Big Plans

Amaebi and large Asahi at Rokuan in Chino Hills, CA.

As I sat at a sushi bar, enjoying a modest but flavorful portion of amaebi and the $2.50 large Asahi they had on special, I thought about the big plans I had for the coming months. This year has been uneventful as far as eating competitions go. I've only participated in a few, low-profile events, devoid of any real motivation to actually try and give it my best.

With a third of the year already passed, I am pleased to finally have some eating competitions worth training for again. This coming weekend I'll be doing hamburgers in San Diego. The hamburger eating contest hosted by Dash Burger is a repeat of a competition I had with Tom Gilbert and Stephanie Torres over a year ago. I have good memories about that event, it was one of my first contests, and only the second time I competed against Stephanie and Tom. I'm not sure if it will be as intense as last time, but with Tom's record of 18.5 burgers in 10 minutes to shoot for and a few hundred bucks on the line, I probably won't be showing up to this one hung over.

Though the event I'm really excited about  is the inaugural Crif Dog Classic in Brooklyn, New York on the Fourth of July. It's not everyday you get to be at the beginning of a burgeoning  eating competition. Takeru Kobayashi invited me to compete against him again and other top independent competitive eaters including Tom and Stephanie in another 10 minute eating contest. I feel fortunate in having the opportunity to develop my eating skills against some of the same people that I competed against from the start. The line up also includes Dave Goldstein and Brad Sciullo, two very strong eaters that I competed against in tacos at Huntington Beach last year.

www.crifdogclassic.com

With this kind of competition, I truly have the incentive to practice and improve my performance metrics. Despite the disgusting feeling I'll surely have from salt laden hot dog practice runs, I feel deeply invigorated to perform well and push my limits as an eater. And regardless of how the contest turns out, I'm looking forward to the trip to New York and spending time with some of my favorite eaters.

On The Tonight Show

Me and the denim clad legend of late night himself, Jay Leno.

Jerry Seinfeld and Robin Williams both received their start on The Tonight Show. I'm no comedian however, so when I was asked to perform the mayonnaise eating bit from my youtube channel on the show, I knew that the appearance wouldn't be a big deal or provide a real platform for me to advance from. Still, the offer to come on the show and be rewarded for something I did for free on the internet sounded like fun. I've also been a fan of Leno since I was a kid.

The production team from The Tonight Show tentatively scheduled me for an early April appearance on the Meal or No Meal segment for the show. A couple weeks before the taping, I worked out the logistics with the producers of how to take the jar of mayonnaise eating video and condense it to a short, 15 second format that was appropriate for a live audience. They wanted the demonstration to have the same disgusting impact as my youtube video and didn't really want to emphasize the amount of mayonnaise I would eat or how fast I would be doing it. This resulted in going with a squeezable 22 oz bottle and spraying the mayonnaise into my mouth for show.

The idea worked well during rehearsal. We used vanilla pudding to practice with and it took about 20 seconds or so to spray the majority of the bottle's contents into my mouth. During the taping however, I instinctively resorted to consuming the mayonnaise as I would in competition. I brought the bottle very close to me and consistently swallowed as I crushed the bottle to effectively push the contents into my mouth. This resulted in a much faster time than during the rehearsal and despite defying the plan I had with the producer, I believe that it still had the impact of generating looks of disgust among the audience members and probably to anyone else who decided to tune into NBC at 11:40 PM.

Ironically, the only part I didn't enjoy of the experience was the mayonnaise eating since it wasn't really in the mood to eat plain mayo at the time. It was interesting to walk around back stage and see how the show is filmed live in person. Also the production team was generously accommodating to me and Jay Leno was a very nice guy in person. Maybe I'll return one day as a legitimately famous person and not just as a novelty from youtube.

Eating Well

Halibut carpaccio at Oki Doki in Tustin, CA.

Since it's been slow for competitive eating events during the winter months, I find myself taking more time to enjoy food in smaller portions and at a much slower pace. There is such a pleasure derived from carefully analyzing each bite you take to discover all the nuances of flavor in the food you are enjoying. Tastes that you really can't enjoy when swallowing pounds of soggy hamburgers and corn dogs.

Though I don't really consider myself a foodie. I lack the discerning quality that elite yelpers possess. The quality that tells them when they are eating superior versions of food they have sampled elsewhere. Truthfully, I take as much enjoyment eating a carefully prepared plate of fresh halibut carpaccio at a nice restaurant as I do scarfing down fast food from Del Taco. So I won't bother rating the places I visit because attempting to assign some sort of numeric scale to the restaurants would be arbitrary at best. So rather, I'll surmise eating experiences that I have enjoyed on this blog.

The halibut carpaccio I described was from Oki Doki in Tustin, Ca. I randomly went there with my girlfriend and a few others one night in search for unique Japanese food near by. There is something to be said about how good company and drink make dining experiences better. Although we had to wait an hour to be seated, I had a generally positive experience at this restaurant. This was partially due to the fact that we finished two 64oz pitchers of Kirin lager, but also because the courses of grilled meats and seafood were very delicious. The items I enjoyed there included the grilled squid, liver yakitori and the halibut carpaccio.

Green tea mousse cake paired with Louis Jadot pinot noir 2009. 

Some items that were only decent tasting included the octopus salad and generic vanilla and green tea mochi for dessert. They weren't awful, just not very memorable. The Kirin served in one of those platsic pitchers with the cooling device in the center on the other-hand was great. There's a certain magic to cold beer, though I should be giving Kirin as much credit as the restaurant for serving it that way. This place was good for yakitori and beer and not so good for service.

I also had a fruitless hunt for a green tea cheesecake recently. In contacting the local gourmet Asian bakeries, it turned out that no one sells proper green tea cheese cake in Orange County any more. So we settled for a fluffy green tea mousse cake with red beans that my friend found at a local Korean market. It paired nicely with my favorite pinot noir for some after dinner drinks and dessert.

It's pleasant to go to sleep not feeling stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. In regularly consuming large amounts of food, it's refreshing to rediscover modest portions of well made food again. It's like the opposite of binging to just eat slowly, considering how things taste in your mouth. And I find it silly that this concept seems so alien to me. Especially after a terrible experience eating sodium laden chicken for half an hour last weekend, I guess it's no surprise that I'm finding so much pleasure in eating how you're not suppose to in competition, slowly and in small amounts. Unlike contests, when you eat well with others, everyone wins.