Wendy's Baconator

I was a big fan of Wendy's Spicy Baconator: pepper Jack cheese, chipotle sauce, pickled jalapeño slices - a nice hot kick, but not really a big burn unless you were a total pepper wuss. The standard Baconator - a double bacon cheeseburger with six strips of bacon - isn't even in the same league.

Unfortunately, the spicy version's been discontinued, which has led to some confusion among my friends who read my original blog entry about it. Some of them have gone to Wendy's, gotten the regular version, and then said to me, "What's with you and the Baconator? It's just a bacon cheeseburger."

This is what's with me and the Baconator: Nothing. I wrote about the Spicy Baconator, and the two are not the same. They're not even comparable. But in the interest of seeing just what the deal is with the Baconator, I stopped into the local Wendy's and got one. They sure look good in that picture there, don't they? (That picture is from a Wendy's press release.)

He's what I actually got. Yeah, I know it's an old joke about how fast food never looks as good as the picture on the menu, but still. This thing looks like it was put together by throwing the pieces across the room.

The burgers were fairly typical Wendy's square patties, done just on the pink side of medium well, with the standard fast-food orange cheese slices. There were six slices of bacon, but if I wanted to really nit-pick, the slices are half the size of the ones you fry at home, so you're not fooling anyone, Wendy.

I took the burger apart and re-stacked it to make it a little less disgusting to eat. It was amazingly average - nothing about the Baconator stands out as any better than any competing product. In fact, if it were a head-to-head against a sandwich like the Burger King bacon double cheeseburger, I'd go with the BK version. Yes, there's less bacon on it, but the patties are flame broiled, and that's worth many points over a griddle-fried burger any day of the week.