Food
Top 10 Things You Should NEVER Order from Burger King According to the Internet
Outside of McDonald’s the most famous and “American” of fast food restaurants is Burger King, that diabetic cousin of the Queen of England. From their flame-broiled burgers to their… Flame broiled burgers, people love Burger King, for good reasons. But from the people that have either worked there or that have spent time actually analyzing what happens to the food inside your body all seem to come to similar conclusions, that there’s a lot on the Burger King menu that isn’t necessarily safe for human consumption. So, we scoured the dark web, where all the hipster food critics and jaded former fast food workers lurk, to find the Top 10 Burger King menu items that you probably should stop ordering.
10. Anything
Sadly, this list has a few entries that basically either imply or state outright that you shouldn’t order anything from Burger King. A lot of that is based on the state of the workers or their actions, from drug use or employees that serve food that has fallen on the floor. Other entries show you just how close you’re getting to being violently ill by ordering certain menu items like most anything chicken (breaded or grilled) and we assume the veggie burger, because it’s a veggie burger. However, if you really spend time looking into Burger King on sites like Consumer Affairs you’ll see that they have an abysmal record there. They have a grand total of 1.5 stars out of five (which is actually better than that of it’s rival/big brother in McDonald’s, which has 1.25 stars). Now, you have to keep in mind that people that have decent to good meals don’t think to themselves that they’re going to log onto a site like Consumer Affairs, create an account, validate their email address and then post a 3 star review of their Whopper Jr. Sites like these tend to appeal to people who have an emotional reason for jumping through the hoops that it takes to actually post and clearly there’s no better motivator in that sense than anger. Even taking that into account, though, it’s alarming to see exactly why people are complaining about Burger King on that site and most of it boils (or should I said broils down to?) food poisoning. Sure, most restaurants will deal with food poisoning at some point but of the 50 complaints this year alone, most were about foodborne illness. That’s just nasty.
9. Anything from the Secret Menu
If you’ve spent any time online you’ll have heard the myth that every fast food place has a secret menu that you can order from. The reality of that is that employees can and do make non-menu items for themselves on break (because you can really only eat so many Whoppers and considering how much Burger King pays it’s employees, they basically have to take advantage of their one free meal a day) and some of those items have been leaked to the public but it’s not like they actually have some company-wide secret menu for VIPs. It’s really just the fact that you can ask them to really make anything you want, based on the ingredients the store has. So, if you want a Whopper Jr. with a Veggie Burger patty on top of it, you can order that but it’s not like the cashier will say “Welcome VIP-Brother! Ah, yes! The “BEst of Both Worlds Burger coming right up!”. So while you definitely can order stuff like that it turns out that it really, really pisses off the employees that work at Burger King (or any fast food place). The reason behind that is that it takes a lot of extra work to make something that they’re not used to making (especially if you’re asking them to make multiple patties), it also means they have to make it fresh which takes longer and that oftentimes they’ll end up having to clean things up as you’re mixing all sorts of sauces and pattie prep stations that otherwise wouldn’t be used at the same time. Beyond that, it becomes hard to actually figure out what to charge someone for these burgers, so it basically is a gigantic inconvenience from top to bottom for those working at Burger King and unless your idea of a secret menu item is a Whopper Jr. covered in human spit, perhaps give this idea a rest.
8. Never Order Any Ice Cream if You’ve Got Food Allergies (Namely to Certain Kinds of Fruit)
It really must be both terrifying and exhausting being someone with a deadly food allergy. While you can save yourself by jabbing yourself in the leg with an epi-pen, thank god, the fact that you always have to have one with you and also you have to make a big deal about the food you order basically everywhere, has to get old. We’re saying that it’s exhausting for those dealing with it, not the food industry workers, whose job it is to deal with all sorts of requests and questions. However, sometimes people don’t really realize how much cross-contamination can occur in a kitchen, just watch any kitchen inspection by Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmare, as one of the cardinal rules that all chefs learn is to never have cooked and raw meat on the same or adjacent shelves as the bacteria from the uncooked meat can end up on the cooked meat, which basically makes it as if it was never cooked in the first place in terms of how sick it can make you. That cross-contamination can occur in other ways and there’s one that you’d think that Burger King should be forced to fix, based on the American’s with Disabilities Act. That happens because Burger King uses the same machine to make it’s fruit smoothies as it does it’s shakes and ice cream. So, if you think you’re ordering a vanilla ice cream cone and are deathly allergic to things like grapes or strawberries, you may actually be ingesting the remnants of those fruits as basically the same nozzle that the ice cream came out of was just also pushing out fruit goo. That’s something that is terrifying and would make me really never let my kids eat out anywhere, if I had a kid with a food allergy (or kids at all… :(). Maybe that’s why the Burger King mascot is a mute that has a facial expression frozen on his face. He had a stroke after eating what he thought was a vanilla shake.
7. The Burger King Veggie Burger
A lot of the entries on this list may seem obvious to most of you, but the fact that they exist on the menu at Burger King means that some people are ordering these items and the number one item that seems out of place is the Burger King Veggie Burger. Burger King is known for… You guessed it, Burgers so it may come as a surprise to many of you that they actually offer a veggie burger, which is basically a vegetable patty that’s crammed full of chemicals in the hopes that it’ll taste sort of like flame-broiled meat or perhaps that it’ll kill you. The iffy-ness of those chemicals are one reason you shouldn’t order the veggie burger, but there are a few more. Like most every other entry on this list, few people go to a place known for gigantic delicious burgers and order a veggie burger, that’d be like going to Disney Land and only riding the toilet, which means that the burgers that are made end up sitting under that heat lamp sometimes for hours, which dries out the already (we assume) super dry clump of tofu and sadness. Beyond that, apparently they smell AWFUL. According to a former Burger King employee on Reddit, whenever they’d microwave a veggie patty (microwaved patties… Yum?) it’d stink up the entire kitchen. Just imagine what that means when it’s time for you to revisit your meal about 12-24 hours later. At least the chemicals blocked your body from actually digesting any of it.
6. The Burger King Fish Sandwich
At one point on this list I mentioned that Burger King (thank god, I said) didn’t serve seafood That’s something that isn’t really true, as they do have a fish sandwich on their menu (I was more referring to shellfish, to be fair… To me) something that sounds like a bad idea from the word jump. Like most things on this list, the problem comes from the fact that people just don’t order enough of these monstrosities and that means that if you’re the type of person that really loves fish sandwiches from Burger King, you’ve got an additional problem to deal with (outside of whatever happened in your life that made you eat seafood at Burger King) is that, for obvious reasons, people just don’t order enough of these. There’s a reason that President Trump likes eating at fast food places like Burger King and especially McDonald’s and that’s because most of the food is prepared in batches, allowing the food to be… What’s the word? Oh yeah, fast. That means that sometimes you’ll get a sandwich that’s been sitting under that heat light for hours, sort of like President Trump under his 80’s era tanning booth… Which also explains why he likes fast food. A former Burger King employee said of the Fish Sandwich:
“THAT is sitting in it’s [sic] little mesh pan above the fryer for hours on end — dare I say days — a batch of 8+ just waiting for the one person a day that will order one or two.”
Yum.
5. The Whopper Jr.
It may come as a surprise to hear that one of the more popular (at least in terms of name recognition) menu items is actually one of the top named things you shouldn’t order at Burger King. now, keep in mind that a lot of these comments from former Burger King workers can be biased or something that happened at their restaurant and thus might not happen at every other location. However, there are a few people online that state that you should never order the Whopper Jr., which apparently is closer to the red-headed step-child of the Whopper than the favorite son that we all thought it was. The real problem comes from the fact that they prepare a lot of them but people don’t order enough for them for the times to line up correctly. Just listen to this confessional from a previous Burger King employee, who when talking about the Whopper Jr. said:
“Never never never buy the whopper junior, not enough people buy them so they just sit out and go bad. They take to [sic] long to make fresh and managers get a bonus check when they have a low enough time so they tell the workers to just use the super old ones that have gone nasty.”
While you’d think that they’d figure out how many people actually order Whopper Jr’s during an average shift and adjust their numbers accordingly… Just read the next entry on this list and you’ll realize why that might not be the case.
4. Anything from Burger King on 4/20
Now, don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a little bit of weed during your time off and while you have to empathize with people working at fast food restaurants, it’s never a great idea to smoke weed while you’re on the job. While Burger King workers aren’t going into surgery or anything, if this list proves anything there are a few ways that if they don’t do their job correctly they can actually make a lot of people sick, or even kill them. Undercooked food is really, really dangerous as is a lack of hygeine from workers in the food industry, which can spread things like E. Coli or worse. Burger King is a huge corporation that takes what it does seriously, so it was actually pretty surprising to hear from Reddit user Kypperstyx that not only were most of the employees high at work (which isn’t a huge surprise, I guess) but that it was something that the managers allowed to happen AT WORK. When asked about drugs at work, he responded:
“Most of them. Only work friends I didn’t associate with them outside of work. I’ve never done drugs. Ive never even drank honestly. I’m just not into it. Our managers were cool with employees going out to the dumpster area and smoking weed on break because it helped them work faster and be more focused.”
3. Anything from a Burger King where they Wear Hats Like This
Every so often there are former fast food workers on the IamA section of Reddit (which stands for I am A… and also Ask Me Anything) who bear their souls and basically make you never want to eat food that you didn’t prepare yourself. One such former worker posted the above image as “proof” that he worked at a Burger King in [location redacted]. Someone asked the typical question of whether or not the former worker (whose username was Kypperstyx) said that while he had never seen that, there was a guy that worked (and apparently still works) there that used to serve food that was dropped on the ground. He said:
“We never had anyone that would spit in food but we did have one guy who is the only one I’ve worked with that would pick up food he dropped onto the floor and still serve it. He’s been there around 5 years now.”
Yuck.
2. Eggs from Burger King
Beyond chicken (see the numer one entry on this list), the number one food that people think of when it comes to food poisoning is probably eggs (or undercooked seafood, but Burger King doesn’t serve seafood, thankfully). While they’re relatively easy to cook, there’s something that seems off about ordering anything egg related at a fast food joint, unless you’re ordering a breakfast sandwich with those weird circular eggs inside of them because those are objectively delicious and worth risking your lower intestine for. When asked what never to order at Burger King a former employee of the King on Reddit mentioned the eggs, stating:
“I’m not very comfortable with how the eggs are made in the morning. They have a piece of equipment that you spray non-stick onto and lay down the metal grid then fill it up evenly with this liquid egg mix and BAM! in about a minute you have 6 eggs. I realize a lot of places probably do that but it’s so strange to me.”
That’s strange to us, as well.
1. Anything Chicken Related… Especially Grilled Chicken at Burger King
Perhaps this should go without saying, but you probably shouldn’t order something at a fast food joint that if undercooked it can either make you very sick or even kill you. When people think of food born illness the first thing they think of is chicken, and so it perhaps shouldn’t surprise you that former employees of Burger King have said that you probably should skip ordering grilled chicken sandwiches or salads, as they take forever to cook and oftentimes are undercooked. Beyond that, the chicken tenders and breaded chicken sandwiches also take a long time to make, which means if you’re trying to actually get your food… FAST, then you might want to skip anything chicken related at Burger King. An anonymous former Burger King worker said:
“If you’re really short on time, don’t count on chicken tenders or grilled chicken sandwiches or salads being made quickly at Burger King. I remember that the tenders took forever to cook and we didn’t really make them that often, so most times they were made to order. Same for the grilled chicken.”