“I mean, how do I…finish this? It’s EVERYWHERE.”
~Consumers of the following
Hamburgers are a wonderful. We’ve often explained why in great detail. We’ve searched around for the largest in the world. Hell, we’ve even unleashed our wallets to let you know the most expensive burgers in the world. Hamburgers are wonderful.
That past paragraph was technically a palindrome.
Anyway, as much as we love hamburgers, America loves them even more, which is why there are millions of variations of the suckers out there to clog your arteries. Some are fancy, some are plain. Some are tofu. All are delicious. Except for tofu burgers, you get that right the hell out of our face, eat yourself a nice rare steak, and write us a 4,000 word essay on why you are bad and should feel bad. No, we’re serious, go home and think about what you’ve done. We’ll wait.
Ahem.
Of course, as we can see with doughnut burgers, Americans love their burgers unhealthy and sloppy. That’s why we’ve decided to scour the google internet our contact list the nation, on foot, forming painful blisters from thousands of traversed miles to find you the sloppiest, messiest burgers that our fair country has to offer. Are there other examples of potentially messier burgers out there? Well, probably, Jesus “messy” is such an objective term and maybe if you’re nice we’ll do a follow up to this article. But in the meantime, sink your fangs into…
The 10 Messiest Burgers In America
Holy hell, look at that. Just imagine ordering that, picking it up with your hands, and shoveling it into the quivering, greedy maw that you used to call a mouth but now just call Alcatraz for nothing can escape. That is a Mexican Hamburger from Taqueria Taconmadre in Houston (don’t worry, it’s “Mexican” the same way that Taco Bell is “food”), where a hamburger is covered in mayo, mustard, pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, peppers, ham, and avocado, and possibly eight sticks of butter, let’s face it, you’d have no idea and you wouldn’t care as you mash this into your face with the assistance of the dozens of napkins you’re about to sacrifice to the grease gods. Like all the best hamburgers, it is going to cause an unholy mess, and is the kind of food you’d never eat on a first date, but would eat without hesitation after you’ve been together for a few years and you’ve long since given up trying to impress each other anymore.
Yes, this and many other burgers in our fine nation are the best thing for the American who has just stopped caring, so let’s embrace the slop, as well as our future necessity for heart medication, by saluting the following magnificent burgers.
10: Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger
“Boooo, AFFotD, booo, we can’t believe you’d just lazily toss in some random burger item you can get at any Applebee’s in the nation. What the hell is that?” you’re probably shouting from your chair made out of reclaimed wood by a carpenter who lives two doors down using only locally sourced nails and lacquer you made yourself by purchasing sulfuric and nitric acid, using them to soak cotton in an acid-resistant container before straining out the pulp material and mixing with a fast drying solvent. La-di-fucking-da Mr. Co-Op, but guess what, just because something comes from some corporate national chain in no way means that it’s any less messy to replace a hamburger bun with two greasy quesadillas, okay? Get off your high horse, hippie.
Surprisingly enough, Applebee’s website hides the nutritional information to make it pretty hard to discover exactly how unhealthy this burger is, but if we had to guess, we’d either go with either “1400 calories and 105 grams of fat” of “holy fuck 105 grams of fat are we reading this correctly?” Between its unhealthy nature, and the fact that the thought of picking up two quesadillas with dripping hamburger meat and toppings in the middle sounds like the least humane way to murder whatever T-shirt you’re wearing at that moment, we’d say it’s more than earned it’s spot on this list.
9: The Quadruple Bypass Burger
Well holy shit. Here we have another burger that is both ungainly, unhealthy, and also decently well known throughout the nation. At 8,000 calories, the Quadruple Bypass Burger from Las Vegas’ Heart Attack Grill has gotten a lot of press, mainly because they have gimmicks like “giving free meals to anyone over 350 pounds” and “having not one, but two, ‘unofficial’ spokespeople die,” and they have had several (yes, as in more than one) people sustain heart attacks while eating their burgers. So this entry kind of works in two ways—it’s messy because, for the love of God how would you even start getting that thing in your mouth, do the owners know that we’ve not yet evolved the ability to unhinge our jaw like a fucking snake, and it’s also messy because if you die while eating a Quadruple Bypass you probably weren’t the kind of person who was planning that far into the future, and your family is going to be mired in years of legal struggles determining who gets to keep your belongings.
Either way, as you can see from the graphic above, the Quadruple Bypass consists of four separate half pound burger patties, each accompanied with sauce, cheese, onion and bacon, with the top layer getting lettuce and tomato to increase the likelihood that you choke to death on this burger while laughingly explaining that you’re “eating your vegetables.” That’s hilarious, really solid joke there, now you have a golf ball-sized piece of cow wedged in your esophagus, and there’s far too much fat to wrestle through for anyone to even consider giving you the Heimlich. Hope it was worth it.
(Okay, it totally was.)
8: The Brat and Burger
Now, as soon as you saw a bratwurst on top of a hamburger you probably started shouting, “WISCONSIN THAT IS FROM WISCONSIN AM I CORRECT THAT ONLY WISCONSIN WOULD DO THIS?” and yes, you would be 100% correct. Sheboygan, Wisconsin is home to two locations of The Charcoal Inn, and specialize in charcoal grilled sandwiches, the messiest of which is that delicious looking monstrosity you see above. Apart from the difficulties inherent in eating a hamburger with a bratwurst hanging half out of the bun which, if you look at it with the right mindset almost makes it look like the hamburger is sticking it’s tongue out at you, the Brat and Burger is a hamburger patty/bratwurst combination that is still topped with cheddar cheese, onions, pickles, mustard, and a shitload of butter, because of course this hamburger needs more butter.
Now just imagine eating this delicious concoction. First, you have to eat the protruding portions of the bratwurst as the rest of the burger basically spits its juices on your chin waiting for its turn for munchtown. Then, you get to the burger, where the brat and hamburger meat mix with cheddar and toppings to overload your senses with pure, meaty goodness, all while butter dribbles down the front of your shirt. You spend a moment deciding if you’ve ruined your shirt, or just invented the best cologne ever, and as you finish that last, hearty bite, you see a blinding light and meet St. Peter at the gates of heaven where he too is eating a brat and burger. You say, “Oh, so I just had a heart attack and died, didn’t I?” to which St. Peter nods, points at the stains at your shirt, and says, “But, totally worth it, right?” and you shrug and say, “I mean, honestly? Not really. I thought the burger was delicious, but this was kind of a really premature death” and then you two will laugh and laugh.
7: The Slayer
It’s not overly common to find a restaurant that serves a hamburger over fries, without any bun, but it’s not especially rare either. When you see that item on the menu, you might mumble something about eating a burger with a fork and knife in passing while you continue to scour the menu. That being said, it is one of the messiest ways to eat a burger, because only the uninspired will say “okay, so we’re going to take the burger off the bun and put it on fries…and leave it at that.” There’s got to be some melted cheese or chili or something on that to make it worth your while, and Kuma’s Corner, a punk bar that doubles as one of the most popular burger joints in the city of Chicago, does not fuck around when it comes to their version of this purposely messy burger method.
Kuma’s, which recently caused waves by making a burger topped with a red wine reduction and a communion wafer to represent the body and blood of Christ, offers the Slayer, where they start with a bed of French fries before topping it with a 10 ounce burger patty and, well, everything listed in the image above. Chili, melted cheese, Andouille sausage, and of course ANGER are the most prevalent ingredients for this burger which you should probably eat with a silverware except this is America so you know that at least one person has ordered this burger, tied their hands behind their back, and stuck their face in it to eat it like a pig from a trough. We’re not saying that our staffers have done that. But we’re totally saying that they did, and it was wonderful.
6: Jucy Lucy
No matter how tasty something is, it’s automatically made more delicious by the addition of cheese. While most of the nation was content with boring-old-but-still-unimaginably-delicious cheeseburgers, two bars on the same street in South Minneapolis decided that hamburgers would be far more fun and difficult to eat if they cooked a burger with cheese on the inside. And thus, the Jucy Lucy (or Juicy Lucy, depending on which purported “founding location” you’re getting it from) was born. It’s a simple concept, but incredibly messy—a hunk of cheese is surrounded by raw meat and cooked until it melts, leaving you with melted delicious goodness inside your burger that has a tendency to scald you if you bite into it too quickly after it’s been cooked.
We’re surprised that it took until the 1950’s for someone to think of the concept, and we’re a little disappointed that Jucy Lucy’s having spread all the way across America yet, but either way there is apparently a bit of a Jucy Lucy war between Matt’s Bar and the 5-8 club about who really created the Jucy Lucy. 5-8 Club’s staff has been known to wear shirts with the motto “if it’s spelled right it’s done right,” to which Matt’s Bar utilizes advertisements with the far less catchy, “Remember, if it is spelled correctly, you are eating a shameless rip-off!” which, come on, really Matt’s Bar? That’s the best you got? How about “lose the I, make 5-8 cry”? Or “if the spelling is true, you’re eating a ruse”? “If there’s a spelling correction, your Lucy’s a deception”? Seriously, we just came up with three better slogans and we’ve been drunk since ten in the morning. Get your shit together, Matt’s Bar.
5: The Double Coronary Burger
Yes, the joke behind this name is pretty much the exact same concept as the Quadruple Bypass Burger, but honestly there’s only so many ways you can accurately describe a burger that counts as a murder weapon if given to someone with high enough cholesterol levels. Atlanta’s Vortex Grill unleashed the unholy messy concoction known as the Double Coronary to an unsuspecting public, probably as a savory alternative to the killer éclair from that episode of The Simpsons, which is made using a half a pound of sirloin, four slices of American cheese, five strips of bacon, and two fried eggs. Oh, and we forgot to mention the fucking grilled cheese sandwiches they used to replace the hamburger bun.
Between the cheese, the oil-grilled-cheese-filled “buns”, the bacon, and the two eggs ready to bleed yolk all over your plate, this burger’s caloric count is listed roughly as “we’ve yet to discover a number that high so let’s just put one of those sideways 8’s.” This burger has more saturated fats than can be found in the known universe, which has caused nutritional astrophysicist to postulate the concept of “anti-saturated fats” just to explain this burger’s existence. And that’s just the nutritional mumbo-jumbo that we don’t give a shit about (avoiding unhealthy food is for French People and robots), the sheer messiness of this burger is astounding. You might think it’s impressive if you had a hamburger that managed to soak through a plastic plate you put it on, but we’re pretty sure that this hamburger drips so much yolk, grease, and cheese that the ceramic plates they’re served on come back empty but permanently stained. Goddamn it we want to eat this burger so much.
4: The 666 Burger (Friday the 13th Edition)
This is not the first time we’ve written about 666 Burger—that also happens to be the name of the New York City food truck that sells a “Douche Burger” for $666. (Don’t worry, it’s not made out of douche, it’s just lobster and gold and caviar and everything you’d insult someone for ordering on a burger.) This burger, however, has no relation to food trucks, New York, or monetary extravagance. It’s a seasonal offering from the hilariously named Weiner and Still Champion in Evanston, Illinois, that is released for the weekend of every Friday the 13th for $13. This hot dog and burger joint takes pride in making absurd hamburgers, ranging from double cheddar burgers topped with a fried chili patty and two bacon-wrapped hot dogs to putting country fried bologna on top of your burger at your request.
Of all their burger creations (well, except for possibly the 911, which is nine burger patties with eleven slices of American cheese), the 666 burger has got to be the most impossible-to-eat-yet-delicious-to-smash-your-face into-as-if-you-were-reenacting-the-last-moments-of-James-Dean burger in Illinois. Taking their standard double cheeseburger, they cover it in six slices of cheese, six pieces of bacon, and oh God what is that why does your chest feel so tight your left arm is all tingly six mozzarella sticks. This is one of the most appropriate celebrations for the spookiness inherent with Friday the 13th, because if you go here to order it there’s the very real chance that you’ll sit down with your meal that taunts the very existence of God and, moments before you take your first bite, someone at a neighboring table will start pounding their own chest in frantic desperation before suddenly becoming silent and slinking in their chair with pearly eyes. And you would shrug and eat your delicious mozzarella stick burger.
3: Mac ‘N’ Cheese Burger
While less gargantuan and more sparse than many of the previous items, Rockit Burger Bar in Chicago (because apparently Chicago is on a quest to take the “Nation’s fattest city” title away from McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas) decided to make the Mac Attack, taking a standard Angus burger and replacing the bun with two discs of deep-fried macaroni and cheese. While this sounds absolutely delicious, and it looks relatively manageable in the picture above, you know for a fact that, in addition to the toothpick necessary to hold each half together, there is glue at play there, because there are literally no more than five or so foods you can fry that would be more messy to eat than mac and cheese.
Fried mac and cheese is one of the fried foods that most often requires a fork because the moment you bite into the thin film of breading, noodles and cheese start spilling out at an incredible rate and despite your frantic efforts to shovel it back in, you eventually concede defeat start licking the dripping cheesy pasta off your plate because you don’t care if anyone sees you, you’re huddled in the corner chugging whiskey and eating fried food all by yourself, God you’re pathetic. Well, take that feeling of food-coma-assisted desperation, and put a burger in between it, and let your imagination do the rest. By the time you finish this dish your plate is going to look like someone made a bowl of chili mac, ate half of it, and then dumped it on your plate of lettuce and tomatoes to teach you a lesson. A lesson about what? The fuck if we know. Probably something like “this is what happens if you eat vegetables.”
2: Fried Twinkie Burger
Take all the “Oh God, it’s making such a mess, I’m a monster, why am I eating this, man just chewing has me feeling out of breath” qualities of the previous fried-food-as-a-hamburger-bun entry, substitute pork belly for the beef in the patty, add bacon, and then replace the bun with something no one would ever even consider using as a bun, and you’ve got the Fried Twinkie Burger from Philadelphia’s PYT. Instead of something cheesy or savory as the bun, PYT has decided, fuck it, let’s just take a recently-revived classic American snack cake, deep fry it to make it impossibly greasy, and mix that overly-sweet concoction with a pork belly burger, cheese, and bacon.
The first fifteen people who bought it received the burger for free, though now if you’re going to order it you’ll have to pay $12 and a wheelbarrow to cart out the customers who previously dove into this monstrosity. While this honestly sounds like a horrific combination of flavors for a hamburger, you know that we’re still going to seek it out if we end up in Philly, because we’re America and any burger with a fried food bun is something we’re contractually bound to try.
The Terrible Garbage Burger
Holy mother of Christ. Florida has a reputation for being America’s craziest state, but McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola, Florida might be the most insane thing to ever come out of that state. We can’t even pretend like this burger looks good—normally, we see heart-wrenching horror and we think, “Good God, we must put that inside us.” Not the Terrible Garbage Burger, which seems to be a close cousin of the Cement Mixer shot in that its sole existence is predicated on making you do terrible things to your body.
The ingredients in this Satanic tower of calories (all of which has to be propped up and stabilized with a 6-8 inch skewer) are as follows: Liverwurst, corned beef, onions, mushrooms, jalapenos, black olives, banana peppers, pineapple rings (wait, what?), wasabi, guacamole, pepperoni, chili, sauerkraut, marinara sauce, barbecue sauce, peanut butter (hold on, can we go back for a second, did you just say peanut butter?), tomatoes, red onions, five kinds of cheese, a couple of strips of bacon (yes because bacon is the one ingredient that you need to show restraint with), remoulade sauce, and vanilla ice cream (WHAT NO WAIT WHY) topped with hot fudge (STOP IT YOU STOP IT RIGHT NOW) and a maraschino cherry stuck in there with a mini Irish flag toothpick. If you just read that entire sentence without blinking, surprise, you’ve just instantaneously gained ten pounds.
Actually, just typing that has made us feel a little…overheated. It’s just, woah, we are really sweating here. Getting…lightheaded…
Must…finish…last…bite of..bur..
Agpehiogpahp;aednpafffffffffffffffffffff
