The only problem I found with the double down was that it was not big enough. Pretty chintzy actually.....
The guy in front of me in line at the KFC on Monday placed his lunch order.
“And a heart attack on the side,” Lorenzo Miranda said.
Miranda and his co-worker William Cantin, electricians at Palm Beach International Airport, drove to the nearby fast-food restaurant to answer the siren call of yet another fat-laden, high-calorie manwich.
KFC’s Double Down, a bacon-and-cheese sandwich that uses two chicken breasts instead of a bun, went on sale Monday as the latest fast-food contender in what has become a kind of Gut Bomb Olympics.
“If you weren’t here eating the Double Down, what would you be eating?” I asked Cantin.
“The Baconator,” he deadpanned.
The Baconator is an 830-calorie burger from Wendy’s, which easily out-bloats the Double Down, which weighs in at a relatively lithe 540 calories in its original-recipe fried chicken form.
A more graceful approach to gluttony
But the Double Down’s caveman appeal isn’t in its size.
It’s a waif of a sandwich compared with Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, a 1,420-calorie assault that packs 108 grams of fat. And it’s not half the handful that the Burger King Quad Stacker is (1,010 calories and 62 grams of fat), or even the McDonald’s Angus Bacon and Cheese Burger (790 calories and 40 grams of fat).
The $4.99 Double Down is more of a sports-car model, a newcomer that takes you down the highway leading to the next belt loop with a new approach to unhealthy eating. Its concentrated 32 grams of fat and 1,380 milligrams of salt are kept sleek by its bun-less exterior, giving it the appearance of an oversize, crispy fat pill.
I ate mine while sitting at a table with construction workers Mike Pelfrey and Chris Couture, who both ordered Double Downs out of curiosity.
“I like it,” Pelfrey said. “I usually get wraps because I don’t like too much bread. With this, you’re just getting all the good stuff. Meat.”
Don’t eat it while driving
It’s a messy, greasy affair. You hold the Double Down as it’s cradled in a paper wrapper, eating your way through the two fried breast fillets that frame two slices of cheese, two strips of bacon and a mayonnaise-like ooze called “the Colonel’s secret sauce.”
Both hands end up fully lubricated by the task. It’s not a driver-friendly fast food.
KFC’s promotion says there’s “so much chicken, there wasn’t room for a bun.”
But I think of the Double Down more as an in-your-face stunt food, a creation so sure of its target audience that it doesn’t even bother to soften its image with a tomato sliver or a lettuce leaf.
“It’s like a fried chicken cordon bleu,” Couture said. “It’s good, but you wouldn’t want to eat it every day.”
If the Double Down catches on, there’s no telling how the other fast-food chains will answer.
If I had to guess, I’d predict something called bacon bread.
Instead of a bun, maybe fast-food sandwiches will soon be encased in two rectangular shapes formed by bacon strips woven together in a basket pattern.
And yes, I’ll be in line for that one, too.