Winnipeg is famous for its Fat Boy burgers. This man is on a quest to try them all 

To a non-Winnipegger, a Fat Boy may appear, at first glance, to be nothing more than an ordinary chilli burger. 

"I would say the first bite being half across your face would say otherwise," Richard Caron — a Winnipeg chef and Fat Boy connoisseur — told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

"If your burger is not mostly disintegrated by the last two or three bites, then I would say you're not getting a proper Fat Boy."

The Fat Boy has been a Winnipeg staple for decades. You can find different versions of it all across the city, but at its core, it's a cheeseburger topped with mayonnaise, mustard, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles — and most importantly — a generous dollop of meat sauce.

Caron is on a quest to taste and review every Fat Burger Winnipeg has to offer, and he's documenting it all on his Instagram account, For The Love of All Fatboys. 

His plight was recently featured in the Winnipeg Free Press.

A 2019 story from CBC Winnipeg traces the iconic burger's origins to restaurateur Gus Scouras, who — along with his late brothers, George and John Scouras — opened some of Winnipeg's most legendary burger joints. 

Scouras — a post-Second World War immigrant from Greece — first learned to slather meat sauce on burgers in the 1950s at his uncle's restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Later, he opened his own restaurant in Winnipeg called Junior's Restaurant, where he unveiled a burger covered in chilli sauce. He called it the Lotta Burger — because it was a whole lot of burger.

Later, he and his brother George opened a second location, which they called Boy Big Burger, and their younger sibling John joined the business.

Over the years, Scouras told CBC, many of their employees went on to run restaurants of their own, and they took the concept with them.

One of those workers, Mike Lambos, bought the Dairi-Wip Drive-In in 1959. He takes credit for coining the name Fat Boy, which has since become entrenched.

Scouras told CBC he doesn't mind that people took his recipe and ran with it. Of Lambos, he said: "He's a good boy. I wish him very well."

That lack of animosity between burger slingers carries on today, says Caron.