Bun 19/30
Plump, butter toasted, fresh, with plenty of sesame seeds and light brown hemispheres balanced to the size of the patty… So why is this bun just meh?! This is a reasonable bun prepared with care and it should have a higher than average score, but I’m gonna hit this bun with a couple of sand bags and say that it is not the mothers milk of hamburgers buns.

Meat 18/30
Flat grilled and seasoned well enough, but a little overdone. Taken off the grill 45 seconds earlier and it would have been perfectly juicy, embracing fully what it is about fresh not frozen meat that makes me as happy as a 14 year old boy discovering MAXIM magazine. Weird, I just noticed that MAXIM and HOOTERS both use all caps to brand themselves… OMFG we did too on the BURGER QUEST blog. I AM YELLING IN CAPS TO LET YOU KNOW THAT THE GUYS FROM BURGER QUEST ARE TOTALY INTO BURGERS LIKE HOOTERS AND MAXIM ARE ALL ABOUT FUN BAGS.

What was I talking about? Oh right; HOOTERS burger meat…… Ew, That sounds so wrong.

Toppings 23/30
(LOL I just said toppings in reference to hooters. Get it? Get it?)

Standard toppings: shredded lettuce, tomato slices, white onion rings and a dill pickle spear are served fresh and chilled to a temperature that will give you a set of high beams. They come along side your burger in a shallow wicker basket lined with checker parchment. Catsup and mustard bottles are brought to the table along with another shallow basket holding your cutlery, wet naps and a few mayo and relish packs. It’s kinda like a Kinder surprise approach for burgers. Maybe this is the family fun our jug model/waitress was telling me about.

I chose, like most quests, to go with a classic style burger with bacon and cheese. The bacon had enough thickness, salt and smoke to peek through every now and again so it must be ok, right ? I got daring with my cheese and went with the provolone option instead of Swiss or American cheese. I know that provolone works with Italian cold cuts, but the provolone offered up for my burger at HOOTERS tasted like someone was farting in my mouth between bites. It was grosser than saying HOOTERS burger meat. Let me temper my disgust by saying It was a bad choice on my part. I can’t hold HOOTERS accountable for the fart catching pallets of their clientele. Which reminds me, I need to watch Human Centipede 2.

Other considerations
I know I’ve taken the low road with this quest, but I can’t help but think that you’re supposed to a little bit at HOOTERS. To be fair, the only thing that seemed truly perverse about the experience is that every sauce you get at HOOTERS comes hermetically sealed in plastic containers. Makes you wonder if in the past they have had problems with disgruntled staff practicing nut dipping.

Unfortunately all the Freudian weirdness seems to have neutralized my ability to take much more than an average stance on this burger. I would suggest it is worth the experience alone to draw your own conclusions. So pack the family up and get on down to HOOTERS for some good ol’ family fun. Don’t forget to pick up an extra extra small HOOTERS wife beater on the way out for Sally and bring a sweater to wrap around Billy’s waist to cover up his pokey pants.

Final Evaluation: What would you do to have one of these again?
I would go online and research more synonyms for breasts to eat is burger again.

The other side of this is that the waitresses are clearly trained to engage you in conversation as much as possible. It’s like Earl’s, but way worse. Instead of having our intense and deep conversations about burgers, we ended up having to engage the waitress and pregnant restaurant manager in conversation on seven different occasions. Yah, you read that correctly, the manager was pregnant.

Bun 20/30
The bun was not bad. It had nice texture and it adequately did the job it was set out to do. My bun was not toasted, but I think that may have happened because the cook who was responsible for preparing the burgers was busy flirting with the one attractive waitress. Hey, cook, get your priorities straight. High quality burger first, failed attempts to impress the lady second.

Meat 15/30
The patty had the right thickness and was prepared well, but it had a distinct taste. This taste, and it’s not exclusive to Hooters, is kind of the taste of a factory. I am not sure how to explain this. It’s like when you walk into WalMart. That place smells like a Chinese factory. Or Sears, it just smells like Sears. By the way, how is Sears still in existence? It seems that the only people in Sears are middle aged men who wander aimlessly to eventually end up near the bra aisle. Wait a minute…Hooters…Sears…middle aged men…bras…I think I just figured out the next restaurant inside store partnership. McDonalds in WalMart, you have met your match. Anyway, the meat tastes like a Chinese factory and I don’t particularly enjoy it.

Toppings 18/30
Not bad, not great. Hooters does something interesting though, which is why I score them above the midpoint on this one for trying. They do not put any of the toppings directly on the burger. They leave them on the side and allow you to construct the burger in your preferred way. Not a bad idea and it took me back to the days of Fuddruckers, but in the end it tells me that they are not confident enough to present a constructed burger to you. It’s almost like they are insecure in their burger construction. Insecurity at Hooters, why I never would of thought…

Other considerations
Part of the construct your burger project includes putting your own sauces on the burger. This would be great, except for the fact that some of the sauces come in packets. I can’t rage out again on why it is just plain stupid to serve packets at a sit down restaurant. I lack the energy, and frankly I am pretty much at the point where if I get packets at a sit down place I am just going to leave instead of letting the rage boil inside me.

Also, a special sauce was served with Wunder Bun’s order of rings and we could not identify it. Neither could the servers. I was going to taste it, but Wunder Bun dipped his finger in the sauce before I had a chance to try it. I’m talking all the way to the first joint. So that was that.

Final Evaluation: What would you do to have one of these again?
Given that Hooters is next to the Back Alley and the Dream Centre, I would have to be coming out of prison, go to a Kim Mitchell show, and then be hungry enough to wander over to Hooters to have a burger. So, you know, hopefully never.

Here’s a little taste:
Waitress: So guys what’s up…you hanging out here for the afternoon?
BQ Guys: Naw we gotta go back to work
Waitress: Oh man that suuuucks
BQ Guys: Yup
Waitress: Yup
BQ Guys: Yup
Waitress: So….
BQ Guys: Yeah

***30 seconds of award silence***

Waitress: So….you guys try the wings here?

And on and on. And to be honest it was really Wunder Bun stepping up to carry on the conversation while Flavour Sabre and I quietly sat in the booth waiting for the pain to end and trying to make sure the eye contact was being strictly maintained. Sounds fun, eh?

Maybe some guys like this type of thing. I don’t. I hate it. I’m there to hang out with my burger-quest mates and talk about…you guessed it…burgers. Leave me alone. I’m the kind of chump that will give you a generous tip even if you get my order wrong, over-charge me and insult my mother….so just stop trying so damn hard.

Bun 20/30
Not much to talk about here – this is a pretty safe burger on a pretty safe bun.

Meat 21/30
I was pleasantly surprised when it came to the quality of the meat on the burger. This is a hand-pressed non-frozen patty. Hooter’s primary clientele probably don’t care too much about the quality of the food, so it would be all-too-easy for them to default to the pre-formed frozen hockey pucks that we’ve seen too often on our quests. But this is a fresh burger that some care has been put into. Not bad.

Toppings 22/30
Hooters is the Ikea of the burger world….some assembly is required.

Your burger is delivered bare bones, with all of the toppings included separately on your plate including the condiments, lettuce, tomato, etc. This allows you to control the quantity and placement of each. I do have to mention that the length of the pickle (feel free to make your own dirty joke here) rendered it completely useless in terms of actually putting it on your burger.

I chose the mushroom swiss burger and while the ‘shrooms were quite tasty, the swiss cheese didn’t taste like swiss at all.

Other considerations
Remember when you were a kid and no one really paid much attention to salt content? You would go to McD’s and chow down on fries that had been absolutely CAKED in salt? Well if you want a little nostalgic taste of days gone by go to Hooters. These fries are the saltiest I’ve tasted on BQ to date.

Finally for the love of Pete, someone tell Heinz to fix their E-Z Squeeze bottles. There is nothing “E-Z” about them unless you dig having a jet-powered stream of ketchup come forth out of the bottle with no ability to actually control the quantity of it, or where it is going. Bite me Heinz. You own a virtual monopoly on the ketchup world, but that doesn’t mean you get to shove cruddy ideas down our throats.

Final Evaluation: What would you do to have one of these again?
I’m just not cut out for this place despite the fact that the burger itself was somewhat of a pleasant surprise.

But I definitely felt like I needed a shower after our trip. I’m 36 years old now and perhaps it just scares the crap out of me to be seen as a middle-aged creep who’s weekly highlight is a trip to Hooters. If I ever get to that point, I’m just going to go “full perv” and hit the strippers for the lunch buffet. That at least feels authentic.