Category: Trending

Over here at Uproxx, we spend a lot of time eating and comparing the finer points of the best fast-food burgers. Whether we’re talking about big juicy doubles, flavor-packed and mouth-watering decadent burgers, or even a classic and simple single cheeseburger, if it’s built from ground beef, buns, and cheese, we’ve eaten it, ranked it, and found ways to elevate it and make it better. But there is some burger ground that we haven’t explored as of yet — the restaurant burger.

Full disclosure, I’m not a restaurant burger guy. I’ve never looked at a restaurant menu and thought “I’ll just have a burger.” If I ever have, it’s because the rest of the menu failed to catch my attention. So rather than order completely off the appetizer menu (which is a totally valid move), I’ll just grab a burger because, well, how bad can it be right?

So while I consider myself an expert on all things fast-food cheeseburgers, restaurants are a bit of a blind spot for me. So to better familiarize myself with the world of restaurant cheeseburgers, I put the names of a bunch of random restaurant chains in a hat and pulled a single one out to see how their most popular burger compares to our personal fast-food favorite.

The lotto this time came up Chilis. So today, I’ll be tasting Chili’s Double Oldtimer with Cheese against Shake Shack’s Double Shack Burger.

Cheeseburger Methodology

In order for this taste test to be as fair as possible, I decided to order each burger as-is with no alterations. Despite my love for a good burger hack, I think it’s important to experience each burger as both chain restaurants intended.

I also decided to rate each component of the burger — the bun, the meat, the cheese, the sauce, and the veggie toppings on a scale of one to five. Then, I added up the scores and crowned a winner. Let’s start with the challenger.

Chili’s — Double Oldtimer With Cheese

Price: $15.19

Tasting Notes:

Right off the bat, the size of this burger took me aback. It’s f*cking huge. This double cheeseburger is enough to share between two people, and if you’re really into small portions, four. That’s just not found in the fast-food space. The fast-food burgers are, for the most part, relatively small. This thing feels like a statement.

The full build consists of two thick beef patties, two layers of cheddar cheese, pickles, lettuce, tomato, shredded lettuce, and mustard.

Biting into it and dislocating my jaw in the process, I’m greeted by the layers of sumptuous beefy flavors that are further elevated courtesy of sharp slightly nutty cheese, the snap of some crisp tomatoes, and a nice balance of sweet and brine-y flavors from the red onions and pickles. The beef is a real standout, although it’s thick and overwhelming. Every bite melts in your mouth and overpowers the rest of the ingredients. It lacks balance, but it’s hard to care with beef this juicy and delicious.

The Score:

The Bun: 4. It’s a basic brioche bun that’s buttery, airy, and most importantly makes way for you to taste the star of the show, the beef.

The Meat: 5. It exceeded all expectations. It’s juicy, thick, and dunks on anything you can get from a fast-food restaurant.

The Cheese: 4. It’s good, but I’m of the thought that the best burger cheese is American. Cheddar is a close second though and helps to add a lot of complexity to this burger so that the only note isn’t just BEEF.

The Sauce: 3. Mustard? Really? Just mustard? I find it a little boring and with meat this thick and two layers of cheese, it’s hard for the mustard to stand out.

The Veggies: 4. It would’ve been a perfect five but that terrible watery shredded lettuce brought it down a point. I love the use of red onion for some delicate sweetness, and the pickles add a nice tang to the aftertaste. Tomatoes are nice and ripe.

Final Score: 20

It’s not a perfect 25, but it’s a pretty great cheeseburger experience, making it hard to be disappointed. Personalizing it a bit will make it a better experience (add bacon, ditch that sauce for BBQ, maybe lose the iceberg, and now we’re talking).

Shake Shack — Double ShackBurger

Price: $9.79

Tasting Notes:

Like the Chili’s burger, the beef is the star of the show. It’s savory, salty, and sports an incredible depth of flavor. Since this is a smash burger, you’ve got an audible textural crunch in every bite thanks to that perfect Maillard crust. Helping to accentuate the beefy qualities of the meat, the tomatoes come in with a burst of umami flavor while the onions offer a kick of sharpness. The sauce is tangy and sweet, but not well spread, and a single leaf of green lettuce adds a bit more texture to the whole thing. Lastly, the bun is denser.

Overall, this burger comes across as incredibly small in comparison. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and I think a Double ShackBurger with a side of fries is enough of a meal for anyone. But I do think it’s worth noting that this burger is about 1/4 the size of what Chili’s is working with.

The Score:

The Bun: 4. It’s a potato roll which feels a bit more novel than a brioche. It’s soft, sweet, and spongey. But it’s a bit too small for this burger. Too much of the burger lives outside of the bun.

The Meat: 3. Look, normally, I’d rank Shake Shack’s beef patties as the best of the best, but this just can’t compare with the melt-in-your-mouth quality of what Chili’s is doing. The flavor is outstanding, but it comes across as a bit too condensed and slightly dry in comparison.

The Cheese: 5. Delicious, salty, and simple — a perfect slice of American Cheese.

The Sauce: 4. Shake Sauce is a mix of ingredients and features both garlic and a touch of paprika. It’s nice and complex with a bit of spice. Chili’s never had a chance with just mustard. I’m docking a point because ShakeShack tends to glob this sauce in one spot rather than spread it evenly across the meat.

The Veggies: 3. Love the juicy tomatoes, the green leaf lettuce has a great snap to it, and the onions are sharp and present, but it all comes across as a bit unimaginative. Luckily, Shake Shack has all sorts of veggies to help you elevate the burger further (mushrooms, cherry peppers, pickles, fried shallots). Unfortunately, none of those come as part of the stock build.

Final Score: 19

Shake Shack loses by just one point. I thought many times about tipping the scale in the Shack’s favor. In the end, even though I think the burger is more consistently delicious across the board, Chili’s highs are just too high!

Closing Thoughts on the Cheeseburgers

Chili’s wins this round! The Double OldTimer with Cheese is a jaw-dropping drool-inducing cheeseburger that makes its inflated price tag feel totally justified. Having said that, for under $10 you can get a burger from Shake Shack that doesn’t disappoint, and for a few dollars more you can add bacon, avocado, fried shallots, and so many other ingredients that can easily bring the burger to Chili’s level.

But if your favorite aspect of a burger is beef, Chili’s is where it’s at, hands down. No contest. Also a major plus on Chili’s side — a full bar. Nothing pairs with a burger like a good margarita.

Throughout her Renaissance tour, Beyoncé has issued a fun challenge to her audiences: When she sings the line “Look around / Everybody on mute” from Renaissance highlight “Energy,” the audience is supposed to remain as quiet as they possibly can. Well, Beyoncé was particularly impressed by one tour stop, as she declared one city the winner: Washington DC.

On August 6, Beyoncé performed at FedExField in Landover, Maryland (just a few miles outside of the DC city limits). Fan-shoot footage shows that when it came to the moment of truth, most people in attendance did a terrific job of shutting their mouths and allowing a profound near-silence to settle across the venue. Beyoncé even gave DC an official acknowledgement, writing on her website that the city was the “eerbody on mute war winner.”

While that moment went well, the evening got off to a rocky start: Before the show started, FedExField issued a shelter-in-place order due to lightning in the area. Fans were eventually allowed to return to their sets, but it did cause a delay for the show. Beyoncé came through, though: The singer paid $100,000 to extend the DC Metro trains by an hour, so fans would be able to get home. The money paid to “keep all 98 stations open for customers to exit and operational expenses.”

Baja Beach Fest will celebrate its fifth anniversary on Rosarito Beach from this weekend, with the likes of Ozuna, Feid, Wisin Y Yandel as headliners.

The schedule is packed from Friday, August 11, to Sunday, August 13.

DJ Miriam will set the tone on Friday from 2:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. local time. DJ Fredy Fresco (3:10-3:30 p.m.), Dei V (3:45-4:10 p.m.), and five other acts will play into the night before Tainy (10-10:45 p.m.), Nicky Jam (10:45-11:35 p.m.), and Wisin Y Yandel (12:20 a.m. to 1:35 a.m.) bring it into Saturday.

The Saturday (August 12) slate features Becky G (9:20-10:05 p.m.), Feid (10:55-11:55 p.m.), and Ozuna (12:40 a.m. to 1:40 a.m.). Gabito Ballesteros is slated earlier in the day (3:45-4:10 p.m.), but it’s possible he’ll join Becky G because the two released their “La Nena” single alongside a strip club-based video in late June.

The final day will welcome 11 total sets — punctuated by Don Omar (10:55-11:55 p.m.) and Grupo Firme (12:45-1:45 a.m.).

The festival notes that all set times “are subject to change.” The official website teases what else can be enjoyed across the three-day event, including a “Baja Wheel” and “Glam Station,” and provides a map of the expansive festival grounds.

See the full lineup and schedule of set times below.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Jeopardy! executive producer Michael Davies has finally revealed how the classic game show can return for Season 40 despite the ongoing writers’ strike: A whole lot of recycling.

While talking to the Inside Jeopardy! podcast, Davies shared that the show will have a “changed” approach that will back prior contestants for a sort of second chance tournament. The decision was made, first and foremost, to keep pumping out new episodes, but also, to not rob new contestants of the full Jeopardy! experience.

“I believe, principally, that it would not be fair to have new contestants making their first appearance on the Alex Trebek stage, doing it with non-original material or… a combination of non-original material and material that was written pre-strike,” Davies said before breaking down how the new season will work for the time being.

Via Deadline:

So we decided that really we needed to invite back and give a second chance in general to players who probably thought that their chance to come back and play on the Alex Trebek stage had gone forever. We’re going to open the season with a second chance tournament for players from Season 37 who lost their initial game, and winners from that will advance to a Season 37 and Season 38 Champions Wild Card.

While Davies couldn’t offer a timeline on when Jeopardy! could return to normal, he did stress that the “best” situation is when the classic game show has its full writing staff.

“I understand that the best episodes that are possible are episodes that feature our writers writing original material and the very best contestants that we put on the air playing that original material,” Davies said.

(Via Deadline)

Jabari Parker’s time in the NBA has come to an end for now. Parker, the former No. 2 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft who has spent the last few years jumping around the league and did not have a team last season, is heading over to Spain and joining FC Barcelona Bàsquet.

The news of Parker’s move had been going around the internet over the last day or so, and on Monday afternoon, the club announced the addition on its social media accounts.

A former top recruit at star at Duke University, Parker flashed his considerable potential as a devastating all-around scorer early on in his professional career. Unfortunately for him, injuries began piling up and prevented him from consistently getting on the floor — Parker has only played in 310 games across his entire career, and has not played in more than 38 games since the 2018-19 campaign.

Parker has played in six teams over the course of his NBA career: the Milwaukee Bucks (which drafted him back in 2014), the Chicago Bulls, the Atlanta Hawks, the Washington Wizards, the Boston Celtics, and the Sacramento Kings. Most recently, Parker appeared in 12 games for the Celtics during the 2021-22 campaign. While he was originally signed on to join the Bucks’ Summer League team this year, Parker had to back out due to a family matter.

Vladimir Putin is struggling to keep his battlefield stocked up to the point where Russia has increased penalties for those who refuse to fight his Ukraine war. On a related note, that war has caused Putin to lose plenty of allies, to the point where no country even wants free giveaways of Russian crops. As well, Putin is not exactly the most desired ally, given that those associated with him could eventually be charged with war crimes. That’s where Kim Jong Un comes in because he’s surely not afraid of such an accusation, given that he’s already responsible for an assortment crimes against humanity on his own.

Putin needs allies so badly that he probably doesn’t even care how bad this looks, but it isn’t exactly a move that sounds like it will be respected by elite North Korean government-associated hackers, who reportedly pulled off a months-long breach of a “major Russian missile developer” in 2021-2022, according to Reuters, which suggests the accessed data could have been used to further North Korea’s own missile program. Uh-oh:

Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.

Reuters could not determine whether any data was taken during the intrusion or what information may have been viewed. In the months following the digital break-in Pyongyang announced several developments in its banned ballistic missile programme but it is not clear if this was related to the breach.

In other words, North Korea doesn’t even respect the boundaries of its allies and will use them to further their own offensive weaponry. Clearly, this makes Putin’s friendship with Kim Jong Un look even worse, especially since Kim Jong Un is so obsessed with this type of weapon that he recently held a victory parade full of intercontinental ballistic missiles. There’s no word yet on whether those missiles were partially engineered using technology stolen by the North Korean hackers, but it’s notable that Putin is likely using North Korea as a supplier of nukes for Belaris. What if he’s purchasing technology that was actually manufactured using Russia’s own secrets?

That’s a bit too circular to consider, so perhaps the biggest takeaway here is that not even one of Putin’s most fearsome allies is putting their foot down about respecting the Russian president.

(Via Reuters)

It stands to reason that there are very few, if any, firsts left for an artist as accomplished as Ed Sheeran to experience, but his ongoing Mathematics Tour says otherwise. Sheeran’s MetLife Stadium stop in June reportedly broke an attendance record, and then he was forced to serve as his own opener at FedExField while Khalid recovered from a car accident. Not to mention, he brought out Eminem in Detroit.

The trend continued at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri on Saturday (August 5) when Sheeran stopped his performance to reveal the sex of a baby.

“My first gender reveal,” Sheeran captioned an Instagram video capturing the moment.

“I will get back to singing ‘Perfect,’ but I feel like this is like a first-time-type thing,” Sheeran says in the video, ripping open an envelope. “It’s a girl!” The crowd erupts in cheers, and the expecting couple embrace before Sheeran adds, “Can I just say, as a father of two daughters, it’s very awesome. It’s very awesome. Congratulations.”

In May, Sheeran took time out of promoting his – (Subtract) album in New York City to surprise two self-identified die-hard fans expecting their first child. “Month 4, it gets easier. … The one thing you need to know is that no one gets it right,” Sheeran told them, as captured by Meet Cutes NYC.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Drake’s It’s All A Blur Tour show in Milwaukee nearly was all a blur for one fan, who apparently fell asleep near the front row (maybe he worked a double shift to afford the tickets?). Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — Drake spotted him while walking by and decided to troll him by posting up and singing at him until his friends woke up him. Once he was roused to alertness, Drake gave him an encouraging toast and a couple more bars before moving on.

Meanwhile, another fan also caught Drake’s attention, this time thanks to his wardrobe. But while Drake apparently appreciated his headgear, his footwear was a whole other story. “My man, I like the fitted hat with the…I feel you, dawg,” he joked. “You look good. Even though you got those Yeezys on, you still look good.” Of course, adorned in a tech vest with a glowing orange Nike swoosh on it, Drake wasn’t going to let the Adidas fly. Even though he’s technically patched things up with Kanye — although, being Jewish, perhaps Ye’s remarks last year didn’t sit too well with him — Drake’s always been a Nike guy at heart, and despite Adidas dropping Kanye, they still make the shoes — and sell them for a tidy profit, too.

Drake’s tour has been a well of hilarious hijinks as Drake asked fans to only throw bras onstage — only to become overwhelmed with underwear after his acknowledgement helped one especially well-endowed fan allegedly land an equally huge opportunity.

There isn’t any readily available proof that Olivia Rodrigo is capable of having a bad idea. It was a great idea to release “Vampire” as the lead single from her upcoming sophomore album, Guts, as it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last month — her third-career No. 1 after “Drivers License” and “Good 4 U.”

Rodrigo’s next single insinuates that she’s had at least one bad idea (or at least that she’s aware of the concept). The three-time Grammy winner shared this morning (August 7) that “Bad Idea Right?” will drop this Friday, August 11. Guts, which Rodrigo first announced in late June, is due out on September 8. It serves as the follow-up to her record-breaking May 2021 debut, Sour.

The “Bad Idea Right?” art finds Rodrigo behind a blurry mirror, on which she’s written “bad idea right” in lipstick — just as she did within her Easter egg-filled video teasing the Guts tracklist on July 31.

Rodrigo gave her fans one day to identify clues and assemble their guesses before confirming the Guts tracklist on August 1. See it below.

1. “All American Bitch”
2. “Bad Idea Right?”
3. “Vampire”
4. “Lacy”
5. “Ballad Of A Homeschooled Girl”
6. “Making The Bed”
7. “Logical”
8. “Get Him Back”
9. “Love Is Embarrassing”
10. “The Grudge”
11. “Pretty Isn’t Pretty”
12. “Teenage Dream”

Guts is out 9/8 via Geffen. Find more information here.

Noah Schnapp credits Stranger Things for helping him come out.

In an interview with Variety, the actor, who plays Will Byers on the Netflix series, explained that once he fully embraced that Will is gay, “it was just an exponential speed towards accepting it for myself. I would be in a completely different place if I didn’t have Will to portray, and to embrace and help me accept myself. I think if I never played that character, I probably would still be closeted.”

Schnapp also revealed that before he publicly came out on TikTok, he told his co-star Millie Bobby Brown that he was gay — in the middle of a Party City. “I kept trying to do it in person with her, and it was too hard,” he said. “So then I just FaceTimed her one day in the middle of a Party City and I was like, ‘Millie, I’m gay.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, Schnapper! You told me finally!’”

Stranger Things is currently on pause due to studio executives not paying writers and performs what they’re worth, but once the strikes are resolved, Will will be “center stage” in the final season, co-creator Ross Duffer explained. “This emotional arc for him is what we feel is going to hopefully tie the whole series together. Will is used to being the young one, the introverted one, the one that’s being protected. So part of his journey, it’s not just sexuality — it’s Will coming into his own as a young man.”

(Via Variety)