Does Rintoul Stack Up?

A fool and his tummy are soon parted. That's the moral of today's story.

For those of you who don't know, my morning producer, T-mart, and I made a bet earlier this week on Game 3 of the Wings/Flames series. T-mart, an unabashed Flames fan, would have to eat yogurt (which he has never tried and is admittedly frightened of) if the Flames fell at home. If they won, I agreed to ingest the biggest and greasiest fast-food burger T-mart could find. He decided on the BK Quad Stacker: four patties, four slices of cheese and 8 strips of bacon.
Thanks to a couple of rare gaffes by Niclas Lidstrom, you can see who lost the bet. But I wasn't that worried. Because even though I don't eat much fast food anymore, the Whopper had been my favorite growing up. This couldn't be that different, right?


Just after noon earlier today, T-mart and I approached the register and he ordered the burger.

"1 Quad Stacker and 2 diet cokes, please."

"Two diet cokes and what?" responded the cashier. She wasn't a trainee. She obviously had never had anyone order this monstrosity before. Another cashier came over to help her find the correct button to ring it in. (For future reference, if the company is advertising a burger on the sign behind the register, but the cashier has never even heard of it, it's probably a bad investment.)

During this time, I had engaged another cashier in conversation as I wanted to wear the Burger King crown while I completed my task. She wondered why I wanted the crown, so I explained that I had lost a bet and had to eat a Quad Stacker as a result.

"A what?" she asked. 2 of 3 regulars had never even heard of the calorie-fest I was about to devour. Not good. When I pointed out the picture on the sign, her only reply was, "Good luck with that, buddy."

A couple of minutes later, it was time for business. With T-mart snickering in the background with camera-phone in hand, I took my first massive bite (not that easy considering the height of the creation).

All I could taste was bacon. But it wasn't that bad overall. A couple more giant chomps and I was no longer tasting bacon - just four flame-broiled patties smothered in cheese.

T-mart was getting pretty giddy about that time as he himself was a bit freaked out by the asthetics of the Stacker. You can see by this picture that it's not the most appealing entree that you've ever cast your eyes on. It doesnt taste bad, but it's a whole lotta burger. And I'm not a whole lotta person.

But a bet is a bet, and I was determined to live up to my end of the bargain. At one point, I'm pretty sure that T-mart felt bad for me as I shovelled this mass of ground beef, bacon and cheese down my pie-hole. Or maybe not.

About 4 or 5 bites from the end, my gut started to realize what was happening. It rumbled at me as if to ask, "What the hell are you doing up there?". I wasn't feeling as though I was going to hurl, but it wasn't exactly hitting the spot. More like smashing it with a 1,000-calorie sledge-hammer. I'm pretty sure the Double Stacker would be good, but the Quad is a heavyweight and I'm not fighting in that division quite yet.

But despite the onset of gut-rot, I finished Quadzilla. I'm not a believer in bulemia, but I was starting to see how you could make a case for it.


At the time of this post, it's been about 2 hours now since I polished off the Stacker, and it's still with me. In fact, it constantly reminds me that it's still with me. I'm sure I'll feel much less bloated as tonight's hockey game approaches. But I don't think I'll be recommending the Q-Stack on tomorrow's Best Bets. You need to be a Fast Food Black Belt to throw down the Quad, and I have clearly been weighed, measured and found wanting in that discipline. It has nothing to do with Burger King; I still give the King two thumbs up, especially the ads with the freaky-lookin', half-lifelike King turning up in strange places. But I need far more training to handle the Quad Stacker. Next time I'll be ordering Old Faithful - The Whopper.