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Here's the deal. The wait was agonizing. It was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Or the sixty-four dollar question. Or the eleven dollar and forty five cent question. Was my order going to come out right? The crew in the back sounded new. New is bad. They performed procreational unions on nearly every delivery, right and left. The old dude that ordered the fish got the chicken. The old dude that ordered the chicken got the other old dude's fish. Hey I don't blame them for that, those old dudes all look the same, right?
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Yeah, I'm going to eat like I mean it. I mean it. That means either grabbing the sports section of the paper in the breakroom as a place mat, or cleverly formulating my own out of available stock. Pretty good huh. Now...
ON THAT SALAD.
That is a topic in itself. You see, Carl's used to have two sizes of salad. An entree salad with chicken on it in a large round tub, and a small side salad in a small round tub. Now, they only have one size, in a medium sized square tub. The only difference between the side salad and the entree salad is one has meat on it and the other doesn't. But it's an awkward size. It's a bit too big to be a side salad, and it's too small to be an entree salad. I get why they do this, they only want to stock one size of salad containers plus the square ones are cheaper to ship as they maximize volumetric efficiency. It just doesn't really work all that well for the customer. But, whatever.
OKAY, THE BURGER
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The 'heft' of the total package was, I won't say it was commanding but it wasn't disappointing either. Now... the first thing that struck me was that the pork baby back rib-thing was small. Agonizingly small. There is a reason why they didn't just offer a baby back rib sandwich, standalone. It would have taken a minimum of four of those things to pull it off. Maybe I got the short stick? Compare this picture with the one in the original post. I suspect I got the norm (no relation to the notable classic sitcom alcoholic) and not the deviation.
Now... to their credit - it was actually a genuine piece of rib. Actual pork meat. Not ground, shredded, processed and reformulated a la Mickey D's or the standard air show 'ribb' sandwiches. It's just, there was so little of it that it was kind of pointless. Can you taste it? You can. A little. But, the same weight in bacon would have gone much further, flavor wise. The other thing is it was drowned in some horrid sweet sauce that just didn't quite do it for me. It was tolerable but not really my thing. I think some kind of steak sauce might have added a better flavor combination. I love beef, I love ribs, but I can't really say the tastes are complementary when eaten together. Definitely not like the beef-bacon relationship.
The zinger... I like cheeseburgers. There is no cheese on this burger, in any form. Some pepperjack would have been nice. Maybe blue cheese crumbles. They do have a guacamole bacon burger that does not have cheese on it, and it works as the guacamole serves as a functional substitute and the overall taste is very good. I won't say the baby back rib sandwich was bad tasting, it was just... off a bit, and missing something. And that damned goo for sauce.
A note on the onion-thingies. Those are not onion rings, they are onion crisps, sort of like when the onions get to f'd up to make functional rings they turn them in to those. They aren't bad, the accompany the burger fine. Actual onion rings, aka the Bacon Western Cheeseburger, would have served just as well. Better, actually. Oh yeah, let's talk about that Bacon Western Cheeseburger, if they would have used the same sauce on the BBR burger, and not too much, it would have been FINE.
Let's do a cost analysis. A premium burger of the same type is roughly a dollar less than the BBR Burger. The way the math works out then, correspondingly is that the BBR Burger is dollar more than the premium burger of the same type. One can infer by deductive reasoning that you are paying approximately one dollar for the piece of rib. And, you are getting about one dollar's worth of rib. So, I can't say it's a bad value, even though the R to B ratio is saddeningly disproportionate.
They did at one time have a very similar promo burger, with what they claimed was brisket on it, and what was actually tasteless goo that might have had meat in it but you couldn't tell and there wasn't much of it. To be fair, the tiny piece of rib, was actually rib.
Bottom line, would I get it again? Maybe if it was a third of the price. Anyway you break it down, eight bucks and change for a fast food burger is pricey, period.
Now, THERE IS A HACK which you can use to get the price down a tad. I should have just done it in the first place but I needed a representative specimen for the review. You can get a double 1/4 pound, instead of 1/3 or 1/2 lb 'Thickburger' and it's cheaper than either. Arguably probably better too.
The old dudes were still bitching about eating the wrong fish vs. chicken sandwiches when I left.
