Eating like a fat and bloated Elvis at Hi-Rise
Sitting at Hi-Rise (2162 Larimer St., 303-296-3656) on a sunny fall afternoon should bring warm thoughts, but when the nice folks behind the counter are preparing The King for you, there is only dread. Like a Jeopardy! question, the ingredients offer a hint at what’s in store: peanut butter, bacon, bananas, and honey on white bread. Ding! “Who is Elvis Presley?”
Breakfast is served all day at Hi-Rise, and there’s no escaping the breakfast-sandwich call of his majesty. The brain boils with fear and gluttonous shame at the impending meal: Bananas and honey? A bloated and sparkly Elvis, demanding piles of such sandwiches and stuffing them into his sweaty face? Bellowed gospel songs and fistfuls of pills and dying facedown on shag carpet—is this what’s going to happen?
When it comes, The King is not the drippy, disgusting mess as expected. The original version was probably a grease-bomb, but the Hi-Rise rendition is rather dainty and neatly grilled on a panini press. Taking the first bite, the sweet bananas and honey are overwhelming. Then the sticky peanut butter and the bacon take over—and it’s not bad. But after a few minutes of tentative nibbling, it all starts to go south. The bananas are too much, obscuring the goodness of the other ingredients. For a lover of bananas, this is probably fine. For the rest of us, it’s cloying. Nobody puts bacon in a corner!
But then after peeling the sandwich apart, a discovery is made: Peanut butter and bacon are really good together. It’s a morass of salty protein on toasted bread, with the barest hint of sweetness from the peanut butter. Sure, it sounds like the sort of thing dog owners wrap around a pill to trick a finicky dog, but those dogs know what they’re barking about. Without the bananas, though, The King loses the small amount of nutritional value it had. But then, Elvis ate those fuckers by the plateful, and look what happened to him.
