You’re hungry. You’re stranded in suburbia. You only have a few bucks in your pocket. Which fast food dollar-menu burger should you choose? To find out, you’d need $6 (plus tax) and to drive all over town taste-testing the dollar offerings from every chain. Do you want cheese? Bacon? Flavor? Two patties? Fortunately, someone has done the legwork for you, without setting foot outside of his car.

It’s not just anyone, either: it’s our former colleague Phil Villarreal, putting his taste buds and about eight bucks on the line to keep us all informed. Phil’s lucky enough to live within driving distance of a wide variety of burgerterias: Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and Jack In The Box.

He declared Burger King’s Baconburger to be the winner. “I’m thinking whoever came up with the term “thick-cut” for the bacon inhaled some “natural smoke” beforehand,” he notes. Yet the tiny bit of bacon makes the burger a lot less crappy than the four alternatives. The Carl’s Jr. offering was shriveled and inadequate, with a meat patty that “vanishes inside a heat lamp-ravaged bun, like a hockey puck on an NHL broadcast.”

Incidentally, if Phil finished all of these burgers during the course of his taste test, his total intake would have been 1,664 calories and 79 grams of fat.

A Quest to Find the Best $1 Burger [Money Under 30]

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