DINING FEATURE: Rochester’s food challenges

For some people, food is just that: food. Fuel – ideally tasty fuel – that
keeps the body plugging along. But for an increasing segment of the population,
food and eating have become something else: a challenge. Another arena in which
to test who is the top dog, leader of the pack, or king of the hill.

Competitive eating continues to grow in popularity with events televised on
ESPN, internationally known melees like the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest,
and the Travel Channel’s hit show “Man Vs. Food,” in which host Adam
Richman tries his stomach at various food challenges across the country. The
spinoff, “Man Vs. Food Nation,” recently had a Rochester-based
episode that shined a spotlight on culinary creations right in our backyard.

I can remember my first food challenge. I was at a car show
in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
years ago. I had to be the first to finish an entire whipped-cream pie. I won a
t-shirt that was too big for me – I suspect they didn’t plan on someone my size
winning the contest. Nowadays I don’t eat competitively, but I love a
challenge. And while I’m not the track-running stick I was in high school, I
think my respectable 32/34 waist (depending which restaurant I’m walking out
of) and 5’10” stature keeps me a fairly lean, mean, eating machine.

And really, Rochester is a great
place to put my competitive-eating talent to the test. After trying the
second-highest hot-wings challenge at Quaker Steak & Lube over the summer,
the wheels began turning. My goal: to hit as many Rochester-based food
challenges as I could, eating across different flavors, foods, and feats,
testing myself on all the gut-busting obstacles: speed, heat, and bulk of food.
I narrowed my quest down to five different challenges that I’ve been punishing
myself through over the past five weeks. Below find my tales of digestive woe.
If we missed a local food challenge, please let us know about it by making a
comment on this article, below.

Description: Finish the approx. 16 oz. bowl of soup in 30
minutes or less ($8.25)

Best for: Fish, Aquaman, anybody with some gillyweed

First up on my list was Tokyo Restaurant’s challenge, a massive bowl of miso
ramen soup prepared at the highest spice level. I had originally picked it
because I thought it would be one of the easier challenges on my list. I mean,
it’s soup. How hard can it be? I was so confident, in fact, that I ate lunch
just a few hours earlier: a decent-sized salad and an M&M ice-cream sandwich.
What could go wrong?

I knew I was in trouble when a waitress brought a bowl of soup to a table
near me, coughing after catching a whiff of the spice. That soup was only a
Level 4 in spiciness. The table full of other diners laughed at me for even
thinking about going higher up on the scale.

The first bite in I thought I’d be fine. The soup was spicy, to be sure, up
there with some of the hottest solid foods I’ve ever tasted. But I thought I
could handle it. However I completely underestimated the problems that a
liquid-based spicy challenge would present as I went deeper into the abyss.
Only a minute or so in I was already coughing. The spice slowly started to
compound across my taste buds, and it wasn’t long before my sinuses started
running. Five minutes in I was still enjoying the soup, but the heat continued
to build. I clung to the notion that it would be close. If the soup cooled
down, I just might have a chance.

I was naive. The problem: most spicy things are solid. Chicken wings give
you some meat to help wash down your tears. The soup, however, was like
drowning in a bottle of boiling hot Tabasco
sauce. Even though I was allowed to drink water during the challenge, it proved
to be a double-edged sword. It helped with the soup’s super-hot temperature,
but cost me time and precious tummy space.

Halfway through I could tell things were looking bleak. The coughing only
continued, and the water-to-soup ratio made it look like I was having a
water-drinking challenge with a soup chaser. One of my plans was to try to get
rid of the solid food first – the leeks, noodles, and meat – and then chug the
broth like my life depended on it. It was a good plan, but difficult to enact
in practice.

By the time the soup hit an edible temperature, my stomach was already
screaming a loud and resounding “NO!” As I limped through the last
few minutes of the challenge, picking at the seemingly Olympic-pool-sized bowl,
I realized I wasn’t eating. I was barely gnawing at the noodles in an attempt
to persevere. By that point the soup stopped tasting good. When asked why, I
responded with a bitter, “There’s a lot.” I vowed to never eat soup
again.

So I definitively failed Challenge 1. It was more of a food marathon where I
had expected a sprint. The main problem was that I was spread too thin and
fighting too many fronts. I was up against heat, time, temperature, and volume.
By the end the soup was diluted with tears of defeat, and I was starting off my
quest 0-1. To make matters worse, somebody on the wall of fame apparently
finished the whole thing in less than four minutes. No domo arigato, Mr.
Soup-oboto.

(Tokyo Restaurant is located at 2930 W. Henrietta
Road. For more information call 424-4166 or visit
tokyorestaurantrochester.com.)

Description: Eat six mega-hot wings, no time limit ($6.99)

Next it was time to spread my wings. The spicy side of food has always been
my specialty, going back to high school when I was forbidden from making an
all-pepper stir fry in cooking class. Having had my share of both hot wings and
sauces, I was feeling a little cocky. I felt more at home with this challenge,
but also felt some pressure. What if I didn’t succeed in what I was predicting
would be one of my best showings?

I started with a newcomer to the Rochester
wing crowd, national chain Quaker Steak & Lube. When it first opened
earlier this year I tried one of its regular “atomic” wings. This
time I was back for the six-wing “triple atomic” challenge.

For the five people on earth who follow these kinds of things, the wings sit
at a blistering 500,000 Scoville units. If cavemen had sauce this hot, we never
would have learned how to build fires from wood. This challenge is not for the
faint of heart, or tongue.

The six wings came piled innocuously in an egg carton, and they looked good
to boot. I decided for the sake of the contest to go blue-cheese commando: I
was going straight for the heat. Might as well grab the chicken by the
proverbial horns.

The wings didn’t smell that hot, and they weren’t soaking in sauce at the
bottom of the carton. For packing such a punch, the sauce was actually quite
tasty. It had a tanginess that most super-hot sauces lack, and it wasn’t
out-of-the-gates-of-Hell unbearable.

The heat started to build, however, and it was the after effect of the sauce
that was the worst. Once I paused my mouth was consumed by the fiery spices. I
plowed through the six wings as fast as I could, coughing once after the fourth
wing. It was nowhere near the lung-attack festival that the soup had thrown the
week before, though that may have been the difference between taking the sauce
straight to the throat instead of letting it pass through my mouth first. In
any event, success was mine.

To tally up my cooling efforts: before I left the restaurant I downed four
glasses of water, drank some of the blue-cheese dressing, nibbled on some pita
bread, and had a chocolate-brownie sundae. The burning sensation lasted roughly
eight minutes and my lips burned on past that. But I walked out victorious, and
got a snazzy car decal. I felt famous.

(Quaker Steak & Lube is located at 2205 Buffalo
Road in Gates. For more information call 697-9464
or visit thelube.com.)

Description: Devour 12 wings in six minutes ($10.15)

Reward: Photo on wall, t-shirt (they were all out!), a
kick-ass wing crown (be jealous)

With only a day in between I rebounded to Buffalo Wild Wings. If I was going
to do one national-chain wing challenge, I might as well do two. The BWW
challenge was slightly more regulated then Quaker Steak’s, and that made it
much more difficult. I had only six minutes to eat 12 wings, which I wasn’t
that worried about. But the challenge also specifies no napkins, no water, no
blue cheese, no nothing. It was just me vs. the wings. The restaurant even set
out a glass of milk to tempt me for when I was finished, the white light at the
end of the red-hot tunnel.

I felt pretty good going in, even with the time limit and the heat. For more
perspective as to just how much fun these challenges are, the waitress told me
that a few fraternity brothers had come in for a pledge event earlier that
week. It made me feel good knowing that I was choosing to do something others
took as punishment – and that they didn’t pass the test. I’m waiting for my
frat acceptance letter in the mail.

Once the wings came I wasted no time going through them. I moved through the
first three in a blazing fast 45 seconds, giving me good time left on the clock
for once the heat fully kicked in. For a while I was on pace to clear under
four minutes. My first cough came right under the three-minute mark.

“I smelled that cough,” a waiter said.

From there I slowed down, the heat finally getting to me. I ended up
finishing the 12 wings in 4:27,
which for comparison purposes, is faster than I have ever been able to run a
mile. The reference is apt, given how much these wings made me sweat. The
waiter even brought me a very refreshing wash cloth once I finished to help
cool things down.

The heat from the BWW wings was enough to literally make me cry: I wept
mid-contest. Just like the Quaker Steak wings, it was a slow-building heat, but
this was much more intense and lacked the sweeter kick of the Lube wings. The
burn also lasted a lot longer – it was more than 20 minutes before my mouth
finally stopped burning, and it took even longer than that for my lips to cool
down. The lovely chocolate lava cake and ice cream I ordered afterward helped.
Now, with Flamethrower officially added to my move list, it was time to move
on.

(Buffalo Wild Wings is located at 780 Jefferson Road. For more information
call 475-1240 or visit buffalowildwings.com.)

Description: Two people must eat 10 lbs. of pizza in 45
minutes ($25)

Reward: t-shirt, picture on wall, certificate for free
large pizza

Pro Tip: Transform into a cow; have eight stomachs

With two victories under my belt it was time to up the ante. The next two
challenges on my list had never been beaten before. First up was 2 Ton Tony’s 2
Ton-za Challenge, which was a mouthful just to say. This two-person challenge
required me bringing in the cavalry, so I wrangled my good friend Dillon Jinks,
who had joined me last year in a fun jog around Sticky Lips’ Atomic Challenge
(more on that in a minute).

Preparation is always important, and I didn’t want to go into this one
blind. I started a junior version of what heavyweight eaters might put
themselves through. For a few days leading up to the challenge, I was almost
constantly drinking water – it expands the stomach and runs through your system
quickly. The day before I crammed four meals into one day, and the day of I had
a light breakfast and only enough small snacks to keep me from completely
wasting away before dinner.

For the 45-minute challenge we were allowed to drink water, but couldn’t
leave the table for bathroom (or, in this case, vomit room) breaks. We decided
on pepperoni and half banana peppers, but in hindsight we probably should have
just went with cheese.

“You’re screwed,” the man across the counter told me when I told
him I was here for the challenge. Apparently the furthest any team has ever
come is halfway through the pizza. That immediately became my benchmark and
goal.

My first thought when the pizza came out was wondering where the restaurant
found a tray that big. I’m guessing it must have been a custom order, and I
worried for the poor oven that had to accommodate all that pizza. This was a
continent of pizza, featuring roughly 60 slices. That’s a lot of dough.

My first giant burp came roughly 10 minutes in. I had perfected my burp
wiggle, which usually works to move the food through my system faster and help
me release when I need to. “It doesn’t taste good anymore…This isn’t
worth it,” I uttered as the contest progressed, already knowing that there
was no way we’d be able to finish.

The clock kept running, and my mouth kept moving, albeit much more slowly.
“Oh God, I’m so tired. I feel like it’s got like chloroform in it,” I
said (even the sound of my voice on the digital recorder seemed over it).
“Passing this is going to suck. It’s going to be like passing a kidney
stone through my butt.”

My compatriot Dillon was even less pleased: “You tricked me into doing
this.”

With 15 minutes remaining, my taste buds hit their limit. The pizza itself
was quite yummy, but eating so much of it was causing my mouth to process
nothing but salt.

“My goal is to eat one more piece of pizza,” I said. “Oh
wait, there’s one right here [on my plate]. I guess my goal is to eat this
piece of pizza. It doesn’t even taste like pizza anymore…”

The delirium only got worse. If you can get drunk off of food, I was three
sheet pizzas to the wind. And there was at least one moment where I was worried
that the food was going to start coming out the same way I was trying to force
it in.

By the end – we finished a respectable just past half way through the pizza
– I felt like I was pregnant with a pizza baby. I could hardly sit up straight,
was barely coherent, and passed out almost as soon as I got home. Just like
drinking too much, my body was retreating from food the only way it knew how:
forcing me to sleep. It was the most painful of the challenges at that point,
and I’m not going to lie, I wavered in my resolve to continue my quest. But I
only had one left, and I wasn’t going to let a pizza that could have solved
world hunger stop me now.

All that said, I did eat pizza the next day.

(2 Ton Tony’s is located at 545 Titus Ave. in Irondequoit. For more
information visit 266tony.com.)

Description: In 30 minutes consume 1 lb. hamburger, 1 lb.
pulled pork, 1 lb. French fries, 1/2 lb. hot meat sauce, 1/4 lb. cheese, eight
strips of bacon, four dress sets (lettuce, tomato, onion) on one over-sized bun
($19.95)

Just like the previous challenge, nobody has beaten the current iteration of
Sticky Lips’ Atomic Food Challenge, now featuring a larger bun, more bacon, and
hot meat sauce. (The challenge was recently featured on “Man Vs. Food
Nation.”) Truth be told, this wasn’t my first encounter with the massive
meal. I tried it once before in the summer of 2010, and am either brave, or
dumb, enough to be back a second time.

My waitress told me I wasn’t the first challenge she had that day. I was the
third: two people had tried it during lunch. I can’t imagine doing much after
any of these challenges, much less walking back into work. So kudos to the
lunch patrons who dared to dance on the devil’s dance floor.

With the ring of a bell, the waiter announced the commencement of the
challenge. My food arrived. It was a lot bigger then I remembered. But we had a
score to settle.

The Atomic Challenge is a pretty intimidating plate of food. I never really
reached the bottom of the platter – I moved food out of the way just to make
sure it had a bottom, but it was so big that even finding a place to start
seemed a life-altering decision. The size of some of the less-provoking
elements was also alarming. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t normally sized,
earth-grown lettuce. I didn’t even bother with the tomatoes. I don’t like them,
and unless they were the last thing between me and victory, there was no reason
to be so cruel to myself.

Not far into the challenge I was in danger: I had taken a giant bite and not
chewed it enough. As I struggled to swallow the too-big-to-eat bite, I was
worried I might have made a rookie mistake and would end up choking to death. I
recovered, but that fear plagued me as I tried to eat more manageable pieces
and not die in a giant pile of food. I think you’re automatically out of
Pulitzer contention if you expire mid-bite.

I did not stop while the timer kept ticking, and by the end I obliterated
most, if not all, of the hamburger and pulled pork – all of it delicious – but
I just couldn’t get past the large starchy pile of fries. I’m pretty sure I got
the bacon and cheese polished off as well, because hey, I’d eat anything
covered in bacon.

After my second Atomic defeat I didn’t actually feel that bad. I was much
more talkative than I was after the pizza, which pretty much crippled me, and
worried that I didn’t push myself far enough this time around. It wasn’t until
I got up to leave that it really started to hit me. I took leftovers with me
(what would fit in the take-out box, that is). The car ride home was agony,
perhaps because I was driving, but also because every whiff of the to-go box
caused me to fear for my poor nauseated stomach. Let’s just say I made it home
just in time. At least I didn’t have to worry about those calories.

(Sticky Lips is located at 625 Culver Road
and 830 Jefferson Road. For
more information visit stickylipsbbq.com)

To experience more of the digestive woe, check out this video of Willie and
the Sticky Lips Atomic Bomb Challenge! VIDEO BY MATT DETURCK (Click the vimeo
logo to enlarge and watch on vimeo’s site, or click the “expand
arrows” to watch fullscreen)

This article appears in Nov 15-15, 2011.