Meal: Dinner Budget: ¥700/person Closest Station: Hakodate Reservation Needed?: No Payment: Cash; PayPay Kid Friendly?: Yes, as long as your kids aren’t scared by offensive colors, sounds, or smells. English Menu?: No!

This restaurant was recommended to us by a trusted source nearly two years ago. We actively seek out and write about burger joints in Japan and were told that Lucky Pierrot was the best burger restaurant in the country. Our expectations were high, but we’ve been disappointed before, so we tried to temper them the best we could.

Flash forward to September 2021. We’re driving to Sapporo from Tokyo and have an overnight in Hakodate. I’m not going to say that we planned this leg of our trip around Lucky Pierrot, but it was a major consideration. We walked in (rushed in) the restaurant at 6:30, worried that they were closing in an hour and half. The restaurant was moderately crowded and we were excited. Then came the dining experience; one I commemorated by buying a t-shirt, but not because I enjoyed anything about our time at this restaurant.

Lucky Pierrot is a cacophony of offensive sounds, colors and smells. The service is lousy (the elderly woman who took our order tonight was shockingly rude) and the restaurant is of very questionable cleanliness (sticky tables and floors).

Yes, the prices are inexpensive and the portions are disturbingly huge, but the basic restaurant fundamentals - service, atmosphere and food quality - are all bad. Really bad.

Being totally honest and trying my hardest to avoid hyperbole, I will say that the Gold Cheese Cheese Cheese Burger was the most disgusting thing that I have ever eaten in a restaurant in Japan. The Chinese Chicken Burger, while cheap, was not much better, but was at least edible. Fortunately, I discovered, and promptly removed, a 1 cm puck of secret sauce from my burger before biting in. My heart is still thanking me for that one.

My partner’s Chinese Chicken Omelette Rice was massive (yes, enough for two hungry Japanese high school students; the restaurant’s apparent target clientele), but, so too, fell short of the mark of anything you would expect to pay any amount of money for at a restaurant.

I’m truly sorry to say this, but the fact that this restaurant chain is so popular in Hakodate (17 branches at last count; Note: the city has a population of less than 270,000) says more about the low expectations of the population here, than it does about anything else, let alone the quality of this place.

My final verdict will not surprise anyone. Lucky Pierrot is most definitely not the best burger place in Japan. Indeed, it may be the worst and, at least in my view, it is certainly over-rated.