and then the fillings themselves are also dry, that’s just an unpleasant mouthfeel and overall dining experience. So, yeah, this one, not off to a good start. I wonder if the Alfredo sauce will actually kind of come in handy here, because the last one just needed moisture, really. It’s a marginal improvement. Now, Joe and I actually went on a tour of Philly and ate Philly cheesesteaks. Joe, do you want to come and give your verdict on this? Like, the steak on its own isn’t the worst thing ever, but this is not the delivery vessel for any kind of Philly cheesesteak. Yeah. I think calling this a Philly cheesesteak is an insult. Joe: It’s embarrassing, yeah. I kind of just want to get through these, so here is the barbecue chicken Papadia. Nah. These are lazy and bad, and they make me sad. You may also be able to find Doritos Cool Ranch chicken, steak, and beef Papadias, depending on where you are in the country and the time of year. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find them today. They do actually sound pretty fun. Papa Johns also has these things called Papadias, which are kind of like pizza quesadillas, finally. Come on, Papa Johns! This is a small pizza just folded over. So what? That is the vegan Philly cheese mushroom, not the Philly mushroom. This is the Italian sausage and pepperoni. Over here is the regular Philly mushroom, not vegan. Look at the state of it! You must be joking! Last one, Mediterranean veggie and feta and whatever. And you’re like, look, surprise! Wait a second. Is this just like the Greek pizza with no cheese? Papa Johns in the US offers both boneless and traditional wings with a few exclusive flavor options. If you’re getting traditional wings, the flavor options are Buffalo sauce, garlic Parmesan, hot lemon pepper, or honey chipotle. Although I will say, looking at the wings, I think maybe they’ve just only given us Buffalo today. Also, all of them come with ranch, which is not a thing in the UK. Can’t get a grip on it. Yeah, I mean, that one’s a Buffalo wing. Pretty tasty Buffalo wing, though. Big and juicy, good flavor. We’ll try some more. I stand corrected. I think this is actually hot lemon pepper. I’m not getting a ton of the lemon. And the lemon I do get is that kind of artificial lemon that almost reminds me more of a cleaning product rather than the actual fruit. If I’m lucky, this is honey chipotle. If I’m not lucky, this is just more Buffalo. I’m pretty sure that’s just more Buffalo. You can also get boneless wings, and they come in the same flavor options. Although you can also get an unsauced boneless wing, which, let’s face it, is just a chicken nugget. Sides, sides, sides, sides! Starting down here, we got poppers, we got tots, we got spirally guys, we got bites, we got bits, we got the whole thing. Chicken poppers. You mean nuggets? No, poppers. Oh, what’s the difference between a nugget and a popper? You’ll never know. This one doesn’t look very cooked. OK. You know what chicken tastes like. This one, what is this one? Is this the piri piri one? Let’s go! I’m inspecting all chicken from now on. Pink’s OK, right? Ooh, but that piri piri flavor. Piri piri, nonexistent in America. Yes, I know it’s in America, but fast food, very low piri piri. Veggie, San Francisco bites. The vegan chicken, especially in nugget form, usually reminds me of biting into an eraser. But with these fried flavors and the seasoning on here, it’s actually not that bad. Here are all the sides exclusive to a US Papa Johns. We’ll start with the breadsticks, which come in flavors of either original or garlic Parmesan. I mean, I kind of know how plain baked pizza dough is going to taste, but I’ll have a little nibble anyway. Yeah, sure, it tastes like baked dough. All of these sides come with marinara sauce and I think are encouraged to be dipped. So give that a little try with that as well. It’s kind of like paying for extra crusts for your pizza. I’ll try a little bit of the garlic Parm one. These look a lot more appealing. I just can’t really envision a scenario where I order them for myself over just eating a pizza. Cheesy jalapeño poppers. You’re calling them bites. Who doesn’t love a jalapeño popper? Yeah, pretty good. First, the four-cheese potato bites. Wow, look at this. Huh? Look at that, right? Perfectly fine. Another one, whoa! Vegan. Just OK. OK? Can we see? I couldn’t even — look. I couldn’t even just get it with a tot, right? If I just wanted — I gotta grab the meat separately for this? This? This, John? Hey, for the first time in this whole video, a second sauce has shown up. Got the hot Buffalo dip, vegan-friendly. All right, John. All right, Johnny boy, what do you got here? Cauliflower bites, though? This I hate. And jalapeño Papa Bites. What? Papa, what are you doing? It’s just dough wrapped around a jalapeño, or it’s jalapeños wrapped around dough. Then we have a couple of cheese-stick options on the menu. This is the Tuscan six-cheese cheese sticks, and we have jalapeño cheese sticks as well. It’s exactly as you can expect. It’s basically just the Italian cheese pizza but without the tomato, which is helpful because it comes with the tomato. So this is effectively just a DIY, build-your-own pizza. I don’t want to try the jalapeño one. It’s just going to be this but with jalapeños. I’m sorry, I’m not trying that. You can also get jalapeño bacon cheese sticks. We didn’t bother today because it’s literally just this but with some bacon on it, so use your imagination. The US also has one exclusive flavor of Papa Bites, which is calzone flavor. But thankfully, Joe spared me and did not order those today. These are sticks, apparently. So, down here, we have garlic pizza sticks, four-cheese garlic sticks, garlic sticks, bacon cheese sticks. Depending on what combination of bread, garlic, and cheese you want, you can have any one of those here. Hey, yo, garlic and bread. Who doesn’t love that? But no cheese? That’s weird. While we’re here, let’s do Sauce Talk. Uh-uh. Sauce Talk. Got the tomato and herb dipping sauce. Oh, my God. If you take the cheesy bread and the sauce, it tastes like pizza! Oh, my God! Also, we’ve had it before, we’ll have it again. Garlic and herb. I’m telling you, this wouldn’t fly in America. I think if this became the default sauce one day, everyone would return their Papa Johns pizza. We want the melted butter with the garlic. That’s what we want. We don’t want this. They tried changing it, and people got really upset. These are the exclusive US sauces. I have a solitary breadstick. So, firstly, we have this zesty sauce. Not too bad. Could be zestier, arguably. The spicy garlic dipping sauce. I’m not getting any of the spice. Classic pizza sauce. It’s pizza sauce. It’s fine. Ranch. I’d say the ranch is zestier than the zesty sauce. The issue with barbecue sauce on a pizza menu is that, personally, I just don’t think it goes with that many things on the menu. You might be able to find some other sauces that we couldn’t get today. These include a blue cheese sauce, a honey mustard sauce, a cheese sauce, and a cream cheese icing. You may also be able to find a Doritos Cool Ranch sauce, depending on where you are in the country and what time of year it is. Although I’m struggling to think how that would be any different from just ranch. UK desserts, they have a few things here that you can’t get in the US. Here’s one of them: the Cinnapie sticks. It’s the sticks again! This time with cinnamon. No thanks. You can also get an assortment of Ben & Jerry’s ice creams. We did order those, but again, they’re sorry. The US has two exclusive desserts that we don’t have in the UK. Firstly, we have the Oreo Papa Bites. Papa Bites are effectively just swirls of dough with a filling. In this case, we have some icing on the outside and little Oreo crumb pieces on the inside. These also come with a little dipping cup of icing. That’s hard work. It’s very tasty. I do think maybe the dough has sat out slightly too long, because that has gone extraordinarily chewy. Then the other exclusive dessert is cinnamon pull-aparts. Mm. Yeah, that’s actually pretty reminiscent of a cinnamon roll. We actually have a few more American exclusive items that we weren’t able to get today. This is because we actually exceeded the number of items you’re able to include in one order. "Food Wars" problems. Exclusive drinks. Pepsi Max, Pepsi Max Cherry, 7Up Zero, Orange Tango, Robinsons real fruit raspberry and apple, Ballygowan wa — what’s Ballygowan? Ballygowan water, straight from Scotland. Here are the drinks you’ll find at Papa Johns in the US but not in the UK. Now, I know there was some chat about Starry recently because it replaced Sierra Mist, I believe. But as far as I can tell, it’s effectively just like a 7Up or maybe a Sprite in the UK. It’s a carbonated lemon-lime beverage. Next up, we have a Pepsi Zero Sugar, Dole-branded lemonade — American lemonade, which is cloudy, lemony, and not fizzy. We have a Crush orange soda. Of course, we have good old American Mountain Dew. And finally, we have Mug Root Beer. I don’t know what root beer is. I don’t think I’ve ever had root beer before. Hm. It’s good. I think the closest thing I can think for a UK equivalent to this is dandelion and burdock, which is, like, an old-school British soda. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised by your Papa Johns. Of all the fast-food pizza I’ve had for "Foreign Exchange," it’s probably my favorite. If there’s something on your menu that I would like to take back to America with me, of course, it’s got to be that spicy veggie that I had, right? The one that I just — it was the one that made me like, wah! Go like that. Dislikes. Papadias, the Papa quesadillas. That is the laziest, laziest menu entry in any fast food. Bin it! Joe says, "Bin it!" You know what you got to get rid of? You know what I didn’t like? What was going on with that thin crust, cheesy crust thing? I don’t know what was going on with that. Now, granted, those pizzas looked like they were delivered via foot. If you’re giving me that thin of a crust, that pizza has to be at least 15% cheaper, right? It just seemed like a waste of space and kind of a rip-off. So that, gotta go. Overall, I think Papa Johns has done a pretty good job. Also, compared to Domino’s, I just feel like the pizzas were much more manageable. They weren’t cramming too many toppings in there. I think the ratios on the whole were pretty good. So yeah, I think broadly speaking, barring a few big whiffs, not too bad, Papa Johns. I remember when we did the original Papa Johns "Food Wars," I did notice that Papa Johns in the UK wasn’t too filled with chemicals, and I think it was kind of the same in the US. So maybe that would explain why, in this example, there isn’t too much difference between the two of them. If there was one exclusive item that I could take back with me to the UK, I’m not exactly sure what it would be. There were a couple of pizzas that I thought were pretty good. I quite liked the pepperoni, sausage, and six cheese. I think those worked together. And for some reason, that pizza just had a better sauce ratio than most of the other ones. Outside of that pizza, I think maybe the desserts were actually quite good over here. I think Americans do do desserts quite well. Either the cinnamon pull-aparts or the Oreo bites, both of them could come back with me. If I had to pick one thing to delete from this and all menus from around the world, I don’t think it’s going to shock anyone when I say the Papa Bowls. Those were an abomination. They do not deserve to be near any menus. Get rid of them. They’re so stupid. What were you even thinking? Yeah, those are cut. Joe: A Brit and an American swap countries to try each other’s Subway. This is "Food Wars: Foreign Exchange." We’re comparing classics, and the first thing we are comparing is a foot-long turkey sub. This is what you get here in the UK. Yeah, this looks exactly like what you get in America. So, in the US they don’t have hearty Italian. We’ve got this on artisanal Italian bread. I feel like Subway calling anything they produce "artisanal" is a bit of a reach. But visually, looks pretty similar to a sandwich I would expect to get from a Subway in the UK. Firstly, we’ve got to keep them honest. See if this is actually 1 foot long. Subway lives to fight another day. That’s pretty much exactly 12 inches. Really gotta work to taste anything on this sub. But to be fair, I feel like our turkey has a little more emphasis on the oven-roasted, so it has a bit of a smokier flavor to it. It’s got to have cheese, and it’s got to have sauce. Yeah, it’s not too bad. I quite like the bread. Bread’s got a good amount of chew to it, bit of tear. Yeah, I’d say taste-wise, pretty similar to the UK’s as well. Maybe slightly saltier than I’m used to. That turkey’s definitely got a bit of a salty bite to it. The other thing we wanted to compare was a 6-inch meatball marinara, although Joe has ordered me a foot-long one, so Joe, do you want to come and take half of this? Yes, I do. Yoink. I think the full sandwich came with seven meatballs. There’s also the cheese on there, the tomato sauce. Looks pretty familiar. When I get these in the UK, I tend to order them with pickles. I’ve been told that’s weird. I think Joe thinks that’s weird. Pickles? What? No, no way. Looks like a 6-inch you’d get in the United States. Yeah, not too bad. I quite like the flavor of the meatball. The meatballs here are quite big and thick, a little bit dry on the inside. So I think with that, and the fact that the bread is also a little bit on the drier side, little bit on the stale side, bit more sauce would probably have helped this out a lot. And also, they could be slightly more generous with the cheese. I think taste-wise, fairly similar to what I’m expecting from the UK one. The taste is not nearly as pronounced as the United States. I feel like also the sodium of this is a lot lower. That’s just me saying, like, it’s not very salty. Not that I want it to be overly salty, but this one feels like they missed some of the seasoning or the seasoning was turned down a little bit. I almost always get this with cheese, so that might also have something to do with it. But just straight up, the meatball and the sauce and the bread, too boring. Drinks from a US Subway come in three sizes, small, medium, and large. Subway drinks delivered in the UK, they provide these bottles of soda. This Pepsi is 500 milliliters. Couple of things to note here. The small in the US is effectively the size of our large in the UK. In fact, I’m going to measure it out now to check. So, the US small has come out to just over 500 milliliters, which is pretty standardly a large UK soda. So if the US small is basically the same as a UK large, how on Earth is this allowed? I’m going to have to measure this thing out because it is ridiculous, and I need to see exactly how much is in there. So, it looks like the US large has come out to around 1,150 milliliters, over a liter of soda. Of course, Subway sells chocolate chip cookies in both the US and the UK, although over here they’re called chocolate chip and I think we call them chocolate chunk. Honestly, Subway cookies in the UK are pretty legit. I like them. I feel like cookies in the UK can be on the crunchier side. I prefer a bit of chew, and Subway’s one of the few places that actually delivers on that. Your chocolate chip cookies are so chewy they fell apart. Taste that British chocolate I’m so fond of. It’s actually a very good cookie. It’s not so soft, but it has a little bit of a bend to it. That’s really not the best Subway cookie I’ve ever had. It is chewy, but kind of on the drier side of chewy, rather than that really gooey chocolate chip feel that you want. Taste-wise, pretty similar to the UK. Texture-wise, not the best I’ve had. Here’s everything at a UK Subway I can’t get in the US. And here are most of the things you’ll find on a Subway menu in the US that we won’t have in the UK. Here in the UK they have a few exclusive sandwich combos ready to go. The chicken tikka is the first one. We definitely don’t have a chicken tikka sub in the US. Just going to go down here. It’s just, it’s dry. It needs some sort of sauce or something. I do like the tikka flavor, just isn’t enough to really make it jump. I mean, the vegetables and the bread are just so, there’s so much of it. I’ve got a couple of US preset sandwiches here that I don’t think are on the UK menu. We’ll start with this one, which I’m shocked isn’t on the menu. It’s a BLT. Whenever Joe tries UK bacon, he’s quick to point out how pale and floppy and tasteless it is, and I’m starting to wonder now if he’s being a bit of a hypocrite, you know, because that’s pretty shocking as far as bacon is concerned. I do not think this is going to be the best BLT I’ve ever had. We just ordered this kind of as it comes on the menu, didn’t try to customize it. Usually I would expect a BLT to have at least some mayo on it, but Subway has not done that. It’s just a very dry, chewy, and slightly bland BLT. There’s also roasted chicken breast. I know we had roasted chicken for a minute. I think it’s off the menu, and now we just have, like, classic sliced chicken breast. And you can get this fun grainy bread. Oh, yeah. Look at those marks. It totally was roasted. I get it, I’m an American. Our food is usually, especially our fast food, is usually way too flavorful because we put so much junk in it. My palate hasn’t adjusted yet, but all these are just feeling like, yeah, you’re in the ballpark, can you just turn it up a little bit? That’s a decent-tasting roasted chicken breast, but. Maybe I should just, like, I’m going to wipe off all the lettuce on all these. I think that’s really doing some damage. Also, this bread’s pretty good. I like that bread. Next up we have this one, which is a Cold Cut Combo. I hope the cameras can accurately capture the color of these meats. I’m going to have to lay these out though, because I truly can’t tell. If you told me these were all the same meat, I would believe you. It’s genuinely taken four of us to try and identify which meat is which. I think the answer is bologna, ham, salami. This also comes with some kind of cheese. It’s a very pale-colored cheese, so it makes me think it’s maybe provolone or, like, a white American. I don’t actually know if I’ve ever had bologna before. At least what Americans consider to be bologna. I know it’s, like, a sort of sandwich meat for preschoolers usually, but I’m sure there are adults eating it as well. It’s a weirdly matte color. The taste is kind of similar to what I would expect from, like, a mortadella. It’s the texture on that that’s really messing with my head. It’s very rubbery and spongy. Try a little bit of ham. Still not good. And what we think is salami. I think we have correctly identified them. The salami at least tastes a little bit different to the other two. Something about the texture of those processed meats, the way they’ve clearly been, like, reformed into logs and then sliced, is deeply unpleasant. We don’t really use the term "cold cuts" to refer to sliced meats in the UK, so maybe that’s why it’s not on the menu. There are also some other preset sandwich options that we didn’t get today, because I’m kind of going to be experiencing them in other forms throughout this video. And there’s a Philly cheesesteak. Oh, no! And here it is. Philly cheesesteak. Nope, no. Got F+ on this. There’s next to no peppers. The cheese isn’t even melted. Certainly not mixed in. We did a whole video about this. You can see why people are very passionate about this, about how it should be done, how it shouldn’t be done. Philly’s protective about a lot of stuff, and cheesesteaks might be at the top of the list. This is absolutely not a Philly cheesesteak. Attention, the United Kingdom, not Philly steak, at all. Not even close. I don’t want to … Disgraceful. Any of the create-your-own menu you can also get in wrap or salad form. These are wraps right here. In an effort to increase efficiency, Subway recently introduced their Subway Series sandwiches. I think these have now made their way to the UK, but they are very different in both the US and the UK. UK recently also got the Subway Series sandwiches. Congrats, guys. This one says, I think this is the Big Bombay. Oh, OK. Now, I don’t know how this tastes, but take note, United Kingdom. See that? That’s sauce. Let’s sauce it up, huh? None of these dry sandwiches. Look at all that sauce. Generous sauciness from the Subway near the studio. The flavor coming off of that, stronger than the other sandwiches that I’ve previously had, so that might be a winner. That’s a tasty sandwich. All right. We’ll start down this end with No. 30, aka The Beast. They’re not kidding. This thing is a bit of a beast. If you get a foot-long, it comes with half a pound of meat in it, because it seems to pretty much contain all of them cold-cut options. Also comes with some cheese. I believe this is provolone. I’m going to do something weird and bite the side, because I want to kind of get a bit of everything in there and the ends look a little bit bare. It’s actually not terrible. Obviously there’s a lot of meat, as you can expect. And particularly on the top half of the sandwich when you bite into it, it’s just meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, and then all the toppings below it. I can’t really tell which of the flavors is really coming to the fore. The pepperoni I think is really coming out there. It’s OK. It’s a bit of a chaotic and slightly gross-looking sandwich, but if you’re a big fan of your cold cuts, actually not the worst option. The Great Caesar. Oh, who the hell put vegetables on this? Meh. There’s bacon in there too. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think you need a whole one of those. The Caesar dressing flavor’s really overpowering. Next up, we have The Philly. As you can imagine, it’s a Philly cheesesteak, or at least Subway’s take on a Philly cheesesteak. I have now had an authentic Philly cheesesteak. I’ve had several, in fact. So I’m relatively qualified to say whether this is or is not a proper Philly cheesesteak attempt. Nah. This one, you’re getting so little flavor from that beef. I don’t like the mayo on there. I want Cheez Whiz rather than the mayo. That’s a pretty shocking attempt at a Philly cheesesteak. Meatless Philly? Ugh. The vegetarian meat is meh, not as bad. It’s not the worst part about it. That sauce is just terrible. Ugh. Next up, No. 33, Teriyaki Blitz. At a glance, this just looks kind of identical to the Philly cheesesteak. I think the main difference is that they’ve subbed out the mayo for some teriyaki sauce. The issue with both of those is kind of the same, in that the beef just doesn’t have any real flavor to it. They can’t keep getting away with this. This is just the same toppings again! This is No. 3, aka The Monster. There is a slight difference in this one, in that this also has bacon and maybe the cheese is different. But it is kind of becoming increasingly apparent that the Subway Series is just ways that they can recycle basically the same ingredients into a few different sandwiches. All I really taste in that one is the cheese and the bacon. Notorious BMT. Feel a lawsuit coming on, guys, come on. I love this little cheese baked in here, right? Looks like your dentist’s signature. So, apparently BMT stands for Biggest, Meatiest, Tastiest. I don’t think so. Definitely not the biggest. Definitely not the meatiest. So, see how tasty it is. That’s just OK. There’s bacon in there. I think there’s a salami on there as well. I like that. I’m assuming the bread is included in this, as far as the preset option. This bread is very good. Next up, we have the elite chicken and bacon ranch. I know you Americans love your ranch. Lot of nodding heads in the studio. Chicken bacon ranch. Pretty classic. I don’t know if I just got a weird bite or something, but I didn’t really get that much of the ranch in there. Quite gentle, not as punchy or tangy as some of the other ranches that I’ve had in the US. That’s OK. Again, I think I just want more flavor, really. Joe always goes on about how we don’t have any flavors in the UK. None of these I’ve tasted really have had much flavor to them. Tex Mexan. Not a typo, according to Subway.com. .co.uk. The colors in this are just sending off alarm bells. Oh, this has chips in it? You put chips in the sandwich! Your chef is a 7-year-old who just went swimming. This is actually pretty good. I was dogging it. I do like this. It’s spicier than I thought it was going to be. All right, UK Subway, I’m coming around. I’m coming around. I thought this was going to be a horror show, but actually this stuff’s all right. Next up, we have The MexiCali. So, we’re filming this in California, and I also spent all of yesterday eating Mexican food, so this has a lot to live up to. There is some avocado in here and quite a lot of this Baja chipotle dressing. That actually could be a lot worse. It’s not authentic Mexican food. I think that’s very clear. But I like the avocado. The chipotle sauce is good. Nice flavor to it. A little bit of heat. Those grilled chicken pieces are actually pretty good. I might have spoke too soon, though. The Baller. Oh, God! Man, this is like, you ever seen that movie "The Thing" where the guy’s chest breaks open and it’s, like, a monster mouth in there? That’s what this looks like. Good God. No. No. Here we have the Turkey Cali Club. We got more of their slightly sad bacon. This looks pretty good. I don’t know if it’s the bread or the fillings in here. I like the spinach. Vibrant. I wouldn’t say it’s, like, bursting with flavor. In terms of the Subway Series sandwiches, admittedly quite a low bar so far, this one’s doing all right. There are these two wraps. We got The Emperor, who got their new groove. Not bad. I kind of wish I got that in a sandwich form. Does this have to be a wrap? Eh, I think it would be better in sandwich form, guys. Just saying. And the Rockin’ Moroccan vegan, ugh. Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s just OK. The final Subway Series sandwich that we got today is this one, the Pickleball Club. It’s got lots more of this quite alarmingly colored purple ham. I’ve never played pickleball. It seems to be, like, an American trend that’s really picked up again recently. As far as I can tell, it’s like tiny tennis. OK, yeah, table tennis is tiny tennis. Pickleball is like medium tennis. I mean, I like pickles, I like honey mustard. I’m really unconvinced by this ham situation you guys have going on over here, but. I am a sucker for pickles, but that’s pretty good. I like how the pickles and the honey mustard work together. That kind of sweet and tangy flavor combination is really good. The ham across any of these sandwiches just hasn’t really had much flavor to it or added much. Same with the bacon. Most of what I’m getting there is pickles and honey mustard dressing, which is OK. These have all just kind of been disappointing. These two salads, exclusives, they got the Great Goddess. Oh, goodness. And the Fine Catch, which I’m assuming is a tuna salad. Is that tuna right there? Or was a cat sick on my salad? Subway in the US has a lot of wrap options. We got two of them today because a lot of them share the same options as the subs. So, this is the rotisserie-style chicken wrap. The tortilla itself actually looks pretty good. The rotisserie-style chicken doesn’t have enough flavor on its own to kind of hold up against all of that, so I’m mostly just getting lettuce and cucumber, which for me makes for a bit of a sad mouthful. Then the other one we got is the roast beef wrap. I’m British. We like our roast beef, got high standards for roast beef, and I’m not sure that this is going to live up. I got quite a lot of red onion in that bite, and it led to a very harsh mouthful. Let me just try and pull out some of the beef and at least try that on its own. It tastes of roast beef, but it is kind of that not-fresh roast beef flavor. I’m not averse to the concept of having wraps on the menu at Subway. Like, the tortillas themselves are actually fine. If you’re going to have wraps, ease up slightly on the other fillings, because currently I’m just basically tasting only the salad. Needs some sauce. Yeah, not averse to the concept. Currently, the execution is not quite there. The UK also has SubMelts, which is a registered trademark, which are effectively just panini versions of some Subway sandwiches. They’re available in pizziola, tuna kahuna, oh, Christ. Supremo, and big cheesesteak. I mean, can we even tell what this is? What the hell’s happening here? OK, that does that too. Oh, OK, this might be something. Oh. Oh, geez. There we go. Put that over there. What else are we curious about? I don’t know about the tuna kahuna. What is inside of this? Tuna, cheese, sautéed onions, and peppers. I mean, I don’t know. Are melts supposed to look appetizing when you rip them open? Subway in the US offers a range of No Bready Bowls, which are effectively just their preset subs but without the bread. I don’t know why places do this. We had the Papa Bowls in the Papa Johns episode, which were mortifying, and this is kind of the same thing. Joe kindly ordered me the meatball marinara No Bready Bowl today. There’s cucumber on here, which, particularly when you’re getting a warm topping like this, is just a dreadful idea. I think this should be outlawed under the Geneva Convention as a cruel and unusual form of torture. I will not be trying it. We’re not done with bowl options from Subway in the US. You can also get salads. In this case, we’ve got the Cold Cut Combo salad. So, as you can see, they slice up the meats that you would normally find in a Cold Cut Combo sub. And as far as I can tell, the salads are pretty much the same in this and the No Bready Bowl. There is lettuce right on the bottom, spinach, tomatoes, red onions, cucumber, and black olives. We ordered this just as it comes, so it doesn’t come with any dressing, although I think in the restaurant you can specify that you would like a dressing with this, which to me would make way more sense. I think maybe the main difference between this and the No Bready Bowl is that these come with croutons, which I will sprinkle in for dramatic effect. There aren’t as many options when it comes to the salad bowls as when it comes to the No Bready Bowls. The No Bready Bowls, any sub could be made into. Whereas this, they’ve actually slightly curated the list. So you can get the Cold Cut Combo, you can get Buffalo chicken, BLT, grilled chicken, roast beef, or sometimes pizza subs. My takeaway from today’s episode is if it’s in a bowl, skip it. Savers and snacks. So savers, as in priced to move. And snacks, which are of course snacks. I got a whole list in front of me. I’ll just go down here and call them out. This is a, what? This looks like a cheese toasted bite. What’s inside of here? Leon: It’s toasted? It’s cheese? I don’t know. It’s, like, chicken? I can’t tell what the base is. All right, moving on. These are the, just, what we would say is hash browns? Yep, OK. It’s a little slice of bread with some fun stuff on it. Um. [bread thudding] These were fresh a while ago. Currently not. Pepperoni and cheese. Just cheese. Also, this is funny. This is really funny. You can get a bowl of meatballs. A little cheese on there. Hey, yeah, meatballs. Why not, right? That’s fun. And the thing I’ve been dreading for, what, three years now? Is your infamous Subway nachos. Three different versions. Why not? Starting with the chili heatwave. What are these, the real spicy ones? Ah. To quote many a British bloke, "Look at the state of it. Oi. The freshest thing I’m holding right now is the bloody box." OK, these look terrible. These look disgusting. It looks like you just dumped salsa on Doritos chips and then microwaved it. I don’t think there’s any cheese on this, is there? Yeah, there’s a little bit. All right. These are so bad. Unless they were free, you paid too much. But you have three different versions of them. Who the hell is getting nachos at Subway? These are even worse. I think these are the ones you showed last time. This is such a joke. This is such a joke. Oh, no. I know you think you’re putting salsa on these, but your salsa is really, really weak and really bad. The chips are chewy. Ugh. Terrible. These were, by the way, the lightly salted. Oh, thank God. God forbid you put salt on anything. Tang cheese. All right, seriously, why do you have three different types of nachos at Subway? You should have zero nachos at Subway. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. Like I said, the second-worst thing to happen to the Subway franchise are these nachos. Subway in the UK actually offers breakfast. Here they have bacon, sausage, poached egg, and cheese; bacon, poached egg, and cheese; sausage, poached egg, and cheese; and the Big Breakwich, which is everything from the above list all in one sandwich. Looking at this breakfast one right here, we can see this has the poached egg and the Lincolnshire sausage. Ooh, man, it’s been sitting for a little too long. Oh, God. They cut the poached egg in half. Oh, they have a couple in here. I mean, when does a poached egg become a hard-boiled egg? So a bunch of that’s in here. Let’s give it a shot. There’s a ketchup or a brown sauce on that. Harry: Ketchup. Ketchup, was not expecting that. Ah, it’s not very good. I do not like that at all. Treats and chips, aka crisps. Here you can get a sugar doughnut, an Oreo muffin, Cadbury’s caramel muffin, and a Bear pure fruit yo-yo. Also, the chips, here’s a few you can get here in the UK I can’t get in the US. You got baked cheese and onion. Doritos tangy cheese, mm. If you want a side to go with your Subway sandwich in the US, then they have a few options not found in the UK. Firstly, we have a couple of chip, or crisp, options, starting with these SunChips Harvest Cheddar flavor. Mm. I feel like in the UK, whenever we get, like, a healthy crisp, it kind of ends up tasting of like unseasoned cardboard. Whereas these ones actually do have a nice cheesy flavor to them. There is Quavers? What is it called? Quavers? I have no idea what a Quaver is. Harry: Try a Quaver. Try a Quaver for the first time. Oh, look at these. Ugh. And the last time. And you can also get these Miss Vickie’s jalapeño crisps. I’ve definitely seen Joe eating these in previous episodes, and I know he loves them. Joe, do you want to come and have one? Yes. You’ve never had these before? No, man, not in the UK. How spicy are they? Not very. Right? Mm. Yeah. Yeah, those are good. Miss Vickie’s is great. They’re not in the UK? No, man. We need these. She makes a mean chip. Shout-out to Vickie. Ooh, the Walkers. Legendary, ready salted. You people salt your food so little, when you have potato chips, you’re like, "Hey, these are salted." Like, yeah, they should be, right? That’s funny. And the Walkers glorious cheese and onion. Let’s go. I think technically on the kids menu, but adults can also purchase too, is this GoGo Squeez apple apple flavor. I’m a child, so I’m kind of the target audience for these anyway. Yeah. Not bad. It’s pureed apple. What can you expect? Yeah, just checking the ingredients, this actually seems fairly natural, which for America is rare. Just apple, apple puree concentrate, and lemon juice concentrate. Also this thing. Oh, wait, we just mentioned before, you do have the Bear pure fruit yo-yo. What’s a yo-yo? I hear it’s twisted. Oh, look at this. It’s a decent amount, right? It’s a decent amount of fruit leather for the kids. Also you can get Walkers prawn co*cktail, Doritos cool original, and Doritos chili heatwave. Subway has started doing foot-long desserts for some reason. They have the foot-long cookie now, and apparently they have a foot-long Auntie Anne’s pretzel, which has just immediately ripped in half. Auntie Anne’s is a popular mall pretzel chain in the US. I think we actually do have a couple of locations in the UK. But I’ve never had one of their pretzels before. It’s been overbaked. You can see on the bottom, it’s quite charred, and that has just led to it being super dry. So, I’ve been informed that they’re ready salted because you used to all have to salt them, in at least the ’90s? Charlie: I don’t know if it was that, but it wouldn’t be normal, because that’s how you packet them. And now it’s been said that the ready salted are too salted. Nostalgic for salting your own chips? OK. [drumroll] These are not salty at all. Dude. I wish I knew this! I could’ve gotten you potato chips in America that would’ve knocked you off your a–. You’d be shriveled up like a prune, they’re so salty. They suck all the moisture out of you. These would be lightly salted in America. I’m not kidding. Subway in the US has two cookie flavors not found in the UK. First up we have this white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookie. I’m not the biggest white chocolate fan. A bit too sweet for me. The US also has a raspberry cheesecake cookie flavor. It’s got that same white chocolate sweetness, so it is a very sweet cookie. But I do like the flavor of that paired with the raspberry. The raspberry’s really good, actually. In addition to the foot-long cookie, you can also now get from Subways, you can also find a Cinnabon foot-long churro at some locations. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it today. Cookies, you can get a rainbow candy chip and a white chocolate macadamia. Rainbow candy chip, white chocolate macadamia nut. So, I’ve been told that it’d be Smarties in these, but you guys’ Smarties are like another version of M&M candies. Our Smarties are sweet. I haven’t had them in forever. But they’re, like, little fruit-flavored things, kind of tart, I think, if I remember. Subway drinks, they have a bunch of bottled sodas and drinks you can’t get in the US. Here are few of the many that we can get here in the UK. Pepsi, right? OG Peps. Pepsi Max, which means it’s sugar-free, correct? Pepsi Max Cherry, 7Up Free, which I believe means sugar-free. "Zero sugar." Man, they’re just like, "There’s no sugar in this, we promise!" We get it! Harry: Sugar tax. The sugar tax. And then Mountain Dew, "All Dew, no sugar." I hear the Mountain Dew here is drastically different than in the US. But this also is sugar-free, so. Oh, yuck. That’s not very good. Terrible aftertaste. Yeah, it tastes closer to what I think 7Up would taste like, so let’s taste 7Up. I can’t remember the last time I had a 7Up. Maybe, like, my grandma’s house. Actually, that’s better than this, but this is also pretty bad. And juice. You guys like juice, or you call it a squash? "Robinsons real fruit in every drop." Yeah, right. This is the raspberry apple. "No added sugar." Also yeah, right. Yo, that’s got a strong aroma to it. Oh, wow. That’s, like, really tart. And kind of sweet for a UK beverage. All right, good on you, guys. Also you can find here in the UK Robinsons apple and black currant; Lipton iced tea, peach; Tropicana orange juice; Tango orange no sugar; and Tango orange with sugar. Also, they got coffee, regular and large, lattes, teas, cappuccinos. Subway in the US has a bunch of drink options that we don’t have in the UK. The differences really come down to the fact that Subway in the US stocks Coca-Cola products, while Subway in the UK stocks Pepsi products. As such, the fountain drinks that you can find in the US include Diet co*ke, Sprite, Coca-Cola classic, and Hubert’s Lemonade. And in addition to the fountain drinks, you can get a range of bottled drinks. Because they stock Coca-Cola products, of course you can just get Coca-Cola. Here we have a bottle of Simply lemonade. This is the American-style lemonade, so, again, it’s a cloudy and still beverage. It is a shock for a Brit to try American lemonade because we are used to what is effectively Sprite as our lemonade, but that’s pretty good. It’s still. There’s actual lemon in there, which is nice, like little bits of pulp floating around, so it’s got a bit of tang and sweetness to it. Yeah, pretty good. Here we have a Vitaminwater XXX. Then the last beverage that we got today is possibly another one that’s aimed at children. It’s Shamrock Farms chocolate milk. Delicious. Can feel my bones getting stronger by the second. Final thoughts, my likes and dislikes. OK, what did the UK do better? Well, it’s hard to say. I don’t like Subway, so I don’t know what you did better or worse than what we do in America. The likes. What’d I like? I liked the Rockin’ Moroccan wrap. I enjoyed the, yeah, the Tex Mexan, the Big Bombay. Yeah, I like those three. I would be happy if those were on the US Subway menu. I’d probably get those. Your Mountain Dew is dreadful, and your nachos are a crime. So that’s how I feel about your Subway here. Overall, it wasn’t very good, but I just don’t like Subway. You know what? I’m going to be a jerk and I’m going to take back the Tex Mexan. Look what I got from the United Kingdom! If I could cut this from all Subway menus, it would be your nachos. Get real. Look, I mean, I’m not the biggest fan of Subway in the UK, but coming to the US, I think I expected at least slightly more. Just hearing the way that Joe talks about British food in general being a little bit bland, I was expecting, you know, some good seasonings, for the meats to have some good flavor, the vegetables, the sauces to really just bring something to these sandwiches. But I have to say, overall, I’ve been pretty disappointed. There were none of the sandwiches that really leapt out to me as being good. The ones that I kind of liked were more just, like, not as bad as I feared they might be. If there was one thing from the US menu that I could take back to the UK with me, I don’t think it would be any of the sandwiches. I think it would actually have to be a side, probably those jalapeño chips. I see why Joe likes them so much. If there was one thing I could cut from the menu, I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone when I say basically anything at Subway that comes in a bowl. Those No Bready Bowls and the salads were both just really, really depressing. Bland salads covered with bland meat. These are so bad. Unless they were free, you paid too much. And even then, you’d be paying on the toilet later. These are so gross! Ugh. Oh, God, this video’s going to kill me.
