Arby’s Meat Mountain or Molehill?

(Hat tip to Jim for inspiration for the title)

Not long ago, word hit the internet that popular fast food chain Arby’s had added a sexy new “secret menu item.” If you’re a person who is on the internet, then you are involuntarily tantalized by secret menu items, because that’s how things work in 2014. Should you, the 2014 internet user, ever have the opportunity to visit an In-N-Out Burger, ordering your double-double “animal style” will validate your entire existence. This is the social contract that we, the 2014 internet using public, have made with the over-salted insta-food conglomerates. This is our blessing. This is our burden.

So Arby’s, the chain which has purported to be the “grown-up” version of the over-salted insta-food conglomerates under the guise that their sandwiches are comprised of delicately sliced of roast beef rather than heavy-handedly greased ground pseudo-beef patties, has jumped on the gleeful, childlike bandwagon that is the secret menu. And the focal point of this secret menu is the now-internet-sensation known as the Meat Mountain. Legend has it, that thanks to a marketing campaign gone horribly wrong (or horribly right?) that an innocuous advertisement for the variety of non-roast beef meats available at Arby’s led to customers asking for a sandwich that looked like the posted advertisement, I.E. a sandwich with every meat offered by Arby’s on any menu item. Eventually they complied, and a craze was born.

My initial reaction to the news was, “We’ll see!” an expression I intended to simultaneously express reserved skepticism and cautious open-mindedness. Then a few days after hearing tell of its existence, I laid eyes upon a real life digital photograph of the sandwich, snapped by a friend of a friend. It was underwhelming. The sandwich looked like ambition gone awry, like an artist had set out to paint a vibrant sunset but had discovered in the process that their paint set contained only fifty shades of gray. “I could eat two of those!” I boldly declared. “Maybe even three if the conditions are just right!”

Well, I didn’t eat three of them. I didn’t even eat two, although I will still claim that I could. No, on this day, during a lunch break taken at the gentleman’s hour of 1:00 PM, I ate just one Meat Mountain. I strolled into the Arby’s location nearest to my workplace, and approached the cashier. I casually asked said cashier, “Hey, do you guys do that Meat Mountain thing?” He chuckled. “Yeah, we can do that.”

We won’t go into the minutiae of the transaction, but the short of it is that I exchanged between ten and eleven dollars of US currency with Arby’s Corporation for a sandwich containing a multitude of meats and a couple slices of cheese. The proof of currency exchange looked like this:

The sandwich looked like this:

I’m not sure that’s it’s a mountain in quite the same way that the advertisement suggests, with layers of meat neatly stacked like layers of sediment from eons past, but I will grant that it is a substantial sandwich. From the lower bun up, we have chicken strips, turkey, ham, a slice of Swiss cheese, corned beef, brisket, Angus steak, a slice of cheddar cheese, roast beef, 3 half-strips of bacon, and then the top bun. Upon unwrapping the sandwich, I added a modest drizzle of the classic Arby’s sauce to two different layers, chosen at random, within the sandwich. Then I unhinged my jaw and dug in.

The first thing I noticed was that the turkey and ham were both cold, the same way they are served on the regular menu sandwiches on which they are included. This caused a sort of weird temperature disparity within each bite. Not such a weird disparity to slow me down, however. Impressive was that the chicken strips remained crispy, and even more impressive was that at no point did the sandwich completely fall apart. Nothing slid out on the back or sides of the sandwich, everything remained stacked in a manner as neatly as could be expected from such a construction. Each bite was a little bit different, some bites being dominated by the saltiness of the  fried chicken tender and/or corned beef, some bites dominated by the cold deli-like turkey and ham slices, some bites dominated by the classic roast beef and Arby’s sauce combination. The bacon was barely noticeable except in texture, which I’m not sure is a statement on the quality of Arby’s bacon or on the ratio of meats/build of the sandwich.

I did finish the entire sandwich, and did so comfortably, unlike those jokers over at the AVClub. I spent around 10 minutes of my obviously very valuable time doing so. Ultimately, it tastes… well… it tastes like Arby’s. If you’ve consumed more than one menu item from Arby’s, you know what I mean. It’s that, but dense and concentrated and en masse. That said, considering that most Arby’s sandwiches contain 2-3 ounces of meat for a $3.50-$5 price tag, and this sandwich contains 12 or so ounces (depending on the weight of the chicken tenders and bacon) for $10, the Meat Mountain may actually be one of the better values as far as dollars/ounce of meat available at Arby’s. So props to Arby’s foray into the world of “secret menus” for that, at least.

VanDiagram