TBG Reviews: Burger King's Loaded Steakhouse Burger

With Mrs. Bootleg off at a bridal shower, I was forced into "weekend dad" duty on Saturday. On our way back from the barbershop, we swung by Burger King for a little drive-thru lunch. The boy's fast food tastes are pretty simple at this point: Kids' Meal with a plain hamburger. Mine are…more complicated – manlier even. And, since I've seemed to settle in at around 180 lbs. (Monday Update: 177.6 lbs.!) regardless of how much grease I eat, I jumped in at the deep end and ordered BK's new Loaded Steakhouse Burger.

Hard to believe that 970 calories and 55(!) grams of fat could come from 100% Angus beef, two slices of American cheese, bacon, fried onion strings, A-1 steak sauce and mashed potatoes, but there ya go. Kudos to the King for the ballsy, artery-clogging idea, but there are several things wrong with this uninteresting fat bomb.

Too much cheese: The double cheese treatment overwhelms everything between the bun. I'm sure none of my readers doubt the curing cured power of bacon, but the gloppy, not-quite-melted "cheese" seemed to be everywhere and in every bite – even at the expense of the pig strips.

Steak sauce: It took me most of my life to realize that a good steak doesn't need steak sauce. I suppose I can see what BK was trying to do here (Hey, it's a steak dinner on a bun! Pass the A-1!"), but there's a reason we don't put steak sauce on potatoes, cheese or onion rings. The smoky, salty goo makes everything taste "cheap", as if it were covering up spoiled meat.

Mashed potatoes: C'mon, Burger King…there really should be more than a teaspoon of spuds on my burger if you're going to trumpet its presence with such pomp and circumstance. The mashed potatoes on mine had squished to the back of the burger, hiding underneath a collapsed ceiling of cheese.

Fried Onion Strings: These aren't to be confused with BK's inexplicably excellent onion-flavored, teeny onion rings. These are more like that crispy onion shrapnel that white people mix with green beans every Thanksgiving.

The obvious problem is that none of these ingredients really go together. BK layers them all atop a rectangle of chewy beef, but the bottom line is that the really risky novelty burgers of whimsy are best left to the experts at Chili's and Applebee's.

Grade: 2.5 (out of 5)