Shelby's Life and Whatnot

That's What A Hamburger is All About

I clicked on Yahoo's homepage which is where I go for my news headlines, and their feature article was "Restaurant's Secret Menu." I immediately knew who they were talking about: In-N-Out, of course!

In-N-Out is a fast food restaurant chain in California, Nevada, and Arizona. To understand the secret menu you must understand In-N-Out's regular menu. It goes like this:

Hamburger
Cheeseburger
Double-Double (two meat patties, two cheese)
Fries (one size only)
Soda (small, medium, large)
Shakes (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry)

That's it. That's the entire menu. Life is not hard at In-N-Out. Naturally you can specify your burger toppings. They are lettuce, tomato, "spread" (basically thousand island dressing), and onions, which you can get raw or grilled.

And then there's the secret menu. The secret menu is basically variations of the above. For example, you can get as many meat patties and cheese slices as you like by using the formula "[# of patties] by [# of cheese slices]." So you could ask for a 3-by-3 and get 3 of each, or a 4-by-7 and get 4 patties and 7 slices of cheese, or whateverthehell you want. As a result, sometimes you get dumbasses who think they're being all clever or original with things like this:

That's a 20-by-20. Feel free to roll your eyes now. You can also get your burger "Animal Style" which is where they grill in mustard as they're cooking it, or a "Wish Burger" which has no meat--it just wishes it were a burger. And those are just a few of the choices.

In-N-Out even makes fun of the legendary secret menu on their website here, but the funny thing is that those aren't all the secret items--there's more. I guess that's the secret-secret menu.