The $60 Checkmate Caesar is a sad waste of food

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Last weekend, I pulled a chicken out of my purse. Seriously. I was in Espana with a friend, enjoying a good glass of wine as a reward for having endured one of the worst meals of my life.

We had just come from Score on Davie, where we had picked apart the $60 Checkmate Caesar. You may have heard about this towering totem to gluttony in the media. It has been featured far and wide all over the world, including London's Daily News, USA Today and the New York Post. In social media circles, it rivals Kim Kardashian for nearly breaking the Internet.

And how does it taste? As gross as you would expect.

Let's start from the bottom up. The foundation is a four-ounce Caesar that lacks any semblance of seasoning. We tried improving it with liberal pours of Worcestershire sauce and several squeezed limes. It still wasn't drinkable.

On top of the glass is a whole deep-fried chicken into which many wooden skewers are poked to balance a hamburger (the patty tasted like cardboard), a mac-'n'-cheese-stuffed hot dog (stale bun), onion rings (battered to death in panko), chicken wings (your standard red-hot nasal burner), a pulled-pork slider (at least they claim it was pork) and a gummy brownie (topped tableside with a shot of canned whipped cream, which promptly slid onto the table in a melted pool of sugary sludge).

I will say that the Checkmate is an impressive feat of food engineering. And it certainly proved to be an attention grabber. Suddenly, we were the most popular people in the restaurant. Everyone stared, gasped and wanted to take our photo.

It later broke the ice while I was waiting in line for the communal toilets. Another diner, who had also ordered the overpriced Caesar, enjoyed the hot dog best. I thought the chicken, steamy and juicy, was the only decent element. Which is partly why I took the remainder home in a paper box and pulled it out at the bar for a laugh.

Why? Why? Why? An acquaintance at the bar berated me for wasting precious column space on a joke of a meal. And he has a valid point. The Checkmate Caesar is a sad waste of food. But the drink has been worth its weight in gold in terms of free advertising for the restaurant. Gimmick food has become a social media phenomenon. And the Score isn't the only culprit.

When I was in Toronto last month, I dined at DaiLo, one of the city's top 10 new restaurants, according to my colleague Chris Nuttall-Smith. In addition to an excellent whole trout and divine black truffle fried rice, I ate a Big Mac bao – which tasted exactly like a McDonald's Big Mac on a steamed sesame seed bun. Why one of Toronto's top rising chefs would bother making his own processed cheese (grated cheddar reduced with hot milk, sour cream, milk powder and gelatin) seems like a grand waste of talent. But again, that gimmicky dish is all anyone in Toronto talks about.

Dining culture has become inundated with the "tweet before you eat" crowd. I'm as guilty as anyone. I honestly don't think it's possible to put this genie back in the bottle. Restaurants that try to ban cell phone photography are unbearably pretentious.

But as discerning diners, we have the option to not play the game. I took one for the team. I ate the Checkmate Caesar so you don't have to. But I'm never, ever going to do it again.