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Most fast-food restaurants have menus that are quite predictable. You’ll find burgers, fries, chicken sandwiches, pizza, tacos, and burritos. People tend to like fast food precisely because it is familiar and comforting—you can count on a Big Mac or a Spicy Chicken Sandwich to always be available and never be surprising. But occasionally, besides these safe and staid menu options, you may spot an over-the-top sandwich, that’s so wild you just have to try it at least once.
It’s on these decidedly wacky fast-food offerings that we’ll be focused on today, and mind you that, unlike, say, the infamous KFC Double Down, all of these over-the-top fast-food menu items are available at American fast-food chains at the time of this writing. So if you want to take a bite on the wild side, go for it. And fast, because it’s likely at least some of these eats aren’t long for these menus.
Now, if you want to take things to another level of wild, check out some fast-food menus at chains overseas.
This triple-patty burger from Wendy’s is so big it may require unhinging of the jaws to eat. With three slabs of meat (constituting three-quarters of a pound of beef) and three pieces of cheese this burger clocks in at an astounding 1,530 calories, 107 grams of fat, and 1,890 milligrams of sodium.
That being said, this sandwich is available now at Wendy’s and people love it, so much that it was brought back less than a year after leaving the menu. Just spilt it with a friend if you want to give it a try.
Burger King’s Chicken Fries have been around just long enough now that we kind of just shrug them off as normal, but let’s really think more closely about what these are: they are tubes of extruded chicken that have been breaded and deep-fried. Not only were the natural shapes of chicken pieces not good enough—like drumsticks or wings, e.g.—but nuggets weren’t sufficient, either, so BK created long, thin chicken tubes and called them fries.
A bowl of chili is delightful, and it’s made even tastier and more filling when cheese is added. Now, taking that chili and cheese out of the bowl and instead wrapping it in a tortilla? Why not? But that wasn’t good enough for Sonic, so the chain jammed handfuls of FRITOS corn chips into this wrap, too.
If you order this sandwich from Subway in its Footlong PRO variety, the one with double protein, it packs in a crisis-level 1,890 calories. Even the regular The Boss footlong has 1,230 calories. But that’s what happens when you add slices of pepperoni and hunks of mozzarella cheese to a meatball sub.
This 1,740-calorie collection of foods is like someone from Jack in the Box planned a menu item as they were actively falling off the side of a boat. “Just jam in curly fries and tiny tacos and onion rings and mini churros, I guess!” It’s literally that: it’s a box filled with several handfuls of each of those foods, plus some dipping sauces.
Found on In-n-Out’s famously not secret “secret” menu (it’s even called the Not So Secret Menu, FYI), the 4X4, also known as the Quad Quad, this burger is the one for those just not satisfied by a Double-Double. It’s four patties of ground beef (so yeah, a pound of meat, give or take) and four slices of cheese plus select toppings sandwiched between two buns.
The 16-Piece Bucket from Kentucky Fried Chicken is another menu item that has been around so long we rather take it for granted. But think more closely about what this really is: it’s 16 pieces of chicken, effectively constituting two entire chickens carved up, cooked, and tucked into a large cardboard tub.
So spicy that most people who love spicy foods are like: “Hey, that’s a bit too spicy,” this chicken sandwich from Arby’s is one of the few hot and spicy fast-food items that isn’t just playing around with its name. The heat comes from jalapeños, a “Diablo BBQ” sauce and “Diablo Bun,” and from a “Fiery Seasoning.”
Steven John
