Papa's Basement » Fast Food

The Fast Food Connoisseur Reviews Wendy’s The W

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 18:45:28 +0000

Does The W look exactly like this in real life? Of course not. Don't be a mouth-breather. But it isn't horribly far off, either. And that's gotta count for something.

The Christmas season has been kind to those of us who like our food fast and greasy. McDonald’s alone has given us the Daily Double, the delightful (if derivative) Chicken McBites and the diabetes-tastic Holiday Pie. Every other chain is getting into the spirit with a seasonal milkshake offering at the very least. If the news stopped right there, I would be content as both a man and a glutton. But lo, unto us this Christmas, a burger was born, wrapped in wax paper, lying in a cardboard box. That burger is Wendy’s new The W. Here is my take on it.

My tastes are as fancy as this guy's.

As always, I like to begin my fast food reviews by telling everyone where I come from on the subject: Namely, that I love fast food. And I hate myself for that fact, but it’s quick, it’s cheap and its astronomical sugar content spikes my barely-existent dopamine levels enough for me to stop hating myself for being a fast-food-addicted slob. Quite a vicious circle, ain’t it?

I say all of that so you are aware that my reviews don’t come from a lofty perch of salad-munching condescension. You know that guy who gets his order and pulls into the first available parking lot space to tuck in because making the five minute drive home with a bag full of food is laughably inconceivable to him? Hi.

(Oh, and for the purposes of my writing, “fast food” means a drive-thru is present. Five Guys might as well be Ruth’s Chris.)

If it doesn't have a drive-thru, I feel like it's fancy enough for this guy to be working there.

So, with all the caveats and foreplay out of the way, what did I think of Wendy’s The W? In a word, amazing. Take all the superlatives I heaped upon McDonald’s Daily Double in last week’s review and then factor in that Wendy’s doesn’t serve meat out of Demoltion Man. The two beef patties and their cheesy crowns are more than adequate, and the veggies on top of them are fresh and piled high enough to contribute much to the burger’s flavor. Where The W truly shines, however, is its butter toasted bun and a secret sauce that tastes like Thousand Island dressing somehow made fattier. If Wendy’s bottled the stuff and sold it as an edible sexual lubricant, I’m sure these two would clear the shelves.

I award The W three-and-a-half out of four clogged arteries. The burger is $2.99-a dollar more than the Daily Double-but I won’t allow my black belt in cheapness to turn me off to what is clearly a superior product. I’ve consumed one of these beasts a day for half a week now and have no plans of slowing down. Until I pull a Mama Cass in the parking lot, which, given the fat content of that secret sauce, should happen by Friday.

In memory of that blessed, big woman. I first heard this song as I pulled into the parking lot of an STD clinic. Even though I’d just stuck it raw into a real sewer pipe, this song convinced me that my death-defying dick would test negative. Sure enough, it did, and now I’ve shared one of the more embarrassing chapters of my life as a throwaway comment that 99% of you won’t even read. Score.

The Fast Food Connoisseur Reviews Taco Bell’s New Triple Steak Stack

admin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:43:58 +0000

How I dress for all of my fast food reviews.

As an American patriot, I spend each Sunday on the couch like a cancer patient, watching 11 straight hours of NFL football. One of the interesting side effects of doing so is that the advertisements that air during football games (and there aren’t many, because NFL commercial time is prohibitively expensive) tend to get stuck in my head. Those horrible Buffalo Wild Wings ads in which corrupt employees who are on the BW3 take sabotage the integrity of the game to permit a bunch of drunks to avoid going home to their neglected wives and children. Geico’s Brian Orakpo spots which have announced to the world that, when the man’s days as a linebacker whose skills are regressing at a troubling clip are over, the black Philip Seymour Hoffman will be waiting in the wings. And, as of last Sunday, I was subjected repeatedly to a commercial for Taco Bell’s newest flatulence-inducing concoction, the Triple Steak Stack, which I’ve conveniently posted below.

The beauty of fast food is that it’s never a costly experiment, so I figured what the Hell and resolved like a woman looking to get engaged that, at some point in the near future, that meat was going in my mouth. Opportunity struck last night as I was exiting my gym which, conveniently, is located next to a Taco Bell. Because I’m a sociopath and my brain can’t form simple connections like “fast food will undo all the hard work you just performed,” I immediately veered into the drive thru, justifying the steak as a protein source and the bread as a post-workout carb load. Moments later, I was hard at work in the parking lot devouring my new purchase.

So, just how much did my Triple Steak Stack look like this in real life? Read on and find out! (Unless I forget to address that question, in which case, I apologize for that and so very much else.)

The verdict? Well, for starters, the Triple Steak Stack gets points for being at least similar in size the meat-laden monster shown to us in its commercial, a welcome change from the Chicken Flatbread Sandwich, whose bun was smaller than a napkin. The Stack’s bread consisted of a soft, flavorless dough that seemed specially designed to prevent the copious grease contained within from soaking through, and the steak inside was not the usual, pleasant Taco Bell steak meat, but more akin to a chewy Steak-umm.

The photo might be fake, but the truth of what your average Steak-umms eater looks like couldn't be more real.

I’m giving the Triple Steak Stack two-out-of-four clogged arteries. At $4.99, it was a pretty crappy deal, barely 50% of the size of a footlong Subway sub with which it shares a price tag. Taco Bell’s entire allure is being able to walk away with four lbs. of food for under a dollar. If I’m going to cough up the big bucks (yet, ladies, I really just referred to $5 as “big bucks”. Rawr), I’m going to want a little more on my return than an oily dough-pocket of beef that’s so low-grade you can almost taste the awful living conditions of the cow that produced it. Plus the farts it causes are every bit as bad as you’d expect. You may never read these words ever again, so savor them well: Taco Bell, I expected more from you.

The Fast Food Connoisseur Reviews Burger King’s California Whopper

admin — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:36:58 +0000

Yeah, I could have posted a photo of Katy Perry covering her boobs and make some innuendo about a pair of 'California Whoppers,' but, at this point in my life, I'd receive more titillation from a photo of food. God help me.

Originally, I had planned to spend the day penning another entry in my Vegas Vacation series which, by now, is officially longer than The Stand. My designs were changed, however, by a conversation with two friends at work (Chris Lingebach and Othello Bouchareb, whose radio show can be heard on 106.7 The Fan every Saturday 8-10 pm, so be sure to check it out), where I mentioned in passing that I had eaten a Burger King California Whopper earlier that day. All previous topics were immediately dropped, and, after describing the burger, both stated they would purchase it, the one debate being to do it later that night or wait until the next day. I figured if the only two people I had mentioned the burger to were that interested in it, I might as well give it a proper writeup.

For those of you who don’t know, the California Whopper is a variant of Burger King’s signature sandwich that swaps the traditional mayonnaise, ketchup and onions for guacamole, bacon and a chipotle-ranch sauce. By my math, you’re exchanging two boring condiments for two good ones and a vegetable (or whatever the Hell onions count as) for a fatty meat, so right there you’re coming out ahead. The guacamole and bacon mixed very well with the beef, though the chipotle-ranch sauce seemed a little calorically excessive (which was obviously a large concern for a man who chased his sandwich down with several-hundred french fries and a gallon of Fanta), and it added little to the sandwich’s flavor.

No, as far as Burger King burgers go, the California Whopper is a serviceable addition to the menu, and you won’t be disappointed if you choose it. My only complaint (I’d say “beef,” but then I’d have to hang myself for the good of the nation) is that the entire time I was eating it, I kept thinking to myself, “This would taste 100 times better if it were made by someone like Five Guys or Z-Burger, whose ingredients aren’t so bland.” While it may be unfair to compare a Burger King product to something produced by a more expensive burger chain, the California Whopper clocks in at $4, which isn’t that much cheaper than a normal Five Guys burger. I’m going to conclude this celebration of my cheapness before I’m forced by law to end it with a YouTube video of me dropping a handful of change and counting it by ear, but just be warned that you might be better off ordering a few burgers off the dollar menu and mashing them together into some sort of burger Voltron. Bon appetit.

I Survived My Vegas Vacation: Day 1, Part 3-A Night on the Town

admin — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:53:26 +0000

Littering isn't the only thing that makes Iron Eyes Cody cry. Shitty flights also do the job.

With both legs of a journey so nightmarish that it made the Trail of Tears look like a pleasant spring hike behind me, I was ready to finally enjoy some of what Las Vegas had to offer. Given I’m a social retard (which, in Vegas, one must pronounce “ritard“), clubbing and pool parties weren’t too high on my list. (Especially pool parties. My body’s gross and I view the entire thing as a private part to be covered at all times.) Here’s what I did want to do while in Sin City:

You people out West really don't know how good you have it.

-Eat at every fast food chain I didn’t have back East (In-N-Out Burger, Fatburger, Jack in the Box, Del Taco) at least once. I find fats and carbohydrates delicious, I’m cheap and I hate cooking. The role of fast food in my diet is similar to that of rice for an Asian, meaning I tend to eat it just a bit.

Yes, wanting to see this was lame of me, but as Aristotle once brilliantly retorted, 'It's my vacation, so go fuck your mother.'

-Walk inside every casino on the Strip and look at all their exterior touristy crap. Be it the the sphinx at the Luxor or the volcano at The Mirage, as lame as it sounds, I wanted to say that I’d seen it all with my own eyes. People were beginning to suspect the veracity of my tale about watching the Bellagio fountains after Matt Damon, George Clooney and I robbed Andy Garcia blind. It was time to make some real memories.

Was I expecting this exact scene to transpire around me? Answer: Yes.

-Play at least one table game and make a sports bet at Caesar’s. I’m not a big gambler. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I’m virtuous, it’s just that losing money sets me off like Malcom X getting called the n-bomb. But if you can do something legally that you can’t elsewhere, well, you do it. Maybe I’d find out I really enjoy gambling. Because that’s what I need in my life.

A lot of money (and possible intellectual property lawsuit) awaits anyone who names their establishment after this.

-Visit a ‘gentlemen’s club.’ On average, I’m good for one visit to a strip joint every 12 months. I feel that number is above the perv curve, but not so much that I need to put signs in my front yard. It had been two years since I last savored the deeply spiritual experience of paying a stranger $30 to disinterestedly grind her holiest of holies against my halfhearted erection for the duration of “Pour Some Sugar on Me“, and I figured that Las Vegas strip clubs had to be brimming over with coke-addicted showgirls and failed Los Angeles starlets, meaning the talent would be impressive.

I reasoned that the easiest goal to accomplish right out of the gate was to shovel some In-N-Out Burger down my yap, so once my closest local friend picked me and my brother up from the airport (for what is friendship but the ability to inconvenience someone far more than you could a stranger?), we requested to dine there. Now, I won’t play elitist food snob and scream that In-N-Out produces food that nothing we have out East can compete with, but they do make a tasty burger, and, after several hours without food (the equivalent of weeks to a normal person), it hit the spot. Will, my brother, was also sated, and it didn’t take long for him to make the next request: He wanted to see a strip club.

Now, as previously mentioned, I have nothing against strip clubs. Will, however, is something of an aficionado. Remember how I mentioned that, on average, I go to a nudie joint once a year? The date of that visit tends to coincide with Will’s birthday an awful lot. At least the man knows what makes him happy in life. My friend/indentured servant was more than happy to oblige Will’s whim, and off we went to the one establishment she knew of. Upon arrival, like a pig hot on the trail of a truffle, Will barreled inside, only to come out 30 seconds later (before I had even entered), a look of consternation upon his face. “It isn’t sleazy enough,” he proclaimed in his trademark baritone. “We need to find another one.”

It’s a fine line between inconveniencing someone by asking them for a ride and forcing them to live out the plot of Collateral, so I insisted we instead call it a night. Will shook off his disappointment and the two of us were dropped off at the only establishment fit for royalty of our caliber: The Hooters Hotel and Casino. In my next article, I’ll get into the wonders of our temporary abode (oh, do I have some stories) and how I managed to fill the first full day of my vacation.

Is Taco Bell Not Beef?

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:41:19 +0000

This was originally going to be an article about how much I enjoyed the new Beefy Crunchy Burrito. Rut roh.

I apologize for the title, which sounds like a line from Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech in The Merchant of Venice. An Alabama law firm is alleging that Taco Bell’s beef, well, doesn’t legally qualify as beef. (To be exact, they found it to contained under 35% beef, the remainder a melange of wheat oats, soy lecithin, modified corn starch and a shit ton of chemicals.) Let’s keep it real, though: We all saw this coming.

I mean look at a burrito above. Even in an advertisement, where the food is supposed to appear a thousand times more delicious than it actually is, the “beef” still looks like a bunch of Pop Rocks the photographer spray painted brown. Beef doesn’t work that way! When fried, it clumps together in big, chewy balls of artery-clogging deliciousness that briefly let you forget the hell that is your life. It doesn’t pour freely to fit a mold like grains of kitty litter.

Honestly, I’m just relieved they didn’t find cow brain or other bits of the bovine that contain high concentrations of Mad Cow. I live in constant fear of contracting that disease, but I lack the willpower to give up the fast food which contains it. So, in spite of my beliefs that the US Government is completely corrupt and in bed with big business, every time I pass through a drive through, I manage to convince myself that the USDA is looking out for me, Johnny Taxpayer, and in no way letting the beef industry feed me tainted meat long enough to down whatever 75 grams of saturated fat I picked off the menu. Let it never be said I’m not a complicated man.

Subway Sucks

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:03:13 +0000

Jared Fogel, the biggest poonhound in the food game. His footlong always tastes like seafood salad.

Don’t let the title fool you: I eat at Subway. A lot. But lately I’ve been forced to conclude that Subway “restaurants” suck. (The balls on that company, referring to itself as a restaurant. They’re a restaurant like I’m a successful disc jockey and comedy writer with a cock you could wrap a wristwatch around.)

My first beef with Subway is the sandwiches taste like shit because they whore you on the meat (I swear that beef wasn’t put in there in an attempt at a horrid food pun). When I buy a turkey sub, give me a solid half-inch layer of turkey, goddamn you. Those bastards spread it on thinner than the lettuce, as if the meat were a condiment. And it’s even worse if you order a meatball sub: Then you can watch the “sandwich artist” making your sub slowly count out the eight meatballs intended to cover a foot of bread like they were doling out gold coins on a Medieval pay day. Perish the thought a friendly face sneak a 9th meatball onto your sub: Abdullah the Artisan might wind up with his hands chopped off as if he were back in the old country.

My second complaint about Subway? It loves to portray itself as some healthy alternative to drive-through fast-food, but there’s no way on Earth it’s good for you. You’re eating an entire loaf of bread. You know who else used to eat an entire loaf of bread in one sitting? Elvis. Sure, he’d hollow it out and fill it with peanut butter, jelly and a pound of bacon, but the gist is the same. Sprinkling lettuce on top of 500 calories of carbohydrates doesn’t make it healthy. If it did, I’d have washboard abs and both of my feet back. (Yay diabetes jokes.)

Again, I don’t hate Subway. In fact, just writing about them makes me want to go and buy some of their slop because that’s how weak and open to suggestion my mind is. I just wish they adopted a more accurate slogan than “Subway – Eat Fresh.” Something like “Subway – Because You Hate Your Body but Don’t Have the Willpower to Eat a Salad.” Much better.

The Fast Food Connoisseur Reviews Taco Bell’s Cantina Tacos

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:35:39 +0000

If being sexually aroused by the sigh of fast food is wrong, may I never know right.

I’ve made no secret on this site of my love-hate relationship with fast food (hate the body it gives me, love every other aspect of it more than life itself). I do my best to avoid consuming it, enduring weeks of bombardment by ads for the latest burrito or burger, thinking I’ve managed to avoid that sweet surrender and then bam, like Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, some trigger will set me off and I simply must eat it. Yesterday, it was the siren’s song of Taco Bell’s Cantina Tacos that I succumbed to.

Taco Bell is, by far, my favorite fast food restaurant because it’s both dirt cheap and, in theory, not as grossly unhealthy as its competition. I had forgotten about the new Cantina Tacos until, the other day, I read someone mocking Taco Bell’s press release for them, which contained the line “Our Cantina Tacos are based upon authentic-style Mexican street tacos, which are designed using simple, fresh ingredients, that customers regard as high quality.”

“Mexican street tacos?” That’s supposed to sound sanitary and delicious? Conjures up images of being surreptitiously fed donkey meat to me. Also, bonus points for using the word “regard.” As in, “These ingredients are not actually high quality, but we hope you regard them as such.” Still, reading about a new culinary delight awaiting me at El Bell was enough to flip the switch. Come lunch time, I knew what I was having.

I decided to get one taco in each of the three meats offered (I’m a Renaissance man like that), chicken, steak and pork. (Usually I don’t eat pork because of both the profound influence of Jules Winnfield upon my life and, one time, I busted out the “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” line from Babe after a girl had just finished going down on me and I still laugh thinking about it, but for the sake of a review, whatever.) The verdict? Worth a purchase. While the double-layered corn tortillas were about as fun to gnaw through as a hymen, the meat contained within wasn’t half bad (pork being the most flavorful of the three by far). Better yet, they were only $1.49 a pop and got cheaper the more you ordered (God bless America).

Oh, li'l fella: You were the yummiest one of all!

So if you decide to be a slovenly fatass and embrace your inner Papageorgiou, the Cantina Tacos aren’t a bad way of going about it. I can also say they didn’t cause any diarrhea, but I have the constitution of a goat and pride myself on my ability to eat all manner of food rife with e coli without breaking a sweat. If you’ve downed these suckers, leave a comment to let me know what you think. Bonus points if you post a pic of the result of any gastric disturbances they may have caused you.

Fast Food Connoisseur

admin — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:21:50 +0000

Dom DeLuise, patron saint of gluttony.

The older I get, the more I realize there is very little I do well in life. Fast food is one of those things, though. Whenever I see a friend post on Facebook about the latest fine eatery they just dined at, I simple laugh to myself, go to the Checkers website to see what specials they have this week and pat my gut while cooing, “Patience, my pet” to it. Back in the day Jesus was able to feed thousands with a few fish and a loaf of bread. In the modern era, McDonald’s has picked up the slack and served billions with patties of meat that are semi-flammable and glow in the dark. After making that connection, I’m not ashamed to admit that fast food is my church. So let me share with you a few of my favorite places of worship. None of them will disappoint, and I promise they’ll send your blood sugar so high that you’ll hacksaw off your own feet just to save the diabetes the trouble.

CiCi’s Pizza

I first bristled at listing CiCi’s as a mere fast food venue, but then realized that anyone referring to it as a restaurant would sound like the biggest piece of white trash shit that ever walked the Earth. For those of you unfamiliar CiCi’s, it’s a pizza buffet that features all you can eat pizza, pasta and dessert. I think there’s also salad there, but: 1. I couldn’t tell you and 2. Who gives a shit? Only the most self-loathing of eatbeast fatties would ever deign to put an ounce of green on their plate in a place like CiCi’s.

Come to CiCi's for the pizza. Stay for the hobo stories.

A wise man once said, “Pizza is like sex: Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” CiCi’s tests that adage like no other pizzeria I’ve ever been to. In fact, the perfect analogy to describe CiCi’s is this: Ever had a woman in your life who you don’t find particularly attractive, but she bugs you constantly for sex and, every few months, you forget how lousy it is with her and cave when she sends you a 3 am text? CiCi’s is that woman. Don’t despair, though: Even after the joy of non-stop mediocre pizza has faded, CiCi’s offers fantastic people-watching opportunities. Be it a broke immigrant family, white trash down from Appalachia or stoned college kids, there’s always a little entertainment with your dinner.

Checkers

What I love most about Checkers is its pricing structure: It offers two of the same, massive burger for $4 or $5. They KNOW no one eating their slop has a friend in the world, so it’s just you, ordering the twofer deal, acting like you have someone to go home to with that second burger. And Checkers is unique in that it offers no place to eat inside, so anyone purchasing food there either has to drive all the way home with it or eat it in the parking lot like an animal. I mean, you’re not ordering food at Checkers because self-control is one of your strong points. So it’s just you with the other whales in the parking lot, shoveling down 82 oz of fried beef fat, casting the same furtive glances at each other that guys who went to porno theaters in the ’70s must have shared. Once in a while the second burger actually survives my initial gorging and I take it home, confident that I’ll eat it five hours later as a second meal. Instead, within 15 minutes I’m staring non-stop at it and sweating like Robert Downey, Jr., confronted with a bathtub full of whiskey.

Hello, old friends.

There is also a design element unique to Checkers that I must praise: The double-drive through. Sure, it speeds up nothing because both windows are serviced by the same kitchen and has led to countless fatal accidents, but it does allow you to go back for seconds without condemnation. More than one time I’ve wolfed down two burgers only to realize, “Hey, the fact that I’m committing suicide with food is depressing. Let’s get a milkshake to cheer me up!” (Inexplicably I always order a small milkshake, as if that’s the secret to a healthy meal at Checkers.) At your average fast food venue, I’d be too disgusted with myself to drive up to the same drive-through cashier twice in one sitting. Thankfully, Checkers spares you that shame, and you can go back for seconds without having to don a fake moustache or wear a burger wrapper like a bandanna to cover your face.

Taco Bell

To this day, I don’t know what Taco Bell gets a bad rap. Everyone I know calls it “Taco Smell” and jokes about it giving them diarrhea, but the place has never once given me the runs (which is more than I can say for McDonald’s, whose Big Breakfast once made me shit so explosively that I had to resort to hand-scrubbing certain areas of my bowl a month later after it became abundantly clear they’d never flush themselves clean). The food tastes decent enough to me and every last item on the menu is dirt-cheap.

It's like the rap of food. Stop remxing and start making something new, dammit!

My only complaint with Taco Bell is that I always get suckered in for whatever the “new” item on their menu is, even though it is always some permutation of crap they already serve. There was a Volcano Taco that was just a normal taco with a red shell. Then a Black Jack taco which was a normal taco with a black shell. And a Double Layer taco that was just a soft taco smushed against a crunchy taco. On one hand I realize it’s my fault because I shouldn’t be relying on a new bit of fast food to make me forget how much I hate my life, but, on the other hand, stop treating your menu like Legos and mashing shit together and calling it a new item, okay? That’s like a wife trying to bring excitement into a stale sex life by wearing a wig. It’s pathetic. And might end up with him punching you and then having sex with the wig.