Gluttons are invited to enjoy a guilt-feel meal at a riverside restaurant in York, discovers MAXINE GORDON

GLUTTONY is not a sin, is one of the first statements you read on Winner Winner's website.

After a visit to the restaurant on the riverside at King's Staith, you will see why.

Designed to replicate a sleazy, American dive bar, this is the sort of place where the food is served XL and finding a healthy option on the menu is as likely as Donald Trump discovering his mute button.

If you think it looks a bit trashy when you cross the threshold, that's the intention. Red walls and red lights set the scene for a night of decadence and indulgence.

Should dessert be your favourite part of a meal, stop reading now. And certainly don't make a booking.

Winner Winner doesn't do desserts. "We find people are too full to have a dessert after their meal," explains our attentive waitress for the night.

What it does do is burgers, chicken and ribs – many with a southern-inspired bbq flavour. None of the dishes appear to be for the faint-hearted; most of them are heavyweight. If you go, make sure you are hungry.

You probably won't need a starter, but as this is a review, we felt duty bound.

There were three of us: me, my husband and our teenage daughter.

To begin, we shared Shrimply Does It (£6.50) and Halloumi Baby (£5.50). Of the two, the cheese plate was the superior – three perfectly browned slabs of halloumi, drizzled with fresh pesto. Not massively exciting, but a good enough appetiser, which we washed down with a round of drinks: a Cosmopolitan for me (£6), a large tangy class of Sauvignon blanc for my hubby (£7) and a glass of water for my daughter (free, hurrah!).

The best thing about the shrimp was the thick chilli jam that came as a dip. You could have played 'spot the shrimp', so thick was the batter.

For mains, hubby picked the Big Mikey (£12) from the burgers selection: a double cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and pickle garnish. This should have come with a banner teasing: 'finish me if you can' such was its humdinger-ness. If that weren't enough, it was served with enough fries to feed a street. My husband was defeated, but declared the dish: "good". I can vouch for that. The burger was clearly home-made, was succulent and full of flavour and cooked to just pink inside.

Our daughter couldn't resist the sound of the Garbage Plate (£15) from the Chef's Specials menu. This turned out to be a plate of chicken, chorizo, diced potatoes, peppers and onions, held together with a melted cheese topping and chipotle sour cream. It sounded a real hotchpotch and looked like that too. Although not initially appetising, it was surprisingly tasty. Everything had been fried to generate maximum flavour (not to mention calories), but again the helping was too generous to be finished.

Winner Winner cooks its chicken on a rotisserie (you can see this in action at its street food shack in the Shambles Market in York). I'm a sucker for rotisserie chicken, so chose the Straight From the Coop option (£15 for a half chicken with two side dishes and a sauce/£25 for a whole chicken with four sides and two sauces). The chicken is brined and marinated for 24 hours before being slowly spit roasted. I went for the half chicken – another whopper of a plateful. We all tucked in and confirmed the chicken was moist and well cooked, although quite salty because of the brine soaking.

The side orders include everything from gravy and corn on the cob, to mac and cheese, potato salad and skin-on, seasoned fries.

I chose the fries and, looking for something healthy-ish, the avocado salad ( I noticed later I had been charged an extra £3 for this, when the menu said it should have been £2).

My fries were the same as my hubby's – skinless and unseasoned, so not as described on the menu – but acceptable all the same. The salad was a bit forlorn, with sad squidgy-looking pieces of tomato perked up by fresh cubes of avocado.

Winner Winner was an experience – and not one we would probably rush to have again. The food was decent in the main, often tasting better than it looked. It's not cheap, with mains averaging around the £14 mark, however they were filling so you wouldn't need another dish.

If you like Yorkshire portions and are happy to ingest a whole day's calories in a dish, then this is the place to fill your boots.

After all, at Winner Winner, gluttony is not a sin.

Winner Winner, 5 King's Staith, York

W: winnerwinnerrestaurant.com

T: 01904 848989

Food: Filling 3/5

Service: Good 4/5

Ambience: Trashy 3/5

Value: Decent 3/5