The SF tech worker whose unhinged order broke In-N-Out forever – SFGATE

Will Young wasn’t even sure his order was possible. He’d heard rumors, of course, but as a kid who’d grown up on the internet of the 1990s, he knew that website whispers didn’t always translate to the real world. He and his buddies, out for a meandering night in Las Vegas, would just have to ask.

So, around dinner time on Halloween night in 2004, Young’s laid-back group, including the late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, stepped up to the counter of a Nevada In-N-Out to test their fate. Would it be possible, they wondered, to make a classic double-double, but with 98 extra patties and 98 extra slices of cheese?

Sure, the workers said after some thought and a chuckle. Why not?

In-N-Out’s famous 100-by-100 burger was born.

“It was no grand plan,” Young recalled, nearly 22 years later, when reached by phone at his home in Walnut Creek. “We just asked. We thought they’d say no.”

Sure enough, the famously affable workers said they’d give the burger a shot. The order took a while, and it must have been hell on the grill cooks, but in the end, the gang got their wish. The evening shift even fashioned an improvised caddy for the behemoth, sliding together cardboard boxes to fit the whole thing. One bun at the top, one at the bottom, and a century of meat and cheese in between.

“That was the end of our night, of course,” Young said with a laugh, “because we ate it, felt terrible and didn’t go out after.”

Today, Young is a family man. Once a longtime San Francisco resident, he’s got a couple of kids and is happy to have traded the Mission for an East Bay backyard, though he does miss being able to simply walk from his front door to a quality burrito. Like many in the greater Bay Area, Young has spent a lifetime at the vague, uncertain nexus of technology and the internet. He’s strategized for startups that ended up going nowhere and programmed for places with sky-high valuations. He’s been an early-stage investor and a guy you’d have to squint to find on an org chart.

And through it all, he’s never been able to leave that massive burger behind. “Sadly, no matter what I do in my career, I’ll probably always best be known for eating a 100×100 at In-n-out,” reads his overflowing LinkedIn profile.

A native of Vancouver, Canada, Young moved to the Bay Area to chase the first dot-com boom. “Programmers back then in San Francisco were still kind of, I wouldn’t say poor, but, you know, like making like $50,000 to $60,000 a year,” he said. As a single man, it was enough money to live on and to chase a few weekends with. Along the way, Young became close friends with Hsieh, playing low-stakes poker and rolling around Las Vegas from time to time.

On the Halloween night in question, Young said that he and a group of seven close friends had been planning to go out to a club, or at least a bar, but decided to get dinner at In-N-Out first. It was Hsieh’s brother Andy who suggested the 100-by-100 burger; he’d heard a legend that some college guys had already tried to make one happen, but he wasn’t sure if they’d been able to pull it off.

So, sheepishly, they asked.

What arrived, a while later, was an unholy balance of hedonism and heroism. Recounting later on his Blogspot site, Young figured the whole thing totaled just under 20,000 calories. Young himself said he probably ate about 20 of the patties in total — and, likely because the kitchen staff had to hurriedly cook over 12 pounds of beef, a couple of them were nearly raw in the middle. But they ate them all.

In perfectly lo-fi digital camera photos from that day, it’s the cheese that stands out. Impossible yellow-orange, it pools in corners like gold in a sluice box. The slices have long since lost their square shape and have picked up a discomforting shine as fat weeps to the surface and tries to escape. But there is no escape.

“We thought it was amazing!” Young said happily. “We had to take a picture.”

They took many pictures, and eventually, word got around about the 100-patty burger. There was a brief window of time, maybe three years, after that night when Young would be dragged off the internet and into the real world to give a quote or two about the unexpected feat. He talked to Maxim and Reuters for stories, and he did a long interview with KCRW and the now-defunct website, A Hamburger Today. Eventually, the page view counter on his Blogspot ticked over a million visits.

At one point, a company pitching itself as the “Australian Condé Nast” reached out to Young, who was happy to give a quote about the burger. He only asked that, when printed, the magazine ship a couple of copies to his home.

“Months later, I forget about it,” said Young, until his roommate checked the mail and found a brown paper envelope. “[We] open it up, and there’s two porno magazines in there.” Just past the centerfold was Young’s quote and a photo of the sloppy mega-burger, part of a layout about ridiculous meals from around the world.

More than two decades on, In-N-Out has not forgotten about Young or his burger.

Because of the crew’s Las Vegas antics, the company maintains to this day a policy that no burger can be ordered larger than a four-by-four, meaning four patties and four slices of cheese. Much like the company’s recent choice to stop calling out the number 67 to avoid raucous teenagers, In-N-Out’s top brass decided that endless burger stacking is simply not worth the hassle.

Young said that he’s met multiple former In-N-Out managers who confirmed that his Las Vegas burger was the inflection point for corporate change. “I was in meetings where you came up, where we decided to not do this anymore,” Young recalled hearing from a former executive several years ago. Another ex-employee, a district manager, said that the clampdown had unintended consequences with at least one high-profile guest. “A Laker star, I won’t name him, but he would always come in for an eight-by-eight,” the manager told Young. “I had to tell him, ‘Sorry, we can’t do that anymore. I have to make it two four-by-fours.’ He was really disappointed.”

These days, Young has found himself straddling the line between his onetime burger infamy and his career in tech, consulting and venture capital. After many years of loving restaurants, Young recently became a part owner himself. He’s part of the founding team of Face Plant, a new fast food company out of Portland, Oregon, that has big plans to shake up the industry. Yes, the place sells burgers — vegan ones.

The company just celebrated its first anniversary, and it has been gaining traction around the Portland area, selling $4.49 burgers and $9.99 combos that include meatless patties made on-site. It helps that New York Times bestselling author and energetic food personality Molly Baz is Face Plant’s head of culinary.

“We’re super happy with where things are,” Young said. “March and April this year [were] our best months ever.” Total growth will take time, and for now, the group isn’t thinking outside of Oregon. But like Bay Area startups and Las Vegas cheeseburgers, Young is known for asking just how big something can realistically get.

“How do we scale this thing?” he asked rhetorically. “How do we fulfill our mission of being the next most loved fast food brand?” Well, if Face Plant is taking cues from In-N-Out, the answer is simple: have a great product that people love — and don’t be afraid to say yes to a few unusual customer request from time to time.

Who knows, they could even end up in the next issue of Australian Condé Nast.