Fast Food Potluck: Flagship Burger Tasting Event
Okay, so I still (yes, yes, I know) have a bunch of other posts I’m planning to put up, but here’s a quick one. Our friends Kai & Ingrid (newlyweds, congrats) are moving up to Seattle, and so we all decided to have a bit of a going away event for them. Mike Ho misremembered an idea that Kai had and decided that should be the event. Here’s Mike Ho’s version (which is what we actually did):
Every attendee goes to a different fast food burger joint and picks up a signature burger, fries and a shake. We bring them all back to one location and we split up everything so that people get to taste a bunch of different burgers/fries/shakes.
In actuality, it was a slight variation on this, as Ingrid actually doesn’t eat beef, so Kai & Ingrid got some chicken as well (Popeyes & KFC) and Hersh picked up some chicken at McDonald’s also. Also, James was running late and couldn’t find a Burger King (his assignment), so he showed up with Taco Bell instead.
In the end, we had food from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, In-N-Out, Carl’s Jr., KFC, Popeyes and Taxi’s (local burger joint, which is one step up from fast food). I think that was all… And we brought it all back to our house since it was somewhat centrally located. It was awesome:
So we cut up everything and ate:
Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and the consensus (surprising!) best bet if you want a completely good fast food meal: Carl’s Jr. (which I think is now Hardees on the east coast). They had, hands down, the best fries. They beat everyone else’s fries cleanly (to be fair, we didn’t have any Burger King food, and Hersh forgot to get fries from McD’s, so perhaps that was unfair). Also, the Carl’s Jr. burger was arguably the best of the bunch (though, there was some disagreement over that). So, there you go.
If we ever do this again (and we wouldn’t for a looooong time, even though it was fun), we’d probably make sure that Burger King and McD’s was fully represented. Also, we’d probably either refrigerate or freeze the shakes. We left them all out on the table too long, so by the time we dug into the shakes they were all pretty much melted — at which point they’re rather disgusting. Oh yeah, I had also picked up some grapes at Safeway, realizing that having some sort of fruit would probably be appreciated and it was, by almost all present. So, having some fruit on the table is not such a bad idea.
And, oh yeah, we also discovered that this wasn’t actually what Kai had been thinking about when he had suggested it to Mike Ho many years ago. Kai’s question was how would you craft a “fast food tasting menu” in terms of creating the best five-course fast food menu out there from any combination of fast food eateries. Of course, perhaps Mike was closer than we realized, since the only real way to craft such a menu would be to do something along the lines of what we did… Anyway, we had a blast. It was a fantastic idea by Mike and everyone had a bunch of fun (and a belly full of greasy fast food). Hope it was a fun sendoff for Kai and Ingrid! Enjoy Seattle and visit us often!
