Beat the Meat: City Café’s Ultimate Burger Challenge

As a student of six years, with the bank account to show for it, I look for two things when eating out: cheap food (preferably free) in portions large enough that it doesn’t matter I’ll be living on lettuce sandwiches and half-eaten bowls of nachos I find abandoned in Teviot the rest of the week.

So when I heard Edinburgh’s City Café offers the Ultimate Burger Challenge meal for free if you complete it, I had to try it.

The Ultimate Burger consists of beef, chicken and beanburgers, salad, pineapple, gherkins, lettuce and cheese in a bun with coleslaw and fries. You have to finish it within 45 minutes.

The café’s chef claims it contains “anything from 3000 to 5000 calories” and none of the restaurant workers have ever tried it. It’s just “too much food”, apparently.

However, I went with fellow Tab scribe Maria to take it on. How hard could it be, we asked ourselves?

Answer: very.

At first it didn’t seem bad; the burgers arrived (mine the original version; Maria’s the vegetarian) and, wearing comfortable clothes (Maria) and having eaten only apples the day before (me), we tucked in.

At first it was enjoyable; everything individually would have made a great meal, but together it was like the nutritional equivalent of climbing Arthur’s Seat in Primark heels: time-consuming, nauseating and fairly dangerous. Soon, I hit a meat-and-carb-mush wall, stopping before I threw up on the Formica tabletop (as, apparently, at least one person has before. Lovely.)

Maria, however, was faring rather better, managing almost everything before being defeated by the coleslaw. The waitress later said she hadn’t seen a female competitor do better.

Maybe the secret to this challenge is to go for the vegetarian option. There are are fewer toppings and you’ll be saved what can only be described as the Meat Shits later on in the day.

Sadly, neither of us stand among the eight conquerors of the Ultimate Burger Challenge (out of 110 competitors). We left without our pictures on the Wall of Fame. But they do give you a doggy bag for any unfinished food, so I won’t have to pinch chips from abandoned plates in Pleasance Bar for another few days – as long as I can bring myself to look at yet another burger.