We Tested Outback’s NCAA Tournament-Themed Monstrosity And It Was Annoyingly Good

The NCAA Tournament is far more than just a basketball tournament to determine a collegiate national champion. It’s a cultural phenomenon. March Madness is something everyone knows about and has become an opportunity for corporations to come up with some clever basketball-themed item to take advantage of everyone’s hoops fever.

There have been plenty of examples in 2017, like Pizza Hut’s “Pie Tops” (shoes that order pizzas), and Outback’s 3-Point Bloom appetizer. The latter piqued my interest because it is one of the most ridiculous food items we’ve seen in a very long time, as it’s a Bloomin’ Onion, already a beast of a fried onion, that they topped with cheese fries and a bunch of small pieces of steak.

The initial reaction was that this was a disgusting, gluttonous, unnecessary creation at north of 3,000 calories. However, there was also intrigue, because I like all three of the ingredients quite a bit. Fried onions, cheese fries and steak are all very good on their own, so I went and tried it out of curiosity to see if this monstrosity would actually taste good, or be way too much all happening at once.

Guess what? It’s obnoxiously delicious. I was hoping it would be bad. I was hoping to report back and tell you not to get it, because it’s terrible for you, but, alas, it’s quite tasty.

The first thing you realize when it arrives at the table is that it looks the exact same as in the promotional pictures (which isn’t how this always works). This gave me hope, as I was half-expecting it to come out of the kitchen as just a mess of ingredients. After the initial shock of realizing you’ve actually ordered this, you must figure out how to attack it.

You can find yourself getting into a little rhythm of picking at the onion and then grabbing some cheese fries and then some steak. But this is meant to be a combo, not a sampler, so I started taking the time to layer onion/fries/steak and was surprised with how well it all worked together.

It’s not the easiest thing to eat with your hands if you want to get a little of everything in one bite. The steak pieces are small (good, but small) and that means they just kind of fall off your pile of fries and onions when you pick them up, or, if you’re successful, they will immediately fall in the dipping sauces. However, it felt wrong to eat something so gluttonous with a fork, so I soldiered on, leaving utensils to the side.

I went with one other person to try and tackle this challenge, and early on we were thinking “this won’t be so bad,” because for the first half of it, everything’s pretty easy going. And then, right as you are nearing the end of the cheese fries and steak (it’s only a half order of the cheese fries on top) all the cheese, meat and miscellaneous fried goods start to settle in your stomach. You hit a wall. Outback will tell you that it’s meant for six people, but four reasonably hungry humans could very easily take this beast down. Two people? You best be extraordinarily hungry, or willing to push yourself into an uncomfortable level of full.

We pushed through as much as we could, eating all of the cheese fries and steak, but in the end were defeated by the sheer volume of fried onions in front of us.

I’ve felt better about myself than I did after eating this monstrosity, but it was the day before the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. That’s a four-day stretch in which I’m sitting on my couch for at least 50 hours, so I don’t even pretend like I’m going to be healthy this week. With that being the case, I figured I might as well take on a behemoth of fried onions, potatoes, cheese and beef. I have no regrets.