8 Outrageous Fast Food Burgers Nearly Everyone Forgot About

When you fall in love with a dish, order it several times, and then watch it disappear from the menu, it's like going through a breakup without actually getting to say goodbye. You're heartbroken and devastated at the prospect of trying to replace your beloved order with something else. Queue all the Taylor Swift, please. Still, time heals most things, so you carry on, with memories and a new go-to order. Before long, you might even forget about that menu item lost to the passing of time.

While outrageous menu items are harder to forget, they're sure fun to remember and a fabulous topic of conversation at parties. We've gathered some of the most curious, outrageous, and largely forgotten burgers that some of your favorite fast food restaurants have retired. Some of these have simply disappeared from our collective memory since enough time has passed, while others, though outrageous to behold, are actually forgettable.

If you've ever lived in Wisconsin, you know that football is something of a religion to the region. So serious, in fact, it's not uncommon for priests to cheer for the Green Bay Packers as part of their parting words at the end of Sunday service. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the deep love for those beloved cheeseheads runs straight through chains like Burger King. In the '90s, in Green Bay and other regional Burger King locations, you would find a Gilbert Burger on the menu.

Since lineman Gilbert Brown (or "Grave Digger") was largely celebrated for his size and everything that came with it, this was a double Whopper burger with cheese and, famously, no pickle. As you might imagine, that is a huge burger. It came to be known as the Gilbert Burger since Brown would pick one up after practice to refuel. Though the Gilbert Burger is largely forgotten in most of the country, some faithful Packer fans still remember it fondly, like Tim Bartol, who described it on Facebook as a dining experience that would leave you with "grease and juice running down your elbows by the time you get done eating it."

Though Burger King no longer offers it by name on the menu, there's nothing stopping you from ordering it exactly the way Brown once did. In 1997, he told Sports Illustrated, "I've been eating that hamburger for eight years, ever since I was in college... You know how you go to college and you ain't got no money and you're sitting around starving, so you take your two or three dollars and you try to make the best of it? Well, I'd go to Burger King and pile all that stuff on it, take the pickles off, cut it in half, and then I'd be grubbing." So, college linemen, take note: You can fuel just like one of the greats right from Burger King.

A little further south, you'll land in the arch-rival city of Green Bay: Chicago. A great sports city in its own right, the illustrious Michael Jordan has a legacy that looms large. In 1992, McDonald's joined forces with the (then) two-time championship-winning Chicago Bull to create a special burger bearing his name.

The McJordan was a quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, sliced onion, mustard, pickle, and even a special McJordan BBQ sauce made specifically for the burger. The burger on its own cost the 1992 price of $1.99, but the special included a large french fry and a medium drink for $3.29. Like the Gilbert Burger, it was available at only a few locations, so not even everyone in 1992 could try the special.

Though the McJordan Special isn't one you can order by name, we sometimes see similar specials attached to other athletes, Angel Reese being the face of one of the more recent specials. Like the McJordan, this meal felt very similar, but instead of a McJordan BBQ sauce, McDonald's simply classified the sauce as a "new Bold BBQ Sauce."

Cheese curds are serious business in Wisconsin. Cheese curds and cottage cheese are nearly the same thing, but curds are the young version of cheese while cottage cheese is curds mixed up with cream to make a different texture. Take those larger curds, deep-fry them, and you have a tasty pub treat. Make a patty out of those curds, fry it, and you have the basis for a tasty invention from Culver's: the Curderburger.

Originally, this burger was an April fool's joke, but it seems the good folks at Culver's vastly underestimated the draw such a sandwich would pull. Before long, the burger was a reality. This rather large sandwich is the chain's Deluxe ButterBurger with a patty made out of a large cheese curd right on top. Basically, it's what you'd have if you wanted a super cheeseburger.

Unfortunately, this burger isn't a permanent part of the menu, and when it was introduced on National Cheese Curd Day on October 15, 2021, each location had a limited supply for this short run. Fortunately, it has made a grand return each year in celebration of this national day of joy in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Though the Hula Burger is all but forgotten in the vastness of the Golden Arches' legacy, the sandwich it was pitted against, the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish, went on to become very popular and even widely topped with Big Mac Sauce to make the Filet-O-Fish droolworthy. However, the Hula Burger is certainly one of McDonald's menu items that quickly failed. As the story goes, McDonald's franchisee Lou Groen created the Filet-O-Fish, and Ray Kroc proposed a competition between the fish sandwich and his own creation of the Hula burger.

The whole reason McDonald's Filet-O-Fish almost didn't make it to the menu was due to Kroc's belief that his Hula Burger would do better. Both sandwiches were non-meat based, but rather than relying on the obvious fish alternative, the Hula Burger had a patty made from grilled pineapple. The sandwich was accompanied by American cheese and all sat on the typical burger bun. To decide which sandwich would make it to the menu, Kroc's and Groen's creations went head to head, and the sandwich that sold more would win the menu spot. In the end, and the reason you've never heard of the Hula Burger before, the Filet-O-Fish blew the Hula Burger out of the water at 350 to six sandwiches.

Over at Burger King, we often see the brand customizing the Whopper (like the fiery hot "How To Train Your Dragon" inspired menu). In 2024, the brand created the Wednesday Whopper, an alliterative name befitting the quirky, spooky "Addams Family" character, Wednesday.

Though it certainly looked like an off-the-wall sandwich, the Wednesday Whopper had the basic ingredients of the regular Whopper but with a purple bun speckled with black poppy seeds. Though we certainly love a fun-colored menu item, we wish this sandwich had gone further out of its way to match the Addams Family vibes. Perhaps switching out some ingredients, or maybe even including some of the "Thing's Rings" (basic onion rings, really) on the sandwich to really pull in even more theming. Without these additional elements, even a sandwich with an outrageously colored bun isn't going to stick in the minds of customers for long.

If you were to imagine a sloppy Joe taco, you'd essentially have the Bell Beefer from Taco Bell. This was a burger made of taco meat and all the other typical Taco Bell toppings like lettuce, onion, and even sauce, but it was between two buns. Certainly, it wasn't your typical type of burger with a compacted patty. Even still, with beef as the primary draw, we're going to count it as a burger for these purposes.

When Taco Bell first opened in 1962, the Bell Beefer was on the menu, but at the time, it was called a Chili Burger. The 1970s brought a change to the name, rebranding it as the Bell Burger, and in 1977 it became the Bell Beefer, the name that stuck through its disappearance.

While it doesn't grace the menu anymore, we imagine the sheer messiness of it could be to blame. The concept of eating a taco on a burger bun sounds outrageously messy, and certainly not one we'd soon like to try while on the road after a quick drive-through pick-up.

It's hard to introduce a new menu item at a staple like McDonald's. Here, customers often know exactly what they want. As soon as they approach the counter, touchscreen, or drive-through. Understandably, the brand tends to stay pretty close to its basic menu. However, there are certainly sandwiches of the past that deserve a resurgence, and the outrageously saucy cheddar melt may very well be one of them.

The cheddar melt looked like a mix of an Arby's cheddar and beef and a burger smooshed together. It was a beef patty with grilled onions and cheddar cheese sauce on top. There was also a rye bun to keep everything in place. Although it hasn't been on the McDonald's menu in the United States for some time, this remains a sandwich you can order in several other countries, including Brazil. Rather than the cheddar melt, here, you'll order it as a Cheddar McMelt.

If you've ever longed for a burger and a pizza in the same meal, the Pizza Burger from Burger King would have been the stuff of dreams. This ginormous burger came in something like a pizza box on a huge bun with Whopper patties, mozzarella cheese, and pizza essentials like herb mayo, pepperoni, and a sauce. To really sell the enormous burger as a pizza-type meal, it was cut into wedges, perfect for sharing.

The gigantic burger sat within a bun just shy of 10 inches and hailed from the Whopper Bar in New York City. We have to imagine that the reason these fizzled out was because of size and the ingredients needed to prepare them. After all, most Whoppers aren't coming with a marinara sauce, and keeping such items on hand for the monstrosity of a sandwich few would order for more than a gimmick, feels wasteful.