What if they gave a riot and nobody came? I expected long lines when I peddled up to my local McDonald’s at 11 a.m. today, the stated time for the relaunch of the chain’s notorious Szechuan sauce.

Here’s the backstory: In 1998, McDonald’s created it as a tie-in for Disney’s Mulan. An episode of the cartoon series Rick and Morty touted it in April, 2017; and in October of the same year, McDonald’s revived the condiment and distributed a limited supply to a few locales. Fans stampeded the stores, even rioting at some when supplies ran out.

“That’s going to be worth a lot of money on eBay someday.”

Seizing the day and hoping to capitalize on the social media scrum that followed (even though Rick and Morty reportedly refused to cooperate), McDonald’s rolled out the Szechuan sauce again today, promising to do it right with 20 million portions. But there were no customers waiting at the counter when I arrived, and the only one at the registers was an adolescent employee, who smirked when I placed my order for five boxes of chicken McNuggets and five packets of Szechuan sauce.

“That’s going to be worth a lot of money on eBay someday,” he said dryly, referring to a report that $995 had been bid for a single packet of Szechuan sauce last year. “Our supply is supposed to last until Friday,” he continued. I carried my bag of goodies — including fries and hamburgers as well as the McNuggets, so I could try the sauce on other products — to a well-lit table.

With trembling hands, I ripped the foil top off the little plastic tub and gingerly stuck my pinky in. Holding it up to the light, I could see the sauce was the color and consistency of strawberry jelly, as a drop slid off my finger and splatted on the table. Flecked with some indiscernible spice, it proved jaw achingly sweet when I licked my finger. Alas, the Szechuan sauce had no heat that I could discern. It tasted mainly like corn syrup with maybe a tiny bit of Worcestershire thrown in.

It didn’t improve the flavor of the stupefyingly bland McNuggets, either. I dipped a fry in, and later poured some on a burger, where it clashed with the ketchup, raw onions, and dill pickle chip. Consulting the packet’s declaration of ingredients proved instructive: “water, sugar, distilled vinegar, corn starch, wheat, soybeans, salt, corn vinegar, contains 2 percent or less: apple cider vinegar, ginger, soybean oil, sesame seed oil, xanthan gum, spice, yeast extract, garlic, wheat starch, natural flavor, citric acid, safflower oil, dextrose, potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate (preservatives).”

In the 1970s, when the cuisine was first introduced to American cities in restaurants that then identified as Szechuan, the signature dish was baby shrimp in Szechuan sauce, and the dish was gooey and sweet and not very hot. But nearly five decades down the road our ideas about Szechuan (now spelled “Sichuan”) have been transformed, and we expect it to be heavy on the chile oil, dried red chiles, green fresh chiles and, especially, Sichuan peppercorns, a lip-tingling spice that was technically illegal here from 1968 to 2005.

And other flavors like cumin and cilantro should be been present, too. All of these things and more, McDonald’s Szechuan sauce totally lacks, at least to my taste. You might just as well pour this Szechuan sauce on pancakes.

I wish all those cartoon fans who might have mobbed McDonald’s waiting for the sauce today were sitting in Sichuan restaurants around town, enjoying wontons in hot oil and Chongqing chicken instead.