For an extra $2 you can get one of the chain’s thick shakes ($4 normally), made from real scooped ice cream and quite tasty.īreakfast is much better than dinner or lunch, served only until 10:30 a.m., with the exception of the aforementioned breakfast burger, available all day. The fries are actually good, though they desperately need salt. Here’s where the menu takes an unexpected turn. This formidable $6 tuck-in also includes a giant beverage. The one shown includes a pair of two-patty sliders, french fries, a chocolate chip cookie, and a hot dog in a bun. Weird assortments of peripheral products like the sliders can be ordered in combination in the so-called All Star Meals. The grilled cheese breakfast sandwich is a fast food wonder. Random assortments of ingredients characterize the All Star Meals. Ditto with the sliders, which can be had with one, two, or three patties. Really, how the chain makes the beef so flavorless is a mystery. (Hey, isn’t that McDonald’s “special sauce”?) It’s really just more dry beef. original six dollar thickburger” ($5.99) also sports tomatoes and pickles, and comes slathered with mayo, mustard, and ketchup. By contrast, a burger that bombed was one from the third-pound premium class of burgers, all of which come stacked with a fair amount of lettuce (I guess that’s the California part), giving them a messy, jumbled appearance. It, at least, had significant moisture in its carefully folded omelet dabbed with ketchup, and cheese that, while not actually melted, was at least on the way to gooiness. The best burger of this mid-size type that I tried was the breakfast burger ($4.69). The barbecue sauce is just what you’d expect, but the whole effect is like eating autumn leaves: colorful but very low on flavor. The onion rings taste like they were fried long ago. The bacon is good, though the two strips amount to one in actual size. It doesn’t taste much like smoke and is dry as dust. This is one of the medium-sized burgers and the patty is curiously curlicued along its circumference, with little protruding spots on the grayish surface that look like warts. The burger is described on the website as “charbroiled all-beef patty, two strips of bacon, melted American cheese, two crispy onion rings, and tangy BBQ sauce on a seeded bun.” Do you want guac on your burger? Or jalapenos? Or teriyaki sauce? The current flagship of the fleet is the Western bacon cheeseburger ($4.90), flogged around the premises on colorful placards and napkin dispensers. The menu is daunting, and the burgers I tasted were uniformly awful. It’s your typical unhealthy hamburger chain, unless you eat only one meal a day. All are available in combo deals that keep the prices low, while allowing the calorie count to soar up to around 1800, which is nearly a day’s caloric allowance. These burgers, made with 100 percent Black Angus beef said to be flame grilled, are available in three types according to patty size, priced from $1 to $6. That menu is relentlessly hamburger oriented, with 15 choices. The underside of the breakfast burger shows off the patty’s gnarly aspects. The breakfast burger is the best Eater tried. Its parent company CKE Restaurants, which also owns Hardee’s, now owns more than 3,000 branches in 42 states and 28 countries.īehold the Western bacon cheeseburger. The next two branches, also in the LA area, were smaller and thus were dubbed Carl’s Jr. By 1945, they’d moved to Anaheim and reestablished the business as a drive-in barbecue. Since many New Yorkers may be unfamiliar with this chain, I thought you might need a quick primer: The chain was founded in Los Angeles as a hot dog cart in 1941 by Carl and Margaret Karcher. And, as is the case with Manhattan’s newest entrant Carl’s Jr., the food is frequently not even any good. Of course, both types of interloper displace our indigenous ma and pa eateries, entrap fellow citizens in low-paying jobs, import many of their raw materials from far away, and presumably send cash out of town in bulging sacks. Yet domestic chains also regularly appear and often provoke little interest. When foreign restaurant chains like Tim Ho Wan, Teremok, Nusr-et, Ichiran, and Sorbillo fly into town, they’re greeted with enthusiasm, getting write-ups everywhere.
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