The Controversial Las Vegas Restaurant Where You'll Be Punished For Not Finishing Your Meal

At a time when just about every restaurant is making overtures toward the health-conscious, there's a well-known spot that revels in excess. Heart Attack Grill is a hospital-themed restaurant in Las Vegas that serves grotesquely unhealthy food and punishes you if you don't finish your meal. While other fast food restaurants cook their fries in vegetable oil (or beef tallow, like these six restaurant chains), the Heart Attack Grill fries them in straight-up lard, and pours in some beer and tequila to boot. Their milkshakes are made from butterfat, and their burgers can contain between one and eight beef patties — or in the restaurant's terminology, a "Single Bypass" to an "Octuple Bypass." 

And if you can't quite finish your Quadruple Bypass meal, a waitress reminiscent of the nurse on that Blink-182 album cover will come along to spank you in public. It's all completely over-the-top, which is very much the point. This is, after all, a restaurant so committed to unhealthiness that it sells unfiltered cigarettes. (In a rare show of restraint, the Heart Attack Grill only offers candy cigarettes to children.)

How much is too much with the Heart Attack Grill?

By now, it should be clear that the food at the Heart Attack Grill is just one small part of a greater whole. Are you going to "enjoy" eating an eight-patty burger with a side of lard fries? Probably not. But spectacle, not food, is the real draw of the Heart Attack Grill. Some of these spectacles are harmless: diners are referred to as "patients" and given hospital gowns upon entry, and proprietor Jon Basso often wears a lab coat and stethoscope while manning the griddle himself.

Other times, though, things take a somewhat ugly turn. Much has been made of the waitresses being referred to as "nurses" and wearing what are essentially naughty Halloween costumes. But there is also the policy that guests who weigh 350 pounds or more can eat for free, which is enforced with a public weigh-in on a scale intended for cattle — a squirm-inducing exercise in gawkery. This isn't helped by the fact that the Heart Attack Grill has used several customers as spokespersons, some of whom have, indeed, died of heart attacks.

But whether or not we think the joke is funny, enough people clearly do to keep the Heart Attack Grill going as a kitschy tourist destination like the Cookie Shot Robot in Vegas. It certainly wouldn't be a good idea to go there every day. But, while the Grill itself may reject the word, everything is acceptable in moderation.

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