Choose Your Own Dining Adventure: Eat A Tasty Burger? Or Keep Jaw Intact?

(Bill Binns)

Not the burger in question. (Bill Binns)

Usually while dining out, the restaurant experience lends itself to a fairly ho-hum set of decisions: Tap water or sparkling? Side salad or potatoes? But then there’s the choice of whether or not to eat a triple-decker burger or keep your jaw in the un-dislocated position. A British woman took the culinary road less traveled and decided to go for it, sans fork and knife, and had to have her jaw reset. Maybe it was all worth it, though — that one bite was “amazing.”

The woman tells the BBC she was eating at a Liverpool restaurant earlier this month when the triple-decker burger proved too large for common utensils, so she just decided to give it a go the old-fashioned way.

“I didn’t think I’d dislocated it — you don’t expect it to happen eating a burger, but I tried to eat it with a knife and fork and couldn’t,” she explained. “I couldn’t open my mouth fully — it felt like I had cramp in my tongue, then I started to get an earache and a headache.”

She didn’t realize her jaw was dislocated until the next day, when she says she felt ill and the side of her head hurt. That’s when she went to the hospital to get the jaw reset, resulting in sweet, sweet relief. It’s worth pointing out that although this might not have been an ordinary burger, she also has a syndrome which can make her joints unstable.

“The minute it went back in, it was like turning a tap off in my head — all the tension just went,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the restaurant said they would be happy to have her back to “enjoy a burger on us [though] we’d recommend something a bit more manageable.”

“We all had a massive cringe at the thought of someone’s jaw being popped back into place, but we’re all really glad [she] is OK,” she said.

The woman herself seems to have a sense of humor about the whole thing, tweeting after the fact (via E! News): “Haha I’m mortified but I can vouch that my 1 bite of burger was amazing. I’ll be back! Maybe give me a week though for when I’m allowed to open my mouth wider than a 50 pence piece.”

Woman dislocates jaw eating triple-decker burger [BBC News]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.