S M Ong: How I ended up with a 15-patty burger

It's like 2008 all over again.

But infinitely bigger.

But not quite.

In November 2008, Burger King introduced the BK Quad Stacker, a burger with four layers of beef patty and cheese plus some turkey bacon.

It would have been the tallest burger I had ever seen except that McDonald's stole Burger King's thunder by introducing at the same time the Mega Mac, which was basically a Big Mac but with four patties instead of the usual two.

And because the Mega Mac had the layer of bun between the meat, it was actually taller than the BK Quad Stacker.

I wondered at the time, why did Burger King stop at four?

Why not a BK Quin Stacker? Or a BK Sex Stacker? No, wait, that sounds like something NSFW.

Because of that restraint, the Home of the Whopper got whopped by the home of Pennywise in the Great Mega Burger Battle of 2008.

That was nine years ago.

This time, Burger King is not repeating the mistake it made in that historic food fight.

You might even say the fast food chain is overcompensating a bit.

Forget the Quad Stacker. That was kid's stuff.

Last week, Burger King announced the return of the Stacker with pictures of burgers as tall as 10 layers high!

One ad suggests that you can get as many layers of patty and cheese as you want at $1.50 per additional layer.

So in theory, you could order a burger with an infinite number of layers - an Infinity Stacker, if you will ­- which just blows my mind.

Could this be fake news? Like Stefanie Sun's death? Or the overly optimistic additional travelling time SMRT tells you to add every time there's a train fault? (That is, unless it's a flooding-in-the-tunnel fault.)

As a fake journalist, I had to find out for myself.

So I went to the Burger King outlet in Novena Square last Friday.

First, I tried using the electronic self-order kiosk, but the tallest burger I could find on the onscreen menu was the quadruple. What was this? 2008?

PACKED SEPARATELY

So I went to the counter and asked a human being whether I could get a 10-layer Stacker.

I was told I could order as many layers as I want, but the tallest burger they could make for me was a five-layer Stacker with the remaining layers of meat patty and sliced cheese packed separately.

Some assembly required.

I was crushed.

What was the point then?

Was I buying a burger or Ikea furniture?

I felt so disillusioned that I just ordered a five-layer beef Stacker with onion rings and a small Fanta Grape to go.

But as I was leaving, I thought to myself: "No, I came here for a 10-layer Stacker. I'm not leaving without a 10-layer Stacker even if I have to assemble it myself."

So I went back to the counter to order what I guess you could call the Deca Stacker.

True enough, I was given a Quin Stacker with the five extra patties packed separately in a flat plastic container and the five extra slices of cheese wrapped in wax paper.

Of course, I realised that if I included the first Quin Stacker I bought earlier, I have the ingredients to build a 15-layer Stacker. But the question was, should I?

A 10-layer burger seemed reasonable (because of the nice, round number) and maybe a little too predictable even, but creating a burger with 15 layers of meat and cheese felt like a crime against nature. An affront to god. A blight on humanity.

It certainly went against everything Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in his National Day Rally speech about eating healthily.

But I did it anyway.

Behold, the Pentadeca Stacker!

That was what I called it.

Even the name sounds like the devil's work.

No wonder after eating the burger, I felt like I was going to hell.

Your move, McDonald's.