Last updated on April 12th, 2017
I try to be a food-snob, I really do, but it seldom works for long. Despite years of education, and my wife’s best attempts to refine me, I remain a regular guy with regular guy tastes — such as, for instance, the Bacon Cheeseburger at our local Red Robin. (For the record, I get nothing from that restaurant chain except the food I pay for.)
Red Robin calls this a “Gourmet” burger. I’m not sure what criteria a gourmet burger has to meet, or even if I care. It’s a good sandwich — a hefty low-carb meal you can hold in your hand.
However, I recommend the two-handed approach. It’s safer that way.
As shown in the above photo, the burger itself is invisible in a cocoon of ice-berg lettuce. Red Robin does use a lot of lettuce for their lettuce-wrapped burgers! Trust me, though, the meat was in there. The sandwich provided me with about 760 calories, most of it coming from the bacon, beef and cheese. It contained 57g of fat, 40g of protein, 6g of carbs, and 3g of fiber. I had them hold the mayo, which would have contributed more fat, but most likely in the form of soy oil. I avoid soy and other vegetable oils whenever possible.
For a side-dish, I had a cup of steamed broccoli.
Anita also went lettuce-wrapped, but with the Fiery Ghost Big Tavern burger. She likes her some heat.
As you can see, she kept the foil around her sandwich, which shows both her intelligence and grace.
Her burger came with both fresh and fried jalapenos, and so was a bit carby. When I gently pointed that out, helpful soul that I am, I got a look of disdain in return. Or perhaps it was a look of contempt; I have trouble telling those two apart. Anyway, I’m grinning like an idiot in the above photo to hold back my tears.
Anita’s Tavern burger provided about 550 calories, 40g of fat, 32g of protein, 16g of carbs, and 3g of fiber.
It was a good day. Our daughters were with us, but I won’t describe what they ate. Lets just say that by the standards of most diners at Red Robin, their meals fit the definition of “regular” better than mine did.
I was surprised to see, on RR website how many carbs most of their burgers have. A lot were in the hundreds! Surely that all can’t be accounted for by just the bun??
Harry — I see what you mean. Quite a few of the big burgers have carb counts over 100g with the bun. Some are in the 90s and 80s. I think most of the carbs are in the bun, but ketchup, other sugary sauces, and even tomato and onion would add some carbs. The problem is, the Red Robin nutrition customizer is apparently being updated and isn’t available right now. So we can’t break down the burgers the way I was doing a couple years ago. The fine-print, static PDF is rather useless for our purposes. Thanks for alerting me! I’m going to keep checking their site.