UK
China
South Korea
Japan
Sponsorship Link
A customer eating at the grease-fest known as the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas was rushed to a hospital on Saturday after suffering from, you guessed it, a heart attack.
/
Witnesses at the hospital-themed restaurant, where scantily-clad "nurses" (waitresses) take "prescriptions" (orders) from their "patients" (customers), said a man in his 40s started showing symptoms of a heart attack while eating the grill's notorious "Triple Bypass Burger," which comes with three half-pound burger patties, 12 slices of bacon, three slices of American cheese, red onion, tomato, and the restaurant's "special sauce."
"He was having the sweats and shaking," said "Nurse" Bridgett, a waitress at the Heart Attack Grill.
When the man started complaining of chest pains, Nurse Bridgett went into the back to fetch "Doctor" Jon Basso, who opened the original restaurant in Arizona in 2005. Basso is not a real doctor.
Must Read
"One of the nurses came back to me and said, 'Dr. Jon, we've got a patient who's in trouble," Basso said. "The gentleman could barely talk. He was sweating, suffering."
Follow us
Basso then called 911 and the man -- still yet to be identified -- was rushed to a local hospital by paramedics and EMTs. Local news station KVUU reported the man had survived and was recovering from his near-death encounter.
Basso says that while he feels for the customer, he has no plans to shut down the restaurant, or trim the fat from the menu after Saturday's scare.
"I actually felt horrible for the gentleman because the tourists were taking photos of him as if it were some type of stunt," Basso said. "Even with our own morbid sense of humor, we would never pull a stunt like that."
Morbid indeed. The Heart Attack Grill has repeatedly been scrutinized for its "sense of humor," which borders the line between being comically unhealthy and dangerously unhealthy. Either way, it's unhealthy.
While no one has died at the Heart Attack Grill -- yet -- the restaurant's 6'8", 575-pound spokesman Blair River died last March at the age of 29. He died from pneumonia after catching the flu.
"Every single person cared about Blair," Basso said. "Had he been thinner, he most probably would have survived that pneumonia, and that's a hard fact that I'm not here to deny. I loved working with him. My conscience is simply this: What would Blair hovering above me want me to do right now? Blair would say this: 'Put back on the stethoscope. Let's keep being the doctor that everyone loves to hate, because that really gives the message out.'"
One week after River's death, Basso found a new obese spokesperson in Ernie Heart, who was actually the grill's original spokesperson but had to step down temporarily to have heart surgery.
"Even though my cardiologist and my wife tell me not to come after surviving a coma and multiple heart surgeries, I still come," Heart said. "I enjoy the burgers."
When Basso opened the original grill in 2005, he openly said he hoped to serve the equivalent of "nutritional pornography," where food is "so bad for you it's shocking."
