Seventeen Reasons to Book a Flight to Manchester

The Holy Cow Burger exists because someone at Red’s True BBQ in Manchester sat down and asked a question no nutritionist would endorse but every serious carnivore has entertained at least once: what if a single burger contained seventeen different preparations of beef?

Carpaccio. Brisket. Cheese steak. A parmesan patty. Jalapeño-spiked ground beef. Tongue. Beef ham. Jus pooling underneath all of it like the whole thing is dissolving back into itself. Two thousand five hundred calories, assembled into something that costs thirty euros and requires a certain philosophical acceptance of consequences. It was a Father’s Day special at the Manchester and Leeds locations, which is either the most appropriate occasion imaginable or a pointed comment about what fatherhood actually does to a person.

When I first read about this I immediately started looking at flights to England. That reflex—irrational, immediate, utterly sincere—tells you everything about where I fall on the burger-as-serious-endeavor spectrum. Some food makes you want to eat it. This kind makes you want to travel for it, which is a different and slightly more concerning impulse. I didn’t go. I still think about it.