How to order off McMenu: the new fast-food hack

Never in my 26 years have I eaten anything quite like a McLand, Sea and Air burger. In fact, seldom have I seen anything like one. Coming eye-to-eye with it in the McDonald’s on Kensington High Street, I feel a sense of foreboding I’ve not known since my first time on a rugby field.

And with good reason. For this towering confection is composed of a Big Mac which has been denuded of its uppermost and lower bun and then wedged between a Filet-o-Fish and a McChicken Sandwich. It looks like something Mary Shelley might have dreamt up and it tastes ... well, it tastes like grease and sauce, and sweat — and possibly all the tears of every chef the world has ever known.

Why eat it then? Why have I spent the past two minutes sketching out this burger on a notepad beneath the unbelieving gaze of a McDonald’s manager? The answer is simple. I am indulging in the latest food trend to cross the Atlantic: fast-food menu hacking, ordering off-grid in burger joints, sandwich or coffee shops.

I had read about places such as In-N-Out Burger in California, which has a “secret menu” from which punters can order such egregious creations as the 20-patty burger. And I have drunkenly eaten the off-menu burger at Joe Allen in Covent Garden. But trying to get the manager of McDonald’s to make me a quarter pounder with chicken fillets where usually there is bun — well, that’s rather a different ask.

From the beginning the odds are stacked against you. Contact the Big Four in the fast-food hacking world —McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Starbucks — and they will tell you that they have no secret menus and everything they sell is listed on their menus. Which is kind of true — but also kind of not.

Take the “poor man’s Big Mac”, for example, one of the all-time most popular hacks. Ask for it in your local McDonald’s and you will get a look pitched somewhere between bafflement and loathing. But ask for a cheeseburger with Big Mac sauce, onions and lettuce, and voilà— “Coming right up, sir.” And you’ve saved yourself £1.80 and about 200 calories.

According to Nick Chapman, the man behind the ever-popular Dude Foods blog, you need to be bold to hack successfully. “The best advice I can give is to just go in and do it,” he says. “The worst they can say is no, but if you’re nice enough and explain it to them, they’d probably be fine with making it.”

Grasp this, he says, and a bright new future awaits. “You are getting the chance to try something not many other people get to try,” says Chapman. And he should know: he rose to international prominence after spending $140 ordering every burger McDonald’s offers and making them into one 20,000-calorie mega-sandwich.

So with his advice in mind and my friend Megan at my side, I head to Burger King in Liverpool Street station. I go in heavy and hard: “I would like a BLT please with a portion of frings.” Again that look — confusion. I repeat myself, only slightly more tremulously. “Let me get the manager,” comes the reply.

I explain that frings are, y’know, a half-portion of fries and a half-portion of onion rings combined, and that I really just want a “bacon burger”. He shrugs. Three minutes later we have both. “You know what,” says Megan, “this is quite fun.”