Mom's Touch — Incredible Burger

Mom's Touch built the Incredible Burger on the same hand-battered chicken thigh that carries its best-known sandwich, then stacked a fried egg and two folds of shaved ham on top of it. Neither topping turns up often on a Korean franchise burger, and together they were the item's whole argument for existing. It held its place on the menu for seven years, from November 2018 until the chain cleared it off the boards in April 2026.

The patty is a whole boneless thigh rather than a ground puck, and that one decision sets the behaviour of everything above it. Ground meat cooks to an even crumb; a whole thigh keeps its muscle grain, so a bite passes through a blistered, brittle crust into meat that pulls apart in strands and holds its juice unevenly, soaking in one spot and dense in the next. The toppings have to survive that uneven surface. Shaved ham slides off a crust still slick from the fryer, and an egg with a loose yolk turns the lettuce below it into a wet mat within a minute of assembly.

Two sauces do the reconciling, and both come across from the plain Thigh Burger rather than being invented here. Thousand Island supplies the sweet-sour ketchup-and-relish note that sits underneath most fast-food secret sauces, an American habit Korean chains borrowed rather than devised. A herb sauce adds a creamy savoury layer that reads against the salt of the ham. Lettuce, onion and pickle sit beneath the stack as the only cold, sharp things present, which is what keeps three warm salty proteins from running together into a single note.

The thigh is an inheritance rather than a design choice. The operator that opened South Korea's first Popeyes in 1994 launched Mom's Touch three years later as a domestic brand, keeping the fried-chicken method it had learned and dropping the overseas licensing fee. Chicken came first at this company and the burger was assembled around it, which reverses the order most burger chains arrive at a chicken sandwich in. The proportions still show it: the patty is cut and fried like a piece of chicken rather than sized to bread, and the battered edge hangs past the bun on at least one side.

It opened at ₩4,900 on its own and ₩6,900 as a set, cheap for the weight of it. That did not last. By February 2022 the two prices had moved to ₩5,200 and ₩7,300, and by October 2024 the set reached ₩8,400, near the top of a menu where the plain Thigh Burger still went for about ₩5,200 alone. Mom's Touch had aimed the burger at a premium tier from the start, and the climb kept testing what a fried egg and two folds of ham are worth on a patty that already fills the bread. Eaten straight from the counter, with the yolk soft enough to run down into the ham, the price made sense. Fifteen minutes later in a takeaway bag, the crust had gone soft and the egg had cooled to rubber.

The discontinuation was flagged in early April 2026 and the burger was off the boards within about two weeks. The Unbelievable Burger took roughly the same slot, keeping the fried egg and the hyperbolic naming while swapping the thigh for a breast patty and adding fried shrimp. Korean forums filled with people who had not registered the loss until they went to order one, and the recurring note among them was that it had eaten richer than the Thigh Burger it was built on.

The chain that outgrew its franchise

The patty came out of a licensing arrangement. Daehan Jedang, a sugar refiner founded in 1956, ran a food arm called TS Haemaro that opened South Korea's first Popeyes in 1994. Three years later the same operator launched Mom's Touch in Seoul under its own name, keeping the fried-chicken technique and cutting the foreign licence out of the cost base. The company's account of the name is that the food should taste the way a mother would make it at home.

The brand lost money for most of a decade. A management buyout in March 2004, led by Chung Hyun-sik, moved the restaurants into a new company called Haemaro Food Service and left him carrying the debt, and no operating profit arrived until 2013. The chain then outgrew the one it had been modelled on. Popeyes shut its Korean stores, and in May 2021 Mom's Touch passed Lotteria to become the largest burger franchise in the country by outlet count, running past 1,400 shops. That ranking counts shopfronts rather than sales, and McDonald's Korea still takes the larger share of the money.

The Incredible Burger ran the length of the company's financial rearrangement. The private-equity firm KL & Partners bought roughly 57 percent of the business for about ₩200 billion in 2019, the group renamed itself Mom's Touch & Company in 2021, and in June 2022 it left the KOSDAQ exchange after a tender offer at ₩6,200 a share. The burger went on sale before any of that and outlasted most of it, coming off the menu in April 2026, seven years after it arrived at ₩4,900.