The new menu of the Las Vegas restaurant belonging to celebrity douche-chef Guy Fieri has already made several heaving rounds on the internet, and while many have the courage to laugh at such offerings as pepperoni wrapped breadsticks known as Guy-talian Fondue Dippers, few have the courage to try them. And even fewer have the intestinal fortitude to conquer the Cheesecake Challenge. That’s a dessert, not a fraternity initiation ritual that ends in barfing.
KNPR’s Andrew Kiraly bravely took on three of the most insane items on Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen’s menu — the aforementioned Fondue Dippers, something called a “Mac n’ Cheese Bacon Burger” that a waiter strained to carry with one hand and, for dessert, something called the Cheesecake Challenge. The menu describes the Cheesecake Challenge as “a mountain” of cheesecake, but turns out, even the overwrought-sounding description wasn’t enough to do it justice.
It is literally half a cheesecake. As in, if you purchased two of them, it would be an entire cheesecake. This is a dessert item on a menu for people who are not overtly interested in slowly killing themselves with food.
Kiraly writes about his encounter with the Cheesecake Challenge thusly:
It is half a cheesecake studded with pretzels and potato chips, then zigzagged with a drizzle of hot fudge. But the telling, crucial detail is how the half-cheesecake is presented. Instead of sitting flat — commonsense, quotidian, even jejune — the cheesecake is set on its edge like a wheel, so it presents itself as a sort of runaway half of a dirty and broken Thundarr the Barbarian moon that’s been ripped out of orbit by cosmic forces beyond our reckoning.
An entire. Half. Cheesecake. Covered with potato chips and pretzels and hot fudge. And it’s called a challenge. Was this menu item designed entirely with journalists getting their jollies from gonzo reporting on garbage food in mind? Is it for soccer teams? Is it for entire tables of people who have all just gone through rough breakups?
No matter how you slice it, it sounds more like a Cheesecake Ordeal.
Images via Eater/Twitter