The New Chili’s Burger Has 1,650 Calories and Is Bigger Than Your Head

We live in an age of dining excess. Once relatively standard fare consisting of ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and condiments, America’s burgers now routinely border on the grotesque. Unless your burger adds on more exotic meats and/or overwhelms the eater with sodium and fat, you are simply howling into the void.

The newest burger offering from Chili’s, simply titled “The Boss”, is the latest entry into our cannon of bloated behemoth burgers. After a trial period in April, the restaurant that sings to us its siren song of babyback ribs has deemed the meal safe for human consumption.

Featuring five different meats and weighing in at 1,650 calories, it is not so much a burger as an attempt to explore the outer reaches of what one’s body can tolerate in a single sitting. If promotional photos are any indication, the Boss is served with a knife skewered through it, as if to warn potential diners of its danger and ward off the faint of heart.

Unnaturally wedged between two buns, anyone willing to submit themselves to The Boss will find jalape?o-cheddar smoked sausage, rib meat, brisket, bacon, and a half-pound ground beef patty that merely serves to ensure this carnivorous offering qualifies as a burger. Cheddar cheese, barbecue sauce and ranch imbue the dish with oozy and gooey qualities. Lettuce and tomato rest at the bottom, the vegetables straining under the weight of the meat, pathetic offerings at the altar of proper nutrition.

The Boss owes its existence to a burger arms race from which we may never truly escape. “The bar for an exceptional burger keeps getting higher and higher,” Chili’s Chief Marketing Officer Steve Provost told Nation’s Restaurant News. “Well, at almost half a foot tall—and with bacon and rib meat and sausage and brisket stacked on top of our one half pound of burger meat—it's hard to get any higher than The Boss.”

We are slaves to our most carnal desires. Chili’s latest burger simply provides us with the means for us to satisfy some of them, however fleetingly. Perhaps one day we will be free from the freakish foods that America’s fast casual chains inflict upon us in their desperate attempt to woo millennials willing to trade indigestion for Instagram likes. For now, we give our thanks to The Boss and feast, praying for salvation.