Under Puzder, in 2001, the similarly struggling Carl's Jr. introduced the Six Dollar Burger, a half-pound, premium offering intended to rival the fare of "sit-down" restaurants like T.G.I. Friday's. It was meant to taste like a $6 burger: The retail price was $3.95, expensive for a fast-food chain, but Puzder believes that fast-food customers are more discerning than people think they are and want higher-quality ingredients—such as beef from an Angus cow—than those found in ordinary patties.

The Six Dollar Burger did well with customers and in 2002 won the Silver Skillet Award from Restaurant Business magazine. Puzder saw the future. "I think a lot of this everybody's-gonna-eat-healthy thing is more a concern of people in the media than a concern of people who come into our restaurants," he says. Fast-food customers had indeed been clamoring for healthy alternatives, which prompted an industrywide stampede toward salads and orange slices, but just because customers wanted them on the menu didn't necessarily mean they wanted to eat them. For all the buzz created by snack wraps and yogurt parfaits, burgers and fries remain the two most frequently ordered items in American restaurants, according to industry research group NPD Foodworld. In fact, the addition of salads at McDonald's and other chains is partly aimed at drawing more burger-eating men by placating wives and girlfriends who would otherwise veto the restaurant choice. "What people say they want and what they do don't match up," says Darren Tristano, an executive vice president at Technomic, a food-industry research and consulting firm. "If they say, 'I'm gonna order more salads,' they're going to order more french fries." CKE marketing head Brad Haley, who looks a bit like a golfer with his short-sleeve shirt, goatee, and nascent paunch, echoes the sentiment. "People say what makes them feel better about themselves in surveys."

So Hardee's dispensed with any semblance of social conscience and in 2003 introduced the Thickburger. In 2004, this begat the downright lurid Monster Thickburger, a messy two-thirds of a pound of charbroiled Angus beef containing more than 1,400 calories and 107 grams of fat. Soon afterward, when McDonald's, under fire in the wake of Super Size Me, responded to critics by phasing out its supersize menu, Thickburgers were there to help fill the void. Sales soared, nutritionists cried foul, and a string of burgers of escalating perversity followed from both Hardee's and Carl's Jr.: the Breakfast Burger (a huge patty crowned with a fried egg, bacon, and hash browns), the Philly Cheese Steak Thickburger (topped with sliced steak and cheese), and the Pastrami Burger (take a guess).

When the latter two prompted a horrified Jay Leno to denounce CKE for using meat as "a condiment for other meats," CKE was delighted and started touting "meat as a condiment" in its promotional materials. "When we do a big, decadent burger," says Haley, a man whose office fridge is full of nothing but springwater and Diet Coke, "we'll send the press release to Jay Leno, and we're not afraid if he says, 'This disgusting thing is 5,000 calories.' "

Leno's disgust has become a reliable boost to CKE's sales. Every time the company introduces a new item, he attacks it, but not before running down its entire list of ingredients in detail, as he did in late 2007 when Hardee's unveiled its contribution to the rapidly growing breakfast market, the Country Breakfast Burrito. Consisting of two eggs, ham, bacon, sausage, cheese, and sausage gravy in a flour tortilla, it has 60 grams of fat and more than 900 calories—the biggest in the land, a belt notch ahead of the Carl's Jr. Breakfast Burger, which comes in at 830 calories. When Haley was quoted as saying that the burrito finally makes a big country breakfast portable, Leno, in one of two separate bits he did on the breakfast beast, quipped, "See, this way you can take it with you in the ambulance after your heart stops." Says Puzder: "A lot of people think Leno's on the payroll."