The (in)famous Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas is back in the news. We reported on this whacky eatery concept years ago. Now, we must (sadly?) report that the Heart Attack Grill is closing its doors… But it’s not shuttering for the reasons I’ll bet you’re assuming…
View this post on Instagram
The place is decked out like some kind of Retro-Deco hospital, in brash, blood-red decor. “Customers are referred to as ‘patients’. Orders are ‘prescriptions’, and the waitresses are ‘nurses’,” the official news release about its opening in 2013 reads. “All those who weigh over 350 pounds are invited to unlimited free food provided they weigh themselves on an electronic cattle scale affront a cheering restaurant crowd.”
The HAG is a pure-Burger joint, offering excessive burgers from 1 to 8 patties tall, with all the fixin’s. They’re named after what was once the most common heart surgery procedure: the 8-patty Octuple Bypass Burger clocks in at a little over 19,000 Calories.
There’s much more bombast and rhetoric in the release. But the foregoing should suffice to give you the general idea behind the place. But that’s all a front for the owner’s ulterior motive…
Ulterior motive
Owner/operator Jon Basso is a former Health Club owner who now bills himself not as a restaurateur but a performance artist whose message is that obesity kills.
“I am probably the only restaurateur in the entire world who is unapologetically telling you that my food is bad for you, that it will kill you, and that you should stay away from it.”
And in the beginning, Basso admitted he was making a good living at it. Social media food bloggers, fans of the weird and woeful, and other fringe types flocked to the HAG.
Times change…
… And we change with the times. Excess and madness are precisely what Las Vegas was founded on. But Basso says he’s finally had to admit the HAG’s time has come.
In a news release that echoes the style and ‘flavour’ of the one he circulated at the resto’s unveiling, Basso recently announced:
“The Heart Attack Grill will not be renewing its long term lease. This decision stems from the reality that major casinos have intentionally priced the average person out of the quintessential American experience of affordable indulgence. The soul of Las Vegas has been replaced by corporate greed.”
He vents his essential disgust with contemporary Las Vegas and all it represents…
“Our core value, ‘eat big and laugh loud’, no longer fits a city peddling forty-dollar ‘artisanal avocado toast’. The honest, heavy-duty calories that built our reputation are now considered gauche by a city that has excluded the middle class and lost its swagger in the process.”
End of an era
So… The infamous Heart Attack Grill is dying. And with it, Basso’s message that Fast Food Kills. The historic event reminds me of the reason given for retiring by perhaps the greatest musical satirist of the 1960s, Tom Lehrer. He said social and political reality in the Nixon era were wilder and crazier than anything he could possibly come up with to write a song about. It was time to ‘hang up’ his grand piano – which he once referred to as ‘an 88-string guitar’…
My take
I agree with Basso. Social and Political truth have become stranger than any fiction that even the greatest satirists of the past century could have imagined. George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut… None of them predicted the Trump Era. Though Orwell came close with his unparalleled vision of a dystopian future, 1984.
It’s ironic that the HAG is closing just as the unvarnished, abominable truth about Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) is becoming known. And obesity, with all the killer afflictions it brings, is hitting record high levels.
I hope everyone reads – and takes time to digest – Basso’s farewell news release…
~ Maggie J.