The Four Horseman have just crested the Sierra Nevadas and are currently barreling toward Phoenix.
Once there, Death will head straight to the Heart Attack Grill Diet Center, where a lot of his work is already being done. Famine will hang around outside town, feeling lonely and trying to buy the Coyotes.
The Heart Attack Grill gets a lot of credit for audacity, though not much for good sense. Its latest promotion offers a free meal to all customers weighing more than 350 lbs.
If you’d like to save money on groceries (and spend three times that much on antihypertensives), you’ll be able to reach your goal alarmingly quickly on a diet of “Double Bypass Burgers” and “Flatliner Fries.”
If you have a stubbornly efficient metabolism, upgrade to the Quadruple Bypass Burger – 2 lbs of beef, three layers of cheese and four bacon rashers adding up to an Elvis-esque 8,000 calories.
“Along with a cold beer and cigarette, it’s a diet you can stick to for life,” their ads promise.
Yes, ‘life’. Or, put another way, ‘six or seven months.’ The filterless Lucky Strikes are menu items.
Hospitalization is a theme at the Heart Attack. The waitresses wear barely-there nurse outfits. There are wheelchairs on hand in case you actually keel over. It’s funny, if you think whoopee cushions in a funeral home are funny.
The “Dr. Jon” seen advising you to try the diet in the ads? That’s Jon Basso, owner of the five-year-old Grill. He used to work as a nutritionist for Jenny Craig. No, really. He did. Does Jenny Craig do excommunications? And where exactly would the power of Christ compel this guy to go? He’s already slinging burgers in the desert.
The star of their ads, 570 lb. Blair Rivers, seems pleased by the results. Or maybe that’s the early, eurphoric stages of grease-induced coma.
Clearly, the Heart Attack Grill loves the attention. But this morning, not everyone was laughing.
“(I)n a society spending $316.4 billion to fight heart disease each year, has Heart Attack's new campaign taken the joke too far?” Time Magazine wondered, not really wondering at all.
On Tuesday morning, the Heart Attack Grill’s phone was off the hook.
“Yeah, they’re all over the news today,” confirmed Rich Myers, who works at the Discount Tire next-door to the lard emporium.
So, do you eat there often?
“No,” Myers said. “Never.”
Why not?
“Honestly? It kinda scares me.”
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