The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

“I think my heart attack is having a heart attack.”

~Oh God, Ordering Seconds Was A Horrible Idea

Many foreigners visiting America find themselves surprised at the amount of relatively fit and attractive people they can see on the street.  In their mind, the typical American is fat, trudging around in clogs with grease stains on their shirt, probably eating a whole pizza right out of the box while they’re walking to the gun store.  Instead, they find that Americans come in all shapes and sizes, and as much as restaurant portions seem larger than they’re used to, and the bread tastes much sweeter than anticipated, America’s culture of excess is largely confined to a very small but visible minority of people and restaurateurs who are fucking insane and are hellbent on cramming as many calories into your maw as is humanly possible before your heart explodes and showers the room with bacon bits like some Lovecraftian horror version of a piñata.

Naturally, our job is to help spread the gospel of this brave minority, these innovators who find ways to put a week’s worth of calories on a plate in front of you, these soldiers of fortune who push us to new limits, pushing our faces down into greasy heaps saying “eat your slop little piggies eat your slop!”  And while we do our best to make each meal as unhealthy as possible using a variety of methods, one of the most time-honored and respected approaches involves the creation of hamburgers so excessive and absurd that the mere sight of them is enough to drive nutritionists to commit hara-kiri.

But we’re no amateurs.  Sure, we could tell you about people who go to fast food restaurants and construct their own caloric monstrosities, or we could point out various chain restaurants’ burgers that double your daily allotment of fat,  but that’s child’s play.  If you really want to grab our attention, you’ve got to make something so obscene that even our own staff would have to take pause before diving in.  But dive in we shall, because this is America, and we’ve always wondered if heart attacks really are as painful as they make it look on TV.

The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

Some people think it’s irresponsible to eat your entire daily recommendation of calories with one hamburger, and we’d agree.  If you’re going to half-ass it, why don’t you just convert to veganism and save us all the trouble.  No, we’re going to need at least two times that to deem a burger to be acceptable to make our list of absurd burgers.  At least.  So we’ve gone on worldwide search (that’s right, we even went to the United Kingdom for a few of these) to find the ten hamburgers that revel in excess, while still being something you could actually theoretically sit down and eat in one sitting (so none of this “novelty three hundred pound hamburger” bullshit).  Because you only live once, so get on with it, those arteries aren’t going to clog themselves.

10:  The Mega Mel Burger (4,556 calories)

Just outside of Houston, Mel’s Country Café has been selling country comfort foods since 1977 with an emphasis on large, meaty burgers.  While their standard burger pushes the limits of dietary sensibility with a full pound of meat, a half-pound of bacon, and three slices of American cheese, the Mega Mel defies everything we know about the capacity of stomachs.  For a mere twenty-five dollars, you are given two hours to devour this stacked burger consisting of a pound and a half of meat, a full pound of bacon, and a quarter pound of American cheese without help, and without losing the ability to walk or keep your food in your stomach.  If you complete this daunting task, you’re given a t-shirt, and the knowledge that you just put over 4,500 calories into your body while leaving your stomach utterly unable to distinguish between reward and punishment.

The burger apparently also comes with unnecessarily large helpings of tomatoes, lettuce, and sliced pickles, all of which rest on a bed of lettuce.  Since you have to eat everything on the plate to complete the challenge, that means that these vegetables are literally empty calories getting in the way of your ability to cram meat, bacon and cheese into your body before the obesity-aided diabetes sets in and the doctors have to take your foot.  Each year they announce the patron to finish the challenge the fastest, with last year’s challenge being a woman who ate this monstrosity in just twenty minutes while looking nothing like what you’d expect someone who would eat this monstrosity in just twenty minutes would look like.  Well done, Texas.  Well done.

9:  The Fifth Third Burger (4,889)

Minor League baseball gets to combine all the excitement of watching nine men stand around idly for 95% of a three hour span while taking out all those pesky nuisances of the big leagues like “famous players” and “being personally vested in your team’s season.”  While you’d assume the prospect of watching a 20 year old college dropout inevitably fail to achieve his dreams for less than $10,000 a year would be enough to fill the seats day in and day out, Minor League franchises sadly must rely on outrageous publicity stunts and promotions to fill their stadiums whose bleachers tend to consist of a hill that you can have a picnic on.  So that might explain why the West Michigan Whitecaps, a single-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, decided to make the 4,800 calorie-plus Fifth Third Burger, which takes five 1/3 pound burger patties covered in five slices of American cheese, salsa, nacho cheese, Fritos, as well as lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream, all of which is doused in nearly a whole cup of chili and placed on an 8-inch sesame bun made with a full pound of dough.

While this twenty dollar burger contains more than twice your recommended daily allotment of calories, it also manages to pack in 209% of your daily value of Vitamin C.  So hey, once your fat cells gain sentience and take over your body from the inside, they’ll at least inherit a nice healthy immune system along with everything else.

8:  The Titanic (5,000 calories)

We take our first trek across the sea Oscar’s Diner in Telford, England (which apparently isn’t really worth checking out).  This American-themed burger bar makes us feel both proud and a little insulted that foreigners assume this is typical American fare, since apparently the United Kingdom is under the impression that Americans eat two and a half pound burgers all the time.  Which we clearly don’t.  Only on special occasions or after bad break ups.

The Titanic piles up two one-pound burger patties, two 4 ounce chicken breasts and six slices of bacon to go along with four onion rings, two potato waffles (potato waffles?  So, not a waffle fry?  Is this a British thing?  Oh it is?  Okay moving on) all of which is topped with mozzarella cheese, lettuce, pickles, onions, tomatoes and mayonnaise.  As of early 2011, about 100 people had ordered the 15 squiggly line (£?) item, with about 20 managing to finish the whole thing with one person who may or may not have replaced their insides with a garbage disposal unit managing to scarf the whole thing down in just seven minutes.  Though honestly, we don’t know why they opted for the whole “two chicken breasts” thing, when if they committed to the beef more they could have topped the next burger on our list.

7:  The 55 Challenge (over 5,000 calories)

Originally the Andy’s Big “A” Challenge originating in Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1991, the challenge initially involved eating six burger patties with four toppings, a side of fries, and a 24 ounce soft drink in under 30 minutes for it to be free (otherwise, you’re paying roughly 25 dollars).  After franchising and changing their name from Andy’s Burgers Shakes & Fries to Hwy 55, they began the 55 Challenge, which is the same exact thing, dishing out an artery clogging 55 ounces of freshly grilled meat with each challenge.  Unlike the Titanic, this meat-centric concoction sets a time limit, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds from conquering the beast at their various locations, with the fastest time being two minutes and 43 seconds by someone by the name of “Furious Pete Czerwinski” who by all accounts might be a miniature black hole that has put on a human disguise to crush obscene amounts of meat into a gravitational singularity.

Either way, there is no documented calorie count for this burger that we could find, but considering that 55 ounces of plain hamburger sets you back around 4800 calories, we’d have to imagine that when cheese and toppings are taken into consideration, this sucker packs more of a punch than this list’s previous entry, especially since the mere thought of trying to rush to finish this burger in half an hour is enough to put us into a food coma.

6:  The State Champion Burger (approximately 5,500 calories)

Much like the highway 55, the caloric count of the State Champion Burger offered up by Diggers Diner in Brush Colorado, appears to be unavailable, they at least list enough ingredients listed for us to make an educated guess.  Between the three pounds of ground beef, a pound-and-a-half bun, eight slices of cheese, and a slew of tomato, pickles, and lettuce, the entire product weighs over five pounds and has had only a small handful of customers successfully complete the $29.99 item.  Naturally, this burger comes with a side of fries, since America as a nation doesn’t remember the last time it was able to see it’s penis while it showered, but it’s not even the biggest “individual burger patty” on this list.  That title belongs to…

5:  The Sarge Burger (approximately 5,600 calories)

The Pig’n-Chik of Sherwood, Arkansas, just outside of Little Rock, offers up the Sarge Burger with a similar caveat as Hwy 55’s.  For $25 dollars, you get a four pound burger with a one pound bun dressed however you like, because the first natural and appropriately American reaction to seeing a burger so massive it can double as a barbell is to figure out what additional toppings you’re going to want on top of it.  If you manage to finish this single massive patty, which takes about fifteen minutes to put together, in thirty minutes or less the meal is free, though only a handful of people have been able to accomplish that task.

Both the Sarge and State Champion don’t necessarily have anything “exotic” or “crazy” going on besides that whole “a very large burger that technically is small enough that people can in theory eat it” (a 105 pound actress, for example, was able to take down the Sarge) thing, but at the same time, who are we to turn our noses up at thousands of calories worth of hamburgers just because there isn’t bacon or massive globs of butter involved?  That said, we’re about to go back across the pond to the dirty idea-stealing British and we start getting back into burgers that are more complicated than “enough meat to feed a family, on a bun.”

4:  The Ulti-Meatum (10,000 calories)

We know, you’re looking at that picture up there, an you have a lot of questions.  “What the fuck is that.”  “Is this a burger or the results of an alien autopsy?”  “Is there a face in there?  Is it smiling?  Can food feel emotions?  Oh God, what if they can?  Oh sweet Jesus.”

Woah there, calm down.  Your food stopped feeling things once we electrocuted the cow in front of all its best cow friends, let’s move on.

This is the Ulti-Meatum, a burger within a burger available at Mister Easters in Preston (for those of you firing up your google maps and looking anxiously for small Iowan towns, we’ll save you the trouble, it’s in England).  While England created it, they stole the idea from America (or rather, a cartoon show from America, but still counts).  The Ulti-Meatum claims to have 10,000 calories while somehow totally missing the opportunity to claim that it is the Inception of hamburgers.  Two buns, cheese, tomato and lettuce surround a top and bottom burger layer, with both sandwiching a cheese-covered burger patty (which, in turn, engulfs another hamburger, cheese, and full bun).  The burger is free if you’re able to finish it in one sitting, or you can pay 20 British-Squiggly-Money-Lines to get each segment cooked up separately so you can assemble every part yourself, which means that it’s actively cheap enough that most people who eat the whole thing by themselves are probably doing it less because they’re worried about spending 20 pounds-or-didgeridoos-or-whatever and more because they’re just too lazy to pile all these toppings together.  Which really is the most wonderfully American mindset of them all.

3:  Quadruple Bypass (12,410 calories)

Sanctioned by Guinness as the world’s most calorific burger, clocking in at around six times your daily allotment of calories, the Quadruple Bypass burger from Las Vegas’s Heart Attack Grill has been featured previously on affotd as one of the America’s messiest burgers.  This “increasingly uncomfortable to praise because the restaurant keeps having unofficial mascots who die distressingly young” ode to excess combines four ½ pound beef patties, twenty slices of bacon, eight slices of American cheese, a special sauce, and lettuce/tomatoes/onion/boring-ass-vegetables-that-honestly-do-impart-a-necessary-crispness-to-the-burger.  Oh, and the bun is coated in lard, and if you’re reading this and your chest is starting to get heavy, you might want to take a break before finishing this article.  Go look at pictures of salad or something online.  Sit on a hammock and have that fantasy where you throw the game winning touchdown in the Super Bowl so your brain is fooled into thinking you’re exercising.  Drive your Rascal Scooter and steer with your knees but move your arms like you’re doing swimming strokes.  We’ve only got two more burgers left, at which point you should be good and convinced that cattle are playing the long con and are waiting to take over as the dominant species after humanity’s final cardiac arrest.

2:  Over De Flames Burger (13,000 calories)

The Over De Flames burger, served by the British restaurant-within-a-Norwich-bar that bore the burger’s name until it’s closure probably doesn’t’ belong on this list.  It’s comically huge, but no mere mortal managed to eat the whole thing.  It was 13,000 calories of “Come on, I fucking dare you” placing six and a half pounds of burger (space over two patties) covered in 40 slices of cheese smashed between a specially made bun, and anyone who managed to eat it in one sitting would be awarded 200 Squiggle-Moneys (those unable to finish it had to dish out 30).    Sundeep De, pictured above, was inspired to make the burger by watching America’s Man vs. Food, because if there’s one thing we’ve established, it’s that the United Kingdom loves to make insane hamburgers, but only as a way to excitedly tap America on its shoulder and say, “Hey, hey, look what I did!  Look what I made!  Do you like it?”

Why would we include this burger as opposed to, say, one of those 777 pound burgers we make in America as a novelty item?  Honestly, we just assume that if they took that overseas and asked Americans if they could down it in one sitting, we’d probably respond, “What’s the time limit” before Furious Pete shows up and casts the whole thing into the orchestrated chaos of the universe that is his stomach.  USA!  USA!

1:  The Judgment Day Burger (15,000 calories)

In The Judgment Day, we find yet another British burger *ducks to avoid series of knives and angry curse words* okay fine, a Scottish burger that also was inspired by Man Vs. Food and which has yet to be defeated (because an American probably hasn’t had a proper go of it it).  We’re not sure how they came up with 15,000 calories, since there’s only one pound of Aberdeen Angus steak burger involved, but it helps that it’s topped with three chicken breast burgers (what is it with the United Kingdom and their “using chicken burgers instead of beef” fascination?), six rashers of bacon, three fried eggs, a double serving of French fries, onion rings, a shitload of cheese, and a homemade chili to finish everything off.  Sold for 25 Brit-Squiggles by Spinnaker Café in Oban, Scotland, this one burger at least gets the spirit of competitive eating right, since it’s only free for anyone who can get through it in 45 minutes.

This is the point at the end of the article that we should inform you that all of these burgers are incredibly unhealthy, and if you have heart problems, or honestly hope to someday avoid heart problems, you should just stick to a healthy diet of lean protein and paoghieapgva;ph phipg a

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*panting*

Sorry about that, everyone.  One of our damn lawyers started typing while we had our backs turned.  He’s tied to a chair now being force-fed bacon grease while screaming, “Think of the liability, damn you!”  No we will not think of our liability, Jake, now eat your bacon sludge before we get the whiskey funnel.  And for the rest of you, your charge is clear.  Head over to England and eat their giant burgers, just to prove that it can be done.  We believe in you.  That which does not kill you makes you stronger.  (Jake just shouted something about how heart attacks actually make you much weaker in a variety of ways, but shut up Jake).