Denny's celebrates bacon with new Baconalia menu

Part the strips to see what's inside...

America's love of bacon is a trend that, no matter how many times it's been pronounced, simply won't die. Maybe we should start calling it a lifestyle? Denny's is making a solid case for all things porcine with it's new Baconalia menu--hell, the menu is even shaped like strips of bacon--by offering seven menu items that promise to please your palate and clog your arteries all at the same time.

Any excuse to ingest eight strips of bacon

We headed to the Denny's on East Lake Street to sample a few of the new offerings (available for a limited time only). Three of the seven appear to simply be eggs with various bacon options like pepper bacon, so we decided to go with a deep pull and order the BBBLT (a triple-decker sandwich with eight pieces of bacon), bacon flapjacks (bits of bacon cooked into buttermilk pancakes) and--hold us down--the crown glory: a maple bacon sundae.

Our BBBLT testers found the XXXL sandwich to be more like a club than a traditional BLT. The bacon overwhelmed, and the tomato was lost among the many greasy layers of the sandwich. The flapjacks proved to be slightly more successful, with salty chunks of bacon pairing well with the sweet pancakes and "maple" syrup. Interestingly, the waitress brought our order of bacon flapjacks and left off the bacon strips from the order, an understandable oversight when our table was already flooded with meat.

A bacon orgy in a glass

But the maple bacon sundae proved to be the one dish that exemplified the bacchanalia sentiment Denny's is going for: An orgy of chopped hickory-smoked bacon, maple syrup, and vanilla ice cream, it's sex on a spoon. Our waitress set the sundae down with a cringe, and when she came back to the table to find a decimated glass filled with empty spoons was shocked to find the verdict: Delicious. "I don't like to chew my ice cream," she explained.

Not a problem for our testers, who made a sport of getting the perfect spoonful of ice cream, syrup, and bacon. The Denny's sundae architects effectively layer the bacon throughout the dish and are far from stingy. If you can only stomach one item from the Baconalia menu, this is it. Sure, you're going to leave the restaurant feeling like Kirstie Alley, but it's worth it.

Insider tip: Sign up for the Denny's reward program and they'll email you a coupon for 20 percent off your entire tab.