Hungary is not a big place, being 109th out of 232 countries on this list. But it's still big enough that anything billed as "the biggest in Hungary" is likely to be pretty big. So when we saw Az ország legnagyobb hamburgere! ("The country's biggest hamburger!") prominently displayed on the homepage of Net-burger, a mostly delivery-only burger specialist that also maintains a small, Internet-friendly restaurant in Budapest's District VIII, we assumed it's biggest burger would be pretty big. And as the pictures above indicate, big it is - probably bigger than any other entrant so far in the ongoing Budapest Burgerwar™. But the real question is not whether the "Mammoth" burger is the biggest burger in Budapest, or even Hungary. It's whether it's the absolute worst.

Let's start by confessing that this ogre of a burger came to us with cautions from several local burger-munchers. ("The absolute worst hamburger in the United States is nowhere near as bad as that Net-burger," cried one when we told him what was on our lunch menu.) But even with these vigorous warnings we were stunned by the fetal pig-sized tangle of slop and ganglia that came splorching onto our desk with a dull thud 45 or so minutes after we made our order via Netpincér.hu.

In addition to cheese (grated), tomatoes, onions, mustard, ketchup and mayo, the mammut is, like all good bad Hungarian hamburgers, fouled with the sort of should-be-banned-on-humanitarian-grounds trimmings that even veterans of such torture can never get accustomed to, most notably raw cucumber and pepper slices and the scandalous salátakeverék (a cabbage-based sour slaw).

But it's the meat that really provides the jolt in this particular culinary nipple clamp. After taking the bait and ordering extra marha húspogácsa (the two additional beef patties augment the base price of Ft 790/€3.15 by Ft 250) we expected to at least come up with something tasting of beef. Instead, what we got were three discs of some sort of burned animal protein each around the size of the slice or two of salami (!) also thrown in the mix, in further, flagrant defiance of the Geneva Convention. On the other hand, it was pretty darn big…

How They Stack Up:

Meat: (1/10)
Bun: (3/10)
Trimmings: (2/10)
Affordability: (6/10)
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Total Score: 3.0/10