French Fry Failure and Burger Bust

My girlfriend and I recently went to Las Vegas for the first time. The Heart Attack Grill happened to be quite close to the hotel where I was staying. Having heard about it before and being a big fan of hamburgers, I really wanted to try it. I reasoned that a restaurant that only makes burgers and has no concern with health must make a pretty tasty burger. One night, we saw an ambulance backed up to the door of it. Perhaps it really was living up to its name, we thought, and I increased my resolve to check the place out.

Finally, the time came. We went in for dinnertime. We were greeted by a woman in a nurse’s uniform who insisted on putting hospital gowns on us. I’m a tall guy, so it was quite awkward to literally bend over backwards so the short hostess could put the hospital gown on me. We were seated and soon a waiter, who was dressed as a surgeon, came over. They had TV screens showing music videos, including one that I thought was pretty appropriate: “Fat” by Weird Al Yankovic.

We ended up each getting a butter-fat shake and a single bypass burger with fries and sugar Cokes. The waiter took our order on an iPhone, which seemed a little ridiculous since it took so long for him to enter it. Why use technology if it’s going to take you longer than doing it the old-fashioned way? We got our shakes first. They each had little pats of butter on them. They really weren’t all that good and my girlfriends in particular was overly melted.

While we were waiting for our food, a young man decided to try for free food. At the Heart Attack Grill, qualification for free food is easy: you must simply be weighed and if you weigh more than 350 pounds, you eat for free. The only catch is that the scale is up a few stairs in the middle of the dining room. The guy who was trying for the free meal stepped up to the scales and weighed in at just over 350 pounds. It felt slightly macabre to be in a room with a handful of people applauding a morbidly obese man.

Our waiter seemed just plain goofy. He was wandering around the mostly empty dining room and even stepped up on the scale once (he weighed in at only 150 pounds or so). A middle-aged man dressed in doctor garb was chatting with some female customers. We wondered if he was Dr Jon himself, kinda hoping that he’d just leave us alone. By the time the waiter brought our meal, my girlfriend and I were pretty much overcome by the absurdity of the whole thing and had caught the giggles. We tried to restrain ourselves as he asked if he could get us anything else.

Just by looking at the burgers, I could tell that they were burnt. I prepared to take a bite of my burger and my girlfriend tried some fries. As we started chewing, I’m pretty sure we had the same expression on our faces. “What are we doing here?” seemed to be the thought on both of our minds. The burger was terrible. Not only was it indeed burnt, it was completely dry as well and the cheese wasn’t even melted. The fries were soggy, limp, cold and flavorless. For fries cooked in pure lard, I would have expected them to knock my socks off.

I ate my burger (I was hungry, after all), and pretty much left my fries alone. I’ll admit that I wanted them to taste good, so I kept trying them, but they were the same tasteless fries, that just got worse as they got even colder. My girlfriend managed one bite of the burger and a few fries, but was mostly full from the shake. At this point, we were pretty much giggling uncontrollably. We hadn’t touched our food for a while when the waiter finally came over to check on us. We were hardly able to hide our amusement long enough to request a to-go box. Even if the food is terrible, it’s hard to watch it go to waste. I think mostly we just wanted to get out of there-it was a pretty weird dining experience and the novelty wore off pretty quickly

We were allowed to take off our hospital gowns on our own when we left. We carried a lot of food out-most of my shake, my girlfriend’s Coke, and a Styrofoam box with her burger and most of all our fries. I wondered why bother taking the food with us, but it turned out that at the airport, the now cold burger made an acceptable snack. The fries somehow made it home with us, so we warmed them up in the oven. There was enough grease on them that they didn’t dry out and just getting them hot was an improvement.

We decided that we would have regretted not checking this over-hyped burger establishment out. The excitement doesn’t go far enough, however to make up for terrible food. Maybe The Heart Attack Grill doesn’t care about making food that tastes good-the Heart Attack Grill only needs a certain percentage of tourists visiting Las Vegas make one visit each to their establishment and the press will take care of the rest.


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