Johnnie Eats!

Eating Well

2012-02-23T15:38:00.000-08:00

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.

A Year later

2012-01-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

This isn't eating.

Eating is an action performed to acquire nutritional sustenance. We eat for the sake of our survival. No, what I do on the stage with others, in front of an audience or a camera isn't eating. I don't do it for the sake of sustenance and, with the amount of choking I've experienced, it is certainly not conducive to my survival.

What I do is more like quickly packing luggage, taking as much stuff as I can and trying to rapidly stuff it into a bag without the bag bursting or throwing up in front of the other bags. The real objective is to pack in as much stuff as possible, not to eat. Eating is what David Hassellhoff does with cheeseburgers while laying on the floor.

And why I do it really comes down to a basic proposition that I thought of after my first contest: So I get rewarded to consume large quantities of food in a short period of time? Ok, sign me up. This is something that I have learned in the past year that I've engaged in this activity, and taking some time to reflect on my eating career, I've come to notice a few trends.

The most significant of which is the reason why I do this in the first place. After making some decent extra income from events, I've become more objective with the competitive eating events I choose to participate in. It simply comes down to a matter of deciding whether or not the incentive to do an event is worth the time and discomfort.

It's not for the love of food as some have suggested. I never walk away from a contest thinking about how enjoyable the soggy food I just packed in was. And on the rare occasion when I actually enjoy the taste of a challenge, it becomes disappointing because it's over much too quickly. No, I'd rather eat slowly and really enjoy the meal with the company of others and a few drinks.

The other trend I've noticed is that competitive eating doesn't have the same allure that it once had for me. Maybe there is a slump that eaters experience in their sophomore year of actively engaging in competition. Perhaps there is, I really haven't felt the magic in a while and it's just not as exciting anymore. The erection I once had for food and competition has grown flaccid.

Penis dessert challenge in San Diego

Regardless, as long as there is an incentive to participate in competition and challenges I will continue to competitively eat. I still enjoy the aspect of improving my technique and capacity and truly feel that I have so much more to learn and improve on.

With 2012 already here, I plan to re-position my online content to be a bit more purposeful. I feel cross posting what I put on youtube with my blog content then linking it to facebook is very redundant. I plan on writing more frequently with more succinct blog entries reflecting on my current endeavors with photographs and opinions. I won't bother summarizing what I post about on youtube since the videos pretty much speak for themselves. Though I will continue posting as I have, hopefully increasing the frequency of uploads as I get more subscribers.

As for facebook, well, that will go on as normal. Just tagging your check ins, posting my current activities and commenting on how adorable that picture you posted of your new puppy is. Also the new timeline format sucks, please stop using that abomination.

Lastly, I've met some very interesting people over the past year. People who have strong opinions regarding competitive eating, who are outspoken regarding competition, the people they associate with in the competitive eating community and the current state of the eating game in general. It's been a few months, but I finally got around to editing a few interviews I did with competitive eaters from the West Coast Hot Dog Eating Championship reflecting such opinions.

Here is part 1:

And part 2:

Also thanks to everyone who's stuck around with me over the past year. I truly appreciate the support in growing my youtube subscriber base and the encouraging words in general. I hope to bring more to the table over the next year.

Eating On TV

2011-11-10T13:49:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of waiting on the set of a TV show. I learned that having plenty of patience and a decent distraction to be absolute necessities when working on a show. I've had the opportunity to work on a couple TV shows lately for competitive eating related segments.

The first of which was as a technical advisor for the FOX TV show "Bones". Despite the allure of working on a popular show, I ended up putting in some long hours over the course of 3 weeks, casting, planning and sitting in during episode meetings; it was actually a lot of hard work. The production team for the show wanted to film an episode under the back drop of an eating competition - "The Hot Dog In The Competition" and it was up to me to cast competitive eaters, coordinate the logistics of an eating contest during the shoot and advise on the details in regards to all the things involved during an eating competition.

After that, when we were ready to begin filming the eating segments, there were hours of waiting spent between the filming the scenes and time was spent mostly hanging out with the cast and production crew. Though I don't really watch the show, so I only had a vague idea of how everything would fit together. This was resolved after getting a copy of the script and participating in the episode meeting which ended up with me getting excited over how they would portray competitive eating on television.

Due to the closed set policy of the studio, I wasn't able to get any pictures on set but they did manage to film a behind the scenes segment for the episode:

Although there ended up being a lot of extras with no real competitive eating experience cast, I managed to get some of my local competitive eating friends involved including Naader Reda, Matt Cohen, Aaron Ybarra and Jed Donahue. I also ended up casting a personal friend to play the victim of the episode who I had a lot of fun with in coaching to portray a champion competitive eater. The amount of food we had to sort out for the episode was staggering. Literally hundreds of hotdogs, bananas, chicken wings and oysters were prepared for the various shoots. They hired a catering truck to sort out the contest food and we filmed multiple scenes involving these items. Fortunately, we didn't have to actually consume much of the food because of the magic of editing and we were allowed to spit any food we had in our mouths into a plastic bucket underneath the competition table after every take.

There was a lot of waiting in between setting up each scene so I walked around and picked at the generous catering selection they had set up for the cast and production staff. Though the real highlight of working on the show was the big hot dog eating contest scene which took a full day to shoot. I ended up casting myself for this scene and enjoyed working with actor Skyler Stone on our close race to the finish of an intense hot dog eating contest. The production team let me use Emily Deschanel's stand in while they set up the cameras and lights which freed me up to further wander around and eat more food from the catering table. Despite the long hours and all the waiting, working on the show was definitely a positive experience.

I also worked on the TV show "DVD On TV" for FX. This was for a noodle eating segment against one of the show's hosts, Jennifer Lothrop, while other host, Dave Holmes commentated. There was a lot of waiting for this one too though it was especially challenging since we filmed the segment around 11pm. That's much later than I'm normally used to eating. They ended up wearing panda outfits to fit in the theme of the show and the segment was a lot of fun to shoot.

Though the noodles were pretty gross after sitting out for a while, I managed to eat four bowls worth during the one minute contest while panda Jennifer worked on her only bowl. We had Taco Bell brought in after the shoot and the cast and crew had a very late dinner. Following up the noodles with bean burritos was a weird mix but the staff was entertained by the notion of me continuing to eat after the segment we just filmed. At least I didn't have to wear a panda suit.

Lastly, I posted a new video to my youtube channel to promote these TV appearances I'm making and did a fan requested eating stunt in the process:

I've definitely enjoyed working both behind and in front of the camera and plan to continue perusing more TV opportunities in the future. The only gig better than getting paid to eat it getting paid to eat on TV.

Day and Night

2011-10-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

I believe Cole Porter said it best with the lyrics, "Where you are, I think of you, day and night, night and day." to accurately describe the feeling of an unending obsession to satiate one's urges.

Though he was most likely referring to homosexual sodomy, I'll be using it to describe my own feelings toward eating challenges and contests for the purpose of this blog post. Though I haven't been very active in the competitive eating business lately and have been especially lazy at updating my blog and youtube channel, I have had some epic all you can eat sushi runs in the past month and a half and my obsession with competitive eating has been active both day and night.

Recently, Kevin Ross and I headed up to Northern California for yet another another eating escapade. This time we decided to stop at Batter Up Pancakes in Fresno, Ca to check out the Grandslam Challenge that our friends in the competitive eating community have been raving about. We arrived about an hour before their closing time of 2pm and the restaurant was cool about preparing a double challenge for us since we contacted them ahead of time.

The owner was present and eager to see us attempt the challenge since he wasn't present for the record setting attempt Matt Stonie did last year. He finished the challenge in a very quick 6 minutes and 4 seconds destroying the old record of 42 minutes. Since the challenge was only about 4 pounds in total, we would both be going after the time Matt had set. The challenge is to consume a pizza platter sized 25 ounce pancake along with a 10 egg scramble with a cup of cheese and four toppings of your choice mixed in within the 45 minute time limit.

Normally they serve the scramble on top of the pancake but during his record setting attempt, Matt opted to separate the scramble from the pancake and we did the same. It helped me out psychologically because I've always considered pancakes a sweet food and mingling with a savory combination of eggs and cheese would probably be distracting. To save on mass, I chose to go with double spinach and double onions for my toppings since they would likely cook down in size and Kevin ended up with some mushrooms mixed in and avocados on top of his scramble.

I thought Kevin's scramble looked more appetizing but mine was still very delicious. He decided to attack the pancake portion of the challenge first while I dove into my scramble. It was fantastic and a definite shame to scarf down so quickly. I finished my scramble at about the same time Kevin finished his pancake. We were both making good time on completing the challenge. My strategy differed from Kevin's strategy of tearing up the pancake. I simply rolled up the entire thing and went at it like a giant burrito.

This proved to be very efficient as I was able to beat Matt's record by nearly a minute, finishing in 5 minutes and 8 seconds. Kevin struggled a little with the scramble portion of the challenge but still managed to complete it in a respectable 7 minutes and 20 seconds, the third fastest time for the challenge on record. We left there feeling satisfied but not necessarily full and along with the prizes of a t-shirt, mug, picture on their wall and a refund of our challenge money, the owner also gave us a couple free dessert pancakes for the road. I haven't had such an awesome experience with an eating challenge in a while, the guys running the place were fucking boss.

Here's video of the challenge:

The next day, after avoiding any alcohol or staying up late we went to Lumpy's Diner in Antioch for their annual hamburger eating contest. Kevin opted out since he did another challenge earlier that day and the notion of paying $40 to register seemed like a waste. I had some decent competition for this event even though last year's champion, Matt Stonie, couldn't compete to defend his title due to his contract with the MLE.

I would face off against veteran eaters such as Darin Verduzco, Naader Reda, Dax Swanson, Mary Bowers and most notably my old buddy Stephanie Torres. I haven't competed against her since our last hamburger contest in December 2010 and was very eager to see how we'd stack up against each other in a year's time. The contest was the same 12 minute, all you can eat format using plain hamburgers that I lost to Matt with last year by part of a hamburger. He managed to eat 10 of the large hamburgers Lumpy's Diner provides in 12 minutes, a total Stephanie and I would surely be setting out to beat.

Having beaten his record the prior day at the pancake challenge I was rather confident that I could do the same with hamburgers. I mean it's not like it's current Matt we'd have to beat but "Last Year" Matt. Fortunately they stationed me next to Stephanie so we both could keep track of each other's progress and as the contest began, I could tell that we were both there for business. She employed her usual eating style, tearing the food into smaller chunks while I was using my practiced method, swallowing large portions of food without chewing.

This proved somewhat hazardous since I coughed and choked a couple times on stage but fortunately didn't reverse. This set me back a little and we managed to keep pace with each other through most of the 12 minutes. Some of the other eaters ended up reversing during the event but I pretty much kept my attention to Stephanie's and my own plate during the contest. It came down to the two of us again and she took the victory by working on her 13th hamburger while I was on my 12th.

They didn't count partials so here's the official results for the top 5:

1: Stephanie - 12 hamburgers

2: Johnnie - 11 hamburgers

3: Naader - 8 hamburgers

4T: Darin - 7 hamburgers

4T: Dax - 7 hamburgers

It's nice to see the progress that we both made as eaters in the past year and having both of us beat Matt's record at this contest was very encouraging. I'll blame my loss on a couple bad swallows and nearly reversing during the start, something which I hope to correct with practice, but Stephanie really has come a long way in her eating career and totally deserved taking home the Lumpy's belt and prize money.

I can't wait until our next competition together and maybe another eating challenge. I'm sure I'll be obsessing about it like Porter's song describes.

Unconquered

2011-09-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

There's a certain satisfaction to being the first to do something. It's like licking the pudding from the lid of a freshly opened package of jello or smacking a baby that's just been pulled from it's mothers womb.

For what ever reason it may be, it's simply pleasant to be the first.

In terms of restaurant eating challenges, there really aren't many that remain unconquered. It seems like every eating challenge has already been done by some great eater before I started in the competitive eating business. So when I heard about a new local challenge that no one has yet been able to conquer and that it involved musubi, I ended my eating challenge hiatus and drove to Ola Hawaiian BBQ in Fullerton, CA.

It's been about 3 months since my last eating challenge. I've been somewhat reluctant to do these since eating another 5 or 6 pound meal wasn't much of a challenge anymore and the idea of putting down another giant burrito or hamburger seemed bland. I've also made the decision to focus mainly on competitions since the rewards are generally better and I take great enjoyment from competing with other people.

Still, the allure of taking down a decent portion of food again was inviting, especially if it was something that I would enjoy eating. The Stan-musubi challenge is a seven pound musubi comprised of four layers of rice with grilled spam, chicken and beef between each layer. It was named after the owner and uses three sheets of nori to wrap up everything. It is served on a plate with a spatula.

They have somewhat strict house rules for the challenge. You must finish everything within 35 minutes and you are not allowed to get up from the table, fall asleep or use the bathroom. The bill also comes to a hefty $35.00 if you fail, which is a little more pricey than your usual eating challenge expense. If you manage to finish within the time limit, you get the meal for free and your picture on their wall of fame. At the time of this challenge, there was no wall of fame for the Stan-musubi challenge since no one had conquered it yet.

Apparently the last challenger ended up throwing up near the end and was very close to completing the challenge. So it would definitely be a feat to keep everything in and become the first person to finish this massive musubi. That really was the most exciting aspect of doing this challenge and I kept it in mind as I started.

It came out very hot, and after preparing my water, utensils and napkins, I quickly dove in. This was a big mistake since the musubi was almost too hot to handle. The heat of the food definitely forced me to take some time to use water to help cool it down. However, it was still very enjoyable. The giant layered musubi is pretty much what you'd expect from a regular musubi only at a much larger scale.

My mouth was a bit salty towards the final third of the challenge and I requested for something sweet to help balance out the taste in my mouth. I ended up with a milk tea boba which not only helped wash down the food but also balanced the saltiness with sweet. The boba balls provided a fun texture to chew on after I conquered the challenge.

At a leisurely 17:55, I had managed to become the first person to finish Ola Hawaiian's Stan-musubi challenge. There was also a smaller eating challenge available that I considered doing after the Stan-musubi challenge. It involves eating 9 normal sized musubi but I decided not to since it had already been conquered several times and I may not be able to set the record time since I had 7 pounds of musubi in me. I hope that they introduce an even larger challenge in the future.

Here's video of the challenge:

Ola Hawaiian BBQ

733 N Placentia Ave

Fullerton, CA 92831

(714) 996-3288

The next step in my eating challenge journey is probably looking for the next unconquered challenge. Either that or to try and beat some decent records set by notable eaters. Or perhaps just finding something that I would enjoy eating large quantities of.

Two Contests, One Day

2011-08-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

If there's anything I've learned from watching the cookie monster on Sesame Street while growing up, it's that there are no consequences from succumbing to your addictions.

With that in mind, I went ahead and participated in two eating contests in a single day. Since I take so much enjoyment from competitive eating, surely nothing bad can happen from eating 8 pounds of frozen yogurt and then following it up with a hot dog eating contest.

The frozen yogurt happened during the 3rd annual frozen yogurt eating contest at Red Cup Yogurt in Oceanside, CA. And when I say happened, I mean it turned into a non-stop vomit fest. You really can't expect much good to happen when you decide to ingest a gallon of frozen dairy, but they had a surprising amount of people sign up, myself included.

My competition included some of the usual Southern Californian competitive eaters; Naader, Aaron, Matt, myself and Frank. I thought about calling ourselves the Glutton Force Five, but that name had already been taken by an awesome food truck in Chicago. Together with 15 other guys, we were divided into two 30 minute rounds of frozen yogurt competition. The rules were simple, the $300 prize would be split between the three fastest finishers who did not reverse. There was also a matter of beating the 12 minute record set by the winner last year.

I prepared by bundling up with a scarf and beanie in hopes to keep myself as warm as possible while ingesting my bucket of frozen fun. From my frozen yogurt challenge experience in Vegas, I learned that despite my normal lactose tolerance, digesting this much diary would require help. So I took 6 lactaid tablets right before eating my 8 pounds of strawberry frozen yogurt. I felt prepared and confident to do well in this competition.

Though my confidence diminished after watching the first round of guys participate. Only one guy managed to finish all 8 pounds and more than half threw up what they couldn't finish. As much as I love frozen yogurt, I had a bad feeling going into my round. We started by drinking the melted "soup" from the top of the bucket before digging in with the spoon. The brain freeze soon set in and I realized just how unpleasant this task would be.

The frozen yogurt went down easily and I managed to keep shoveling spoonfuls into my mouth without worrying about choking. Naader and Aaron were also making quick work of their buckets. This prompted me to eat at an even faster pace. I felt my esophagus tighten and my heart rate increase to keep my body warm from the pounds of frozen dairy I was forcing in.

At about 5 minutes in, I was nearly done but needed a few moments to compose myself before finishing. It was a very close finish, but I had managed to edge out Naader by 15 seconds, finishing my 8 pounds in 5:53 and winning $200. We both destroyed the current record of 12 minutes as well.

Here's footage of the contest:

Red Cup Yogurt
301 Mission Ave. #301
Oceanside, CA 92054
www.redcupyogurt.com

After this, there was the business of sorting out my qualifier for the West Coast Hot Dog Eating Championship at the Derby Deli in Mission Viejo. I'm nearing the end of my first year in competitive eating and I wanted to put on a good performance for my qualifier. This was my first competitive eating event ever and I'd like to see the progress that I made over the past year.

However, going in with 8 pounds of frozen yogurt sitting inside you was definitely not the way to do it. Both me and Naader were trying out this double contest day thing for the first time and it's probably one of the stupidest moves you can make in competitive eating. Following up a high sugar and dairy meal with a high sodium one is a terrible combination.

We would face off against the newly independent Kevin Ross, Shawn Kirby and some big dude named Travis. Fortunately they would allow the top 3 to continue on to the finals on Labor Day so only two people would be disappointed that night. As usual, the Derby was nicely decorated and we had the stage set up in the lounge area.

It's hard to believe that's it's already been a year since I was stuffing my face with no technique or experience at this place. Nostalgia for an eating competition was a new emotion for me. The hot dogs came out in platters of ten and were pleasantly warm. Of course I'd be dunking the buns in water, but at least the first two hot dogs I ate were decent. Everyone seemed to have a strong start and I quickly got into my usual double hot dog eating technique. Though I already started feeling the wall at only 8 hot dogs in and experienced the strongest amount of regret for the prior contest at that point.

It would have been devastating if I didn't qualify for the finals of the event that I got my start in competitive eating in. I really ought to have taken this qualifier more seriously. To make matters worse, Kevin was putting the hot dogs away at about the same rate he did at the Nathan's qualifier back in June and Naader didn't seem phased at the fact that he just ate 8 pounds of frozen yogurt. Despite there being only 5 contestants, I couldn't slack off if I wanted to secure a spot in the finals.

It was somewhat of a relief, that me, Kevin and Naader were significantly ahead in the last 3 minutes of the contest. I felt that I could take it easy at this point. I just needed to make sure that I didn't throw up and get myself disqualified. So, I kept pace with Kevin and we all managed to qualify for the finals.

It was very close:

1: Kevin Ross - 19.5 HDB
2: Johnnie Excel - 18.5 HDB
3: Naader Reda - 17.5 HDB

The 3rd Annual West Coast Hot Dog Eating Championship is happening in one week:

http://www.derbymv.com/index.php?p=derby_hotdog_contest

It will be a very serious contest. With $10,000 on the line and the likes of Takeru, Pete and Tom coming back to California, it will definitely be the only contest I'm doing that day. I also plan on doing a bit more than 18.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

So was cookie monster full of shit in teaching me that unbridled addiction has no consequence? Yes, very much so. In my adult years, I have learned that it's not a good idea to idolize someone with a fist in their ass.

Stacked

2011-08-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

My top complaint in competitive eating is usually the lack of strong eaters to compete against at contests. Although the lack of challenging competition makes winning easier, I don't receive as much satisfaction from my victory and it hinders my performance because I'm missing that sense of urgency needed to push myself during a contest. There's not much sport in going to an eating competition and facing off against a bunch of people with no competitive eating experience.

Though sometimes your wishes are fulfilled in grand fashion. Eating legend Takeru Kobayashi, in collaboration with Dexter Holland of The Offspring, put together a taco eating contest in Huntington Beach, CA to promote Dexter's Gringo Bandito hot sauce. Some top eaters were assembled to participate in this competition to compete for nearly $7,000 in prize money against Kobayashi himself. The competition included "Furious" Pete from Canada, as well as East Coast eaters Dave Goldstein and Brad Sciullo. Californian competitive eaters including Naader Reda, Aaron Ybarra and Matt Cohen would also be competing. The field would be very stacked.

The competition was held at Fred's Mexican Cafe in Huntington Beach at the same time as the US Open of Surfing. The sidewalks along Pacific Coast Highway were packed. It didn't help that the venue's intimate atmosphere made it difficult to accommodate an eating contest but the organizers managed to cram a small stage in a room full of people. Unfortunately, this had the ramification of splitting the contest into two rounds. With all the judges, counters and trays of tacos, there was only enough room to fit half of the 11 competitors.

Despite the logistical set backs, I was still very enthused to participate. I've been looking forward to competing in this event for weeks. I also had the advantage of being placed in the 2nd round of competition so I could observe the other eaters before competing myself and get a good idea of what to expect.

Aaron and Naader participated in the first round and brought the most eating experience to their table. After some jovial introductions, a serious mood quickly set in with the eaters. They realized that they would not only be competing against each other in the first round, but their totals would be measured against the amounts from the guys in the next round as well. For a shot at the money against this stacked field, all of the eaters needed to push themselves to the limit.

During the first round, Aaron quickly took a commanding lead. He stacked about three or four tacos together and ate them simultaneously. Aaron kept this pace up for the first five of the ten minutes before slowing down. Everyone seemed to be figuring out how to eat the tacos as they went. Naader eventually got his stride and steadily ate his chicken tacos. He would catch up to Aaron in the last few minutes and the round came down to the two of them. They both broke the 30 taco mark in the final minute. Aaron ended up edging out Naader with 31 chicken tacos to his 30.

Here's video of the first round:

The bar was set, and after an intense first round, it was my turn next. There was barely enough room for five eaters at the table and with six it felt cramped. After introductions, me and Brad were placed by each other and we negotiated our table real estate. We had hardly enough room for cups with the two trays of chicken tacos placed in front of each eater. For a serious eating contest you can never have enough cups. Looking at the tacos up close, they really didn't seem too complicated to eat. Each one was just a tortilla with a strip of grilled chicken and some cheese inside.

As the contest started, everyone dove right in, cramming several tacos into their mouths at once. I did the same but I needed to eat a few of these tacos in order to get a hang of how to eat them efficiently. However, with this line up of eaters, every moment counts and the time I spent figuring out how to eat the tacos at the beginning definitely affected my totals. Kobayashi took an early lead, finishing his first tray of 20 while most of the guys were about half way done with theirs. Brad's tray was the only one I could clearly see and since he was a couple tacos ahead of me, I decided that he was the person I should keep pace with.

I struggled with the whole strips of chicken during the contest. It was tough to have to chew through the chicken before swallowing them with water. About midway, I found myself with a mouthful of tacos. I could barely chew with that much in my mouth. So I adapted my strategy to take in smaller amounts and got into a rhythm at the later stages of the contest. Meanwhile, I was hearing incredible numbers from the announcer in regards to Kobayashi, it seems that he had no trouble swallowing the tacos whole.

As the contest neared it's end, it became increasingly evident that this was a race for 2nd place. Keeping up with Brad and Pete was a challenge and we all ate furiously to stay in the money. Christine Kitchenmaster did a great job of keeping me on task and counting the tacos I ate. I really pushed myself during the final minute and the results were a tight spread for 2nd through 4th. Though we were very distant from the winner, Takeru Kobayashi. He won by consuming 81 chicken tacos in 10 minutes.

Here are the results:

1- Takeru = 81 / $5,000
2- Pete = 49 / $1,000
3- Brad = 45 / $500
4- Johnnie = 41 / $250
5- Dave = 37
6- Aaron = 31
7- Naader = 30
8- Matt = 23
9- Jeff = 18.5
10- Jason = 17
11- Cory = 14.5

And here's video of the second round:

It was a struggle to keep up with such a stacked field and I've never placed so low in a contest before. However, in the company of these seasoned eaters, I felt that I did a decent job. This is still my rookie year after all and I'm looking forward to improving a bit by the next time we eat tacos in Huntington Beach.

Taco Practice

2011-08-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

A common question I get asked is: "How do you train for competitive eating?"

I know a lot of top eaters out there who don't like revealing their winning competitive eating secrets. But to be perfectly honest with you guys, it's just a combination of intense stomach stretching, hard drinking and leprechaun blood.

That's right, leprechaun blood.

Harnessing the magical properties of a leprechaun's life fluid gives me the edge needed to win an eating competition. But It's not easy to procure. You need to go into the wilderness, be lucky enough to spot a rainbow or two and slay the little bastard with a machete as he defends his pot of gold.

Also practicing with the food you'll be eating is a decent way to prepare for a contest. I recently faced the toughest competition of my competitive eating career at a taco eating contest in Huntington Beach. So I went to Del Taco during their taco Tuesday night and got ready.

Unfortunately, I ended up buying the wrong kind of tacos. I was so enamored with the idea of consuming 50 tacos that I had completely neglected the type of tacos I should be practicing with. I ended up buying 50 regular, hard shell tacos filled with ground beef, lettuce and cheese. These would be much different from the chicken and cheese soft tacos I would compete with.

Being that I had already spent about $20 and the notion of exchanging my bags of tacos for something more appropriate seemed ridiculous, I went home and decided just to have a big meal. At 65 grams a piece, 50 of these tacos would weigh over seven pounds. And with a gallon of water, this would at least be a decent stretch for the contest.

So after some tedious taco unwrapping, I managed to pile all 50 tacos onto three paper plates. I poured a few cups of water and started eating. The main drawback with these tacos was the hard shell. I had difficulty eating them quickly without injury to my mouth. After a while, I ended up using a dual taco process, biting two at a time sideways while swallowing them with a lot of water.

The water really helped soften the crispy taco shells in my mouth and made for easier eating. Though the grease from the ground meat didn't really get along well with the water which made for an unpleasant texture going down. After some tiring taco munching, I managed to get through all 50 but still felt hungry after. I guess the most important thing I learned after this taco practice was to stick to the type of food that you'll be eating during a competition and that eating 50 tacos from Del Taco isn't very fun. It think I'll just stick to the leprechaun blood in the future.

Here's video of my practice run:

Big Fun

2011-07-29T03:03:00.000-07:00

"Things are bigger this year."

Those are the words that I kept hearing while walking around the California State Fair in Sacramento last weekend. It seems like an established tradition in the area to not only visit the fair every summer but to compare this year's offerings to those of prior fairs. Apparently, things were bigger this year. Big is good.

We are Americans after all. It's inherent for us to take our big salaries, buy a surplus of over sized goods at Costco and load them into our big cars. And before you assume that this will be some sort of scathing critique of wanton excess in our daily American lifestyle, just stop yourself from getting on that train of thought heading towards negativity city. I'm a competitive eater, I don't only support excess, I embrace it with loving arms. Like I stated earlier, big is good.

And I like fairs. I like how we currently have them popping up all around us like glorious, musical, deep fried temples where we dutifully pay homage to the gods of excess. Bacchus would be appeased. In Sacramento, there were numerous examples of how things were bigger this year. From the 500 horse power world's largest shopping cart to the enormous stuffed prizes people were carrying around, things certainly lived up to my expectations of this epic fair. Also, the selection and availability of food at the California State Fair was nothing short of massive. They even introduced the world's largest corn dog this year.

For me, this theme of big fun culminated into a corn dog eating contest. On this trip, Milo Franks sponsored another one of their corn dog eating contests offering a total purse of $2,800. With first place receiving $2,000 of that purse, this prize money was bigger than any prize they had offered before. The sponsors were no strangers to having an eating contest. This would be the third time they hosted this event and they were very organized in sorting out the logistics of the contest. Milo Franks had card counters prepared, news and media in attendance and lots of corn dogs ready. They also held two qualifiers before the finals last Saturday.

I was hoping that the prize money would attract some very notable eaters to compete with. Perhaps some guys from the East Coast would show up to help widen the breadth of competitors that I have eaten against. Unfortunately, no one bothered to make the trip. At least there were some decent local guys to compete against. There was also the matter of the current record of 15 corn dogs in seven minutes set by Matt Stonie, back in his independent days, that I could contend with. Though the format changed a little, time was increased to eight minutes. That meant I needed to eat at least an average of 2.14 corn dogs per minute or 17.14 corn dogs in 8 minutes to comparatively exceed his record.

On the day of the finals, I felt prepared to take on some corn dogs. Despite tearing my lip the prior night from biting into it during my qualifier, I felt adequately ready for the contest. Back stage, before we were called out to compete, I had a genuine WTF moment when I saw this guy holding a leaky bag of ice on top of his head, drenching the majority of his torso with cold water. My brain ached from try to figure out the reasoning behind this. There was also a guy with a cool rainbow hat along with a couple really big guys and the rest of the eaters. We were quite the motley crew on that stage.

As the corn dogs came out, I thought of the qualifier and how I would handle the corn dogs this time around. Concerns cropped up about how many bites

I would take before I swallowed water and what I would do if my lip started bleeding again. Probably just keep going I thought. My mind went blank as the contest started and I was cramming corn dogs into my mouth before I realized it. I quickly gained control of my form and got into a steady rhythm. It was my real weakness during the qualifier.

Like the evening before, the corn dogs were delicious. There's something special about freshly hand battered and deep fried corn dogs at a fair. They're completely unlike those frozen turds of processed ingredients that you find at your local grocer. The organizers also had enough sense to not waste any condiments this time around, keeping the table nice and simple. There was only water, corn dogs and napkins.

During the event, I was so focused on preserving form that I had completely lost count of how many I had eaten. There was a growing pile of sticks on my plate, but I had no way of quickly knowing what my total was. It turned out that my counter didn't know either. It seemed like he was randomly flipping the cards behind me for my count. I caught him a couple times missing a flip when I had finished a corn dog. It's good that you end up with a bunch of sticks after eating corn dogs, I was able rely on them to be my count at the end of the contest.

The downside to this was that I didn't know if I was in the lead or not. $2,000 generates a lot of anxiety during a contest when you don't know whether or not you'd be taking it home. The announcer wasn't any more help since he was reading the totals from the counters to give the audience updates about our progress. With about two minutes left, I noticed a slowdown with the eaters around me. People seemed to be getting full. This was a good thing since I was no where near my capacity and was able to just kept plowing through the corn dogs that were brought out.

There was some confusion at the end about the final counts however. My counter was reporting 13 on his sign which tied another guy at the opposite end of the stage. We ended up resorting to stick counting to figure out the actual totals and fortunately the evidence left after corn dog consumption proved my victory. I ended up winning with 18 corn dogs in 8 minutes. 2nd and 3rd had consumed 13 and 12 corn dogs.

Here's video of the event:

It was exhilarating to win the $2,000 and receive congratulations from rowdy audience members. I definitely had big fun at the fair. After a beer, I quickly rushed to the airport to make my flight back to Southern California. My only disappointment was that I was told by someone who competed against Matt Stonie at the last corn dog eating contest that the dogs they used were larger than the ones we ate. So I can't really claim that my 18 corn dog count was a new record even if the event organizers were telling people that it was. I guess not everything is bigger this time around.

We'll just have to resolve it whenever that rematch in the future happens. Hopefully, it will be over corn dogs.

California State Fair

1600 Exposition Blvd

Sacramento, CA 95815

www.bigfun.org

The Best Ramen In Orange County Again

2011-07-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Over time, I find myself growing less fickle when it comes to choosing what food I eat. Apart from pickles, I take great enjoyment in consuming all types of food. From fine dining and my routine favorites to late night drunken fast food runs, I've really been enjoying what I eat. So when I found out that my favorite ramen place in Orange County was holding another eating contest, I became very excited.

Shin Sen Gumi in Fountain Valley, Ca would again hold another ramen eating contest using the same rules as last time. Participants are given 45 minutes to eat a bowl of ramen and as many additional orders of ramen as they can within the time limit. They earn a t-shirt for consuming at least seven extra orders of ramen and a $50 gift card for eating the highest total. I won the contest they hosted last Thanksgiving by eating 16 additional orders of ramen in 45 minutes.

My competitive eating buddy Frank also showed up for a big meal but was oblivious to the fact that there was a contest happening. I encouraged him to do his best regardless and try to beat the highest total so far, nine additional orders. Given my past performance, I was very confident that I could beat that total and worked on eating past the record I set last time.

Just like last time, the first bowl was the best tasting. The slices of pork and ramen complemented the strong dashi taste very well. Though I was there for business and would save savoring the tasty food after I won the gift card. I poured in my glass of ice to cool down the broth and went at the noodles. Fortunately, they were ready for me this time and the chef cooked my ramen ahead of time to ensure that I had a consistent supply. He served me two orders at a time and I made quick progress.

Frank ate his ramen efficiently with a fork, but being unprepared for the contest took it's toll. We both slowed down at around 20 minutes in and I felt fullness set in around my 11th order of ramen. By this time, all the ice I've been adding to cool down the noodles had significantly diluted the taste of the delicious broth. All I could taste were the noodles now.

As it came down to the final 10 minutes, things weren't looking good for beating my record. I was only at 13 orders and would need to eat three more to match my record. It was a strange emotion I felt at that point, I was amazed that I had eaten so many last time but disappointed that I couldn't do it again. I like to think that I've made some progress since November but I couldn't muster the eating tenacity needed to get past my record, a sense of complacency overwhelmed me. Frank had also stopped eating at this point, falling one order short of winning his t-shirt.

I was done. I reluctantly finished my 15th extra order of ramen and watched time run out. I was one short of tying my past performance but at least I had won the contest. As it turns out, the extra orders of noodles weighed half a pound each so eating over 8 pounds of ramen was at least a decent meal. I felt better after walking around when they had me take some pictures. Like I could have eaten a few more orders then, but unfortunately the contest was over. They gave us some complimentary green tea ice cream after which really helped balance the taste of the meal and numb the disappointment I felt from failing to beat myself.

In the future, I hope to eventually beat my record. Even if they don't have a contest, I'd like to just order ramen and test myself against my past performance. At least the $50 gift card I won could cover all that food. They still have the best ramen in Orange County after all.

Here's video of the contest:

Shin Sen Gumi

18315 Brookhurst St

Fountain Valley, Ca 92708

(714) 962-8952

The Spirit of Independence

2011-06-29T17:37:00.000-07:00

One of the finest institutions of art and inspiration is Disney World's Epcot in Florida. Inside of their World Showcase pavilion you can find a great example of the embodiment of the American spirit of independence in a statue aptly named Spirit of Independence.

There's something about how a stone man dressed in garb from The American Revolution that stirs one's spirit and just makes you feel liberated. Like you posses the freedom to do as you please and to pursue the endeavors that your heart pushes you towards. Especially if that endeavor is to win an eating contest.

A couple weeks ago, I witnessed some of my competitive eating friends pursue this goal in Hawthorne, Ca. The MLE held a qualifier for their 4th of July Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest there. This event awarded a trip to New York and a place in the contest to the top male and female competitive eater of that day. It would be a brutal contest, with a lot of unknown variables to take into consideration. And to be perfectly up front, it took a lot of restraint from myself to avoid participating in this one.

The competition would include Matt Stonie, Crazy Legs Conti, Ben Taylor, Damon Wells, Kevin Ross and Bryan Beard. It would have been such a thrill to prove myself against these eaters and to finally get that rematch against Matt who I came second to in a burger contest last Autumn. I also felt confident in my hot dog eating technique since I pulled some decent numbers in Las Vegas from my last contest. But I'll wait, I'm still undecided if and when I will participate in an MLE event so I'll focus on supporting my friends in the MLE in the mean time.

One of the most exciting aspects of this qualifier was to see which of the eaters would actually show up. Some declared their intention to compete ahead of time such as Stonie and Conti, while others were a last minute surprise such as Taylor. Though the most anticipated possible participant was definitely, the highly ranked, Ben Monson. I have yet to see this guy do anything since I joined the competitive eating world and apparently no one has heard from him.

After the line up was sorted out, the eaters prepared their drinks on stage and the contest started smoothly. Going in, the favorites to win were definitely Matt Stonie and Crazy Legs Conti. It made the most sense given their past performance and that they were the two highest ranked MLE eaters participating. The food supply was reasonably organized though the counting for the amount of hot dogs consumed on stage left much to be desired. They only had counters for Taylor, Stonie and Conti and they did not continuously nor accurately reflect what was being consumed during the contest. The only thing that the crowd was certain of was that Matt Stonie was eating a lot of hot dogs.

He seemed to be dominating most of the contest but no one, including the eaters themselves would know the final total until a few minutes after the contest. Christine Kitchenmaster ended up winning the women's division by consuming 8 hot dogs in the 10 minute time limit. However the men's contest had a bit more ambiguity. The discussion about the final totals on stage between the eaters and the judges seemed to take forever. The audience eagerly waited in anticipation.

Surely, the top three would be Stonie, Conti and Taylor. Those were the only eaters they had counters for but when it was announced that Taylor came in 4th with 20 hot dogs, I was very surprised. Someone else had actually eaten more than these guys. And after Conti came in 3rd with 21 hot dogs and Stonie came in 2nd with 25, I honestly had no clue who else could have pulled such high numbers. As it turns out, Damon Wells was the one pulling the high numbers. He won the contest and a spot at Coney Island with 26.5 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

Here's video of the contest:

I believe that the victor is usually the person with the strongest spirit and determination to achieve something. Damon had talked to me about how hard he had been training for this and I had no clue that this would result in his victory at Hawthorne. I'm glad he did so well since it's a testament to effort and pursuit. Though I felt bad for Matt for coming in 2nd at this event. I don't think he mustered up all the effort he could have for this one due to the lack of accurate updates on the amounts people were eating during the contest.

It's okay though, he ended up eating 32 hot dogs at another qualifier after this, also securing his spot at the big event at Coney Island. It will be interesting to see how these two do against one another as well as the other top eaters on Independence Day. I'm pretty sure victory will come to whomever has the greatest spirit.

Food and Eating in Las Vegas

2011-06-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

We can't stop here. This is bat country.

Las Vegas holds a special place in my heart. There are so few places in the world where you can readily indulge your vices on a whim. During my last couple trips to the city of sin, I indulged in some great eats, mostly for money but also for a bit of sport.

The first contest I did in Las Vegas involved my least favorite food, pickles. Veteran eater and promoter, Arnie Chapman invited me to compete in Carnegie Deli's pickle eating contest held at The Mirage. My initial reaction was to refuse, the notion of eating pounds of pickles just sounded awful to me. However, they offered $1,000 for 1st place, $600 for 2nd and would give me a free room at The Mirage just for participating. Prostitution is quite prevalent in Las Vegas and food prostitution is no exception. I'll eat anything for money, so I signed up.

Another boon was the opportunity to face off against Joe Larue. It would be fun to eat against someone of his caliber and I tend to perform well when eating against true competition. Joe also participated in the Bar Louie tater tot contest in his part of the country with very comparable results to mine, so this would be a good match up.

I bought a food scale and some jars of pickles for practice. My first practice run was terrible, I barely finished two pounds in 5 minutes at home. My jaw ached from chewing through the tough pickles and my mouth tasted like cat piss. As I packed my luggage, I decided to bring a few practice jars of pickles with me to hone my technique in between my blackjack sessions at The Mirage. I would deifnitely need the practice.

The contest itself was very well organized. Arnie did a great job announcing during the contest and The Mirage set up a stage in the sports lobby area of their casino. We even had some local celebrity judges including ventriloquist Terry Fator and my judge, tv chef Rick Moonen. He awkwardly rubbed my back during the contest and kept yelling "Eat those pickles boy!" behind me.

I'm glad I practiced, going through each of the one pound bowls of pickles felt routine by now and I did my best to put that salty, sour taste to the back of my mind. I kept a close watch at Joe Larue's totals during the competition and he really pushed me to eat more. I truly tried my best to out pace him through the 5 minute contest. He's somewhat intimidating to eat against, towering over me and able to fit two pickles in his mouth at the same time.

It ended up being a very close contest. After the weighing was done, Joe secured 1st place and $1,000 by beating my 3.8 pounds of pickles with his even 4 pounds. I took home 2nd and $600 but more importantly learned that I didn't actually need to enjoy a food in order to eat it well during competition. I can't wait until I have chance to eat against him again and hopefully I don't need try and relish pickles then. I craved intense sweets after this experience.

Carnegie Deli @ The Mirage

3400 South Las Vegas Boulevard

Las Vegas, NV 89109
(702) 791-7111

Fortunately, my next eating challenge involved a lot of sweetness. I Love Yogurt in Las Vegas offers a 100 ounce frozen yogurt eating challenge called "The Devo Hat" challenge. It involves eating four types of yogurt with four toppings totaling 100 ounces out of a plastic hat within half an hour. You have to pay for the yogurt if you fail but victory not only yields you the meal for free, but also another normal sized yogurt, any way you like, to eat at your leisure.

On paper, this challenge sounded like a great idea to me. I regularly enjoy frozen yogurt and they let you choose half of the flavors. It was also a hot Nevada day, so enjoying a nice frozen yogurt sounded very pleasant. I went in and sat at one of their table arcade machines and enjoyed the overly 80s atmosphere.

It seemed like they put a lot thought into the decor and ambiance. Apart from the selection of different yogurt flavors that dominate the right half of the floor space, there was a selection of candy from the 80s, a wall decorated in boom boxes, new wave music coming from their speakers and The Smurfs playing on their television. I couldn't help but feel nostalgic and realize how much character this decade had. I doubt you could do the same thing for the 90s, though I entertained the notion of eating at a Saved By The Bell themed restaurant.

They quickly sorted out my yogurt, with the house choosing the first two toppings and yogurt flavors. They started with a base of raisins covered in white chocolate, then added plain tart and carrot cake flavored yogurt on top of that with a layer of gummy worms after. I decided to go with peanut butter and chocolate yogurt for my selections though the total weight ended up topping 100 ounces after my yogurt was added so they did not add the two additional toppings like they normally do.

As it turned out, this would be a very good thing because during challenge I quickly came to realize that the toppings were the most difficult part. My only concern was the painful brain freeze from eating cold food at a rapid pace but it really wasn't that bad. You start eating yogurt and your head just gets used to the mild numbness. I ended up eating most of the yogurt in the first six minutes. The tricky part was the hardened candy layered in between. The pliable gummy texture of the worms turned rock hard and I had immense difficulty biting through them.

I ended up spending the majority of my time figuring out how to eat the candy in the bowl. I tried some water to help soften the worms but it really didn't do much. The only thing I could do was swallow them whole since I couldn't chew through the frozen candy. This took a long time but was the only way I could finish the challenge. I finished everything in 18 minutes, a few minutes shy of their record. I felt frustrated and messy afterwards. My hands and mouth were a sticky mess and the sugary fluid hardened my beard like hair gel. I'd like try return and do this one again, on another hot day, hopefully without gummy worms.

Here's video of the challenge:

I Love Yogurt

11700 W Charleston Blvd # 120

Las Vegas, NV 89135-1580
(702) 243-5683

My last eating event in Las Vegas was the chili dog finals at Ellis Island Casino. The casino would hold a 15 minute chili dog eating contest during a food truck event they were hosting. I felt confident for this event since I have experience with hot dogs. They are the golden standard in competitive eating, it's probably the food they would use if competitive eating ever became an Olympic event. I'm also partial to food covered in chili and cheese, so that was a bonus.

The contest had an unusual format where $1,000 would be awarded to the person who could eat a platter of 10 chili dogs the fastest and award $500 and $250 for the two people who could eat the most in the 15 minute time limit respectively. On top of that, they had restricted water to one glass per platter of 10 chili dogs and you had to clean all the debris from your platter before moving on to the next one. It was an extremely strange format but I welcomed the challenging conditions set forth. No dunking buns in water here.

We also had a reasonably stacked field for the contest. MLE legend Richard Lefevre, eating veteran Tom Gilbert and Travis Fowler, who most recently did 21 hot dogs at the Las Vegas Nathan's qualifier, would comprise part of the 10 people competing in this event. Taking home the money wouldn't be easy for this one, but I would definitely enjoy competing with these guys regardless.

Fortunately, they sat us all adjacent to one another so it would be easy to keep track of their numbers during the contest. The plastic wrapped platters of chili dogs came out nice and hot and were enjoyable to eat. The only thing that threw me off were the onions and mustard in addition to the chili and cheese on top of the wieners. Mustard really had no business mixing in with this combination of condiments.

As the contest started, I knew I had to be fast out of the gate. Capacity wasn't a concern since we were just trying to eat 10 chili dogs as fast as possible. I really wanted to get the 10 down quick, win the $1,000 and be done with it. The idea of sitting there and eating for the full 15 minutes was nauseating. Tom Gilbert ended up beating me to the 10. He secured his $1,000, cleaning his platter as I started on my 10th chili dog. Close, but close doesn't count in the vicious world of chili dog consumption.

I guess I was in it for the long haul. So I got into my eating rhythm and worked on the next platter of chili dogs placed in front of me. I ran out of water during my second platter and ate my 19th and 20th chili dog dry. Richard Lefevre was the closest to me at this point, he looked about half way done with his second platter and Travis Fowler was a few behind him.Tom was disappointed that he couldn't eat more chili dogs but at least he provided updates to me and Richard since they sat him in between us.

The fullness set in around 25 hot dogs and I wanted to stop eating at about 27. I had a decent lead over Richard at that point but he didn't slow. I haphazardly expected him to slow down like I did nearing the end of the 3rd platter of chili dogs but he just kept going. He really lived up to his reputation as a high capacity eater, so I just kept eating to maintain my lead.

I ended up going into my 4th tray of chili dogs, starting on my 31st one in the last minute of the competition. I just felt gross, my senses were numb, I was past the point of fullness and all I could smell was chili, mustard and onion. I saw that I had a 3 chili dog lead against Richard at this point so I didn't finish my last chili dog, I was done. As the clock ran out, Richard was on his 29th chili dog, I had half of my 31st on the platter and Tom had an empty space filled with disappointment in front of him.

He told me after that the hardest part was watching everyone else eat for another 13 minutes. I told him not to worry about it, I'm sure that $1,000 helped brighten his day. I took home $500 and placed 2nd with 30.5 chili dogs in 15 minutes. While Richard took home $250 and placed 3rd with 29 chili dogs. Travis said he was disappointed because he spilled his water during his second platter and couldn't eat efficiently after that happened. He placed 4th with 18 chili dogs.

Here's video of the contest:

Ellis Island Casino

4178 Koval Lane

Las Vegas, NV 89169
(702) 733-8901

My eating in Las Vegas was a savage journey to the heart of the American dream. I took home some decent money, made a big mess and felt sullied after. It's such a load of shit when people tell you what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. No, it follows you across the state border on that 4 hour drive back to Orange County and it smells like onion and mustard.

Until next time Las Vegas, even though you make me feel shame and regret every time I visit, I'll be back to eat you again.

A Humongous Bowl of Hemingway

2011-06-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

At 61 years of age, Ernest Hemingway went to the front entrance of his Idaho home, placed the barrel of a 12 gauge Boss shotgun into his mouth and ended himself.

I'm not sure why, but this was what I was thinking about during the last eating challenge I did in San Francisco, California. Maybe it was because it was a hot bowl of soup and consuming the searing liquid reminded me of placing dangerously painful objects into your mouth. Or maybe it was because I had just finished reading 'A Farewell To Arms' again. Probably both.

But before I get into the gory details of my recent challenge, I put together a special announcement video I made with my rabbit and a bottle of bubbly. Now available in high definition:

So in summary, I'm putting a bit more effort and polish into the content I publish. I'm somewhat of a tech nerd and it was only a matter of time before I went high definition. I sincerely hope that those of you who follow my eating exploits enjoy it.

Anyways, back to San Francisco. A small Vietnamese restaurant in the north side of town called Pho Garden advertises that they are the place where the pho eating challenge was born. They have a massive sign in the front proclaiming this and although I may be easily persuaded by advertising, I believe them. I mean it is a massive sign after all.

There are a few different pho eating challenges scattered through out California and out of all of them this is probably the best known. I'm guessing that's because it's the only one that gives you the humongous bowl to take home after you complete the challenge. Well at least that was the reason I was doing it.

You get an hour to finish two pounds of various beef cuts and two pounds of noodles. The ingredients swim in a savory beef broth that you don't have to consume to complete the challenge. As with most pho, the flavor of the broth is magical. There's something about boiling beef bones in a large pot for hours that's just unique. Campbell's should can this soup and call it 'Beef Noodle Soup' with a sticker on the can saying "Now with extra tripe!"

Having some experience with competitively eating pho from the challenge I completed at OB Noodle House, I knew I had to cool this bastard down from the beginning. They said it was okay for me to use ice, so I ordered a pitcher to dump in as I started. This helped immensely, as the addition of ice not only helped cool down the boiling hot broth but it also slowed down how much liquid the noodles would absorb. Even though it's only 2 pounds of noodles, they can easily absorb double their weight in hot liquid.

You're given a set of large chopsticks and a ladle to eat your pho with. The ladle came in handy with holding a lot of the noodles out of the broth and made them easy to pull into my mouth. Food is much easier to consume when you don't have to chew it.

After a few minutes of slurping up the hot soup, I realized that I didn't use enough ice. You'd think a pitcher would do the trick but not when you have a gallon of boiling hot broth. Not that the pho was scalding my mouth but it still definitely burned and I started feeling warm all over. Like when someone says they love you or when you have a stroke. The texture from the various meats weren't helping either, they mixed in with the noodles making it harder to swallow without chewing. Just random slices of meat, tendon and tripe tangled in a mess of noodles. The balls of beef floating around were a bit chewy as well.

This was about when I started thinking about Hemingway. I have developed a bad habit of going on mental tangents when doing eating challenges. I really like thinking about the author's intention and mind set when reading a novel and 'A Farewell To Arms' was no exception. It was pleasant to read an allegory about American tragedy set in a modern historical background. My mind went on like this for a while but at least I caught myself this time. The tiny digital clock on the table showed I was running out of time and I told myself, "You're either doing this the wrong way or the Hemingway!"

I went from the chew and swallow method and just concentrating on the swallowing part, it was going down quickly again. Near the end, I motioned to the waitress to strain out the remainder of the noodles and beef which caught her off guard because she didn't realize how close I was to finishing. She put the rest of my eating challenge in a smaller bowl and I pushed to beat the record of 15 minutes. With a guy on his lunch break cheering me on, I managed to swallow the last bit at 12 minutes and change. Though the clock doesn't record seconds so I ended up having an official time of 13 minutes.

Here's video of the challenge:

The best part, aside from the tasty meal, was getting to take home the massive bowl. They don't give you the one you ate from but a new one, nicely packed for transport.

I'm not sure what kind of food I want to eat from that bowl yet but I will definitely enjoy some massive meals from it. Doing another pho challenge was a pretty good idea and a surprisingly thought provoking one at at that. Is it something in the broth or is Hemingway just a damn good writer?

It's a shame he went out the way he did. But I suppose, in a way, I had my own mind blowing experience.

Check it out if you're in town:

Pho Garden
2109 Clement St
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 379-8677

Deep Fried & Smothered In Cheese

2011-05-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing I love about American food, it's how often that it's deep fried. And if there's a second thing I love about American food, it's how often that it's smothered in cheese. Now if you're lucky, you can have both in the same meal. Maybe with a bit of bacon for good measure. In my recent eating exploits, I had the pleasure of consuming both deep fried and cheese smothered food.

The first of my recent deep fried and cheese smothered eating adventures was at Bar Louie in Anaheim, Ca. On April 21, 2011 Bar Louies across the country held their annual "Rock The Tot" tater tot eating contest. Contestants would have six minutes to consume as many 1 pound baskets of tater tots as they could. The winner receives a $250 Bar Louie gift card and tater tots for a year.

Aaron Ybarra would once again provide me with some solid competition as well 10 other bar goers. One guy even guaranteed victory as he had not eaten since breakfast. I really hoped he could eat as well as he boasted.

The contest was very organized, we started on time with three pounds of cooled down tater tots at our places on the table. They had cups of water ready, a decent emcee to announce the contestants and we even received t-shirts! I thoroughly enjoy when challenges or competitions provide fuel for my recent obsession of collecting eating t-shirts.

Tasting a couple tots before the contest, I found that it's pretty much what you'd expect. I can't remember the last time I've actually eaten a tater tot but it was probably in elementary school. It felt strangely nostalgic eating them and they even had sloppy Joe's available on their menu to complete the grade school cafeteria experience.

As the contest started, I quickly adhered to my technique, mashing handfuls of tater tots in one hand and drinking water with the other. They went down fairly quickly as there were no weird flavors to throw me off this time. I really appreciated how they let the first three baskets cool before the contest, everything went down smoothly.

Unfortunately, the fourth and fifth baskets were fresh from the fryer. Normally, that would be pleasant but not when you're about to cram the scalding hot potato nuggets into your mouth. I considered stealing my neighbors cooled down basket but didn't want to risk disqualification because of some arbitrary "anti-tot-stealing" clause in the contest rules.

I made due with what I had, eating the 4th basket with plenty of water to cool down the tater tots as much as possible. With time running out, I did the same with the fifth basket, ignoring the mouth burns and stuffed as many tater tots into my mouth as I could. I'm notorious for "chipmunking", cramming as much food in my mouth as the timer runs out. And that I did at this contest. As long as it's not against the rules, I figure this really gives me an edge in competition since I can fit so much into my mouth. There's a lot of room there, surely enough to house a couple hamsters or perhaps a chinchilla.

After six minutes of intense tater tot stuffing madness, they brought out the scales and weighed everyone's left overs. I sort of forgot about the other contestants and looked over to see how Aaron did, it seemed like he was my closest competition in this spread. It turned out that he had consumed nearly four pounds of tater tots. After weighing, my official total was 4 pounds, 11.5 ounces. I had secured the victory, a $250 gift card, a year supply of tater tots and perhaps the best surprise of the evening, an awesome golden Mr. Potato Head trophy. A solid gold potato.

Okay, it's spray painted plastic but at least I could play with it after. Looking back, I wish that my fourth and fifth baskets weren't scalding hot. That's the real draw back with eating deep fried foods. I felt like I could have easily gone into my sixth basket of tater tots if they were a bit cooler. But a win is a win, I'll come back next year and defend my title.

Here's the information for the Bar Louie near me:

Bar Louie Anaheim

321 W Katella Ave # 212
Anaheim, CA 92802-3618
(714) 495-4170

Go entertain your nostalgia for cafeteria foods but this time with alcohol!

The second stop on my artery clogging adventure was McGonagle's in National City, Ca. This Philly Cheese Steak shop recently introduced a cheese steak challenge that pays money to the victor. Free cheese steaks? Money? Yup, I'm there.

They give you half an hour to consume three of their 1.5lb double meat cheese steak sandwiches to win $50. You have to pay $30 up front, which they keep if you fail the challenge. A nice surprise was that they double the prize money if you can complete the challenge in under 15 minutes. Since I was no stranger to eating Philly cheese steaks, I'd be going for the $100 prize.

The cheese steaks came out piping hot, with plenty of sliced steak and grilled onions smothered in cheese sauce. This was the Philadelphia standard with no fancy gimmicks or alterations to the classic recipe. Well except for the enormous amount of meat stuffed into the sandwich. It smelled great, I was ready to dive in the moment it came out. But since I was going for time, I let them cool down a bit and stuck to technique to help win that money.

Eating challenges seem to taste better when there's money involved and these sandwiches were no exception. It's amazing how balanced four ingredients can be. As I was chomping through the first sandwich, everything seemed to just go down in a nice, harmonious taste. The only thing that seemed excessive was the cheese but that's mainly because I was trying to eat neatly. That lofty goal died quickly after finishing the first sandwich.

These sandwiches were literally overflowing with meat and cheese, and much of it ended up on the tray as I went through the sandwiches. I was making good time with the first sandwich done in a minute and a half and the second finished in about four minutes. The hard part would be cleaning up the sloppy mess of meat and cheese that fell out of the sandwiches.

After finishing the third sandwich about 7 minutes in, I still had a small mound of meat and cheese to clean up. Though it was a pleasurable mess to clean since it was still nice and warm, but I really don't do well eating food in messy pile form. I ended up finishing in 10 minutes, 33 seconds and I felt that I wanted more. It was over too fast, they were really that good.

Here's video of the challenge:

If you're in the San Diego area and want to try eating some cheese steaks for money, here's their information:

McGonagle's

1231 Highland Ave
National City, CA 91950
(619) 259-2777

All in all, it's been a decent couple weeks of competitive eating. Procuring a near infinite amount of deep fried tater goodness and some cash was nice. It's incredible how satisfying one's hunger for deep fried and cheese smothered deliciousness can be. Perhaps I need to give it a go with combining the two and adding bacon into the mix. I certainly enjoyed eating them separately.

Though afterwards, my heart pretty much exploded. But I'm feeling much better now.

A Big Breakfast and Some Asparagus

2011-04-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

I took a road trip to Stockton, CA to check out my first live Major League Eating event.

The annual Stockton Asparagus Festival again hosted their deep fried asparagus eating contest which brought out the MLE's top ranked eaters Joey Chestnut and Pat Bertoletti. I also went to support my local MLE eating buddies Kevin Ross and Matt Stonie who decided to leave the world of independent eating competitions to pursue loftier goals with the MLE.

And after a drunken night of hotel room parkour, I needed a good breakfast to soak up the hang over before heading out to see some asparagus eating action. Since I was in Northern California, I returned to Lumpy's Diner to try one of their eating challenges, The No. 3 Intimidator.

You get an hour to finish a six pound breakfast platter that includes eggs, ham, cheddar cheese, bacon, sausage, hot links, a beef patty, a chicken fried steak and two biscuits all smothered in gravy. This was fine, I enjoy eating all of the aforementioned items. The cool part was being able to breakdown the food however I wanted before starting the challenge.

I went at it with the knife and before long, the smoldering stack of breakfast foods was reduced to a pile of ambiguous mass. I broke it down because I wanted to set a decent time and at least it still tasted awesome after the mess I made.

This brings me back to the same complaint I have with these sort of competitive eating mornings. Again, I shouldn't have had so many drinks the night before. I hate that it seems like every blog post I write ends up like that, but it's so true. Other eaters may be able to pull it off but I'm absolutely shit when it comes to eating in this condition. During the challenge, I was so enamored with consuming my delicious meal, that I forgot to drink water and lost form.

In the middle of eating, I remember thinking to myself, "Hey, I'm eating some bacon, cool. Mmmm.... bacon. Oh wait, you're doing an eating challenge idiot... bite... swallow... bite... swallow!" Fortunately, my companions reminded me to drink a bit of the four glasses of ice free water I had prepared prior to starting this challenge. That really helped and I eventually finished in 14:16. Well under the one hour time limit but certainly worse than how I normally perform when I actually pay attention to the task at hand. But like all good things in life, I felt gross, sweaty and strangely satisfied after.

Here's video of the challenge:

And if you're in Northern California, stop by and try one of Lumpy's eating challenges:

Lumpy's Diner

5891 Lone Tree Way

Antioch, CA 94531

925.778.5867

www.gotlumpys.com

Shortly after my messy breakfast I traveled 45 minutes east from Antioch to Stockton for the festival. Unlike most eating contests I've done, they started prompt and early, right at noon.

I met up with a bunch of other competitive eaters and quickly got into the spirit of the contest. I was excited and due to the hot, sunny weather, picked up a couple festival beers before the contest to enjoy. That certainly helped wash down breakfast, there's nothing like beer to wash down hang over food.

The crowd was immense, bigger than any I had ever witnessed at an eating contest. But I wasn't surprised, this is how the MLE does things. Competitive eating promotions is their industry and they do it well. It was organized, there were judges for each eater, runners for the food and entertaining commentary during the contest. This was a damn nice spread.

I ended up being wait listed for this event, so I was only observing this time. Though after Matt decided to join the MLE, I realized the window of opportunity this had opened up in regards to the Californian independent competitive eating scene. It would be less competition for the big eating contests without him in the picture. It's sad I wouldn't get to compete with one of my favorite eaters due to his contractual restrictions, but hey, more money and prizes for me yeah? This is also a great chance to practice my technique to hopefully face off against the top ranked MLE guys one day.

The contest was fierce, and I wasn't envious of the competition Matt had to compete against. In addition to the MLE's top two ranked eaters, Joey and Pat, he also had to face off against their #7 ranked Erik Denmark, #14 ranked Adrian Morgan, #29 ranked Kevin Ross and #34 ranked Ryan McKillop. And who wants to compete against someone with the word 'Kill' in his name?

About half way into the contest, Joey Chestnut pulled out in front with Pat Bertoletti about a pound behind him. Adrian Morgan and Matt had an intense battle for third place. Maybe it was the dehydration or beer but I experienced a sudden urge to eat some asparagus myself during the contest. It's one of my favorite vegetables and the breaded and deep fried presentation looked delicious. Fortunately, I would score some afterwards.

It was a great experience to finally see these guys live and surprising at how much I leared about competitive eating from just watching them. I took note of technique, hydration, pacing and despite this being an unusual format for competition, I felt that I really learned something tangible that I could use in my next contest. Watching Joey and Pat eat was amazing. It was definitely better to watch these guys first before competing against them.

In the end, Joey Chestnut ended up setting a new record by eating 9 pounds and 5 ounces of asparagus in 10 minutes. Pat came in second with 7 pounds and 3 ounces and Matt edged by Adrian with 6 pounds and 12 ounces to Adrian's 6 pounds and 8 ounces. This was a damn good debut for Matt, I just know he'll kill it in upcoming contests.

What an awesome day it was to soak up the sun, eat a giant breakfast, hang out with great eaters and avoid the intense asparagus urine smell from the port-o-potties at the festival. For now, it's back to the independent eating scene for me. Hopefully I'll take this experience and wisdom bestowed upon me by such established eaters and really hone my eating technique.

Or I could just use it to school random frat boys and alcoholics at bars across Southern California. Either way, good times.

Fun With Sushi

2011-03-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

I absolutely love sushi.

There have been great distances traveled and lofty prices paid to satisfy my sticky rice and fish desires. It's one of the few foods that can rival bacon in capturing my heart and dominating my palette. It's my competitive eating weapon of choice. Both the sushi record I set at Sushilicious and the Gozilla Roll Challenge at Sushi Delight have been my favorite eating challenges thus far.

So when Ra Sushi recently hosted a series of eating contests at their various locations across the country, I simply needed to participate. At stake was a year's worth of sushi, $600 of gift cards to Ra Sushi. Fortunately, there were two nearby in Orange County and I decided to compete in the contest at the Tustin District.

Dubbed Maki Madness, the competition was organized into tournament style brackets between 32 participants. There would be four rounds, eliminating half of the field at each round, until only the final four remained. Each round was a race to eat two of Ra Sushi's signature tootsy maki rolls until the finals where contestants would attempt to eat as many of the sushi rolls within three minutes to determine the winner.

Given my strong affinity for sushi, I was really looking forward to competing in this one. I felt I could do very well with a food I so commonly ate but also because the notion of winning and enjoying $600 worth of sushi gluttony really drove me to do my best at this event.

On a stormy Sunday afternoon, I met my buddy Aaron for some more fast paced competitive eating action in Tustin. We found that Frank from the pastrami eating contest a couple months ago would also be participating. It's always fun to see some familiar characters at these events. We opted to compete in seperate brackets in order to avoid eliminating each other before the finals.

It was a packed house of contestants, supporters and customers at Ra Sushi. Each heat of the contest was well organized and the rounds went by quickly. The sushi rolls tasted great, just a simple combination of crab, shrimp, cucumber, rolled in sushi rice and peppered with tempura flakes. They went down easily with water and I ended up eating both rolls simultaneously during my heats.

There was so much excitement in the air both during and in between each round, people really got into it. It was fun to have the opportunity to watch others compete before participating yourself. We had a bit of merriment in talking with the other contestants and their supporters in between rounds. Aaron, Frank and I all advanced to the finals, things were looking good for us.

By now, the audience seemed eager to see who would come out on top. All of the eaters seemed to be feeling the six sushi rolls they had consumed earlier during the preliminaries. But that did not detract from the vigor that the contestants expressed in the final round. After the first minute of the finals, it quickly came down again to me and Aaron vying for that top spot. We pushed each other to truly earn that prize. Bite after bite, there would be no slowing from either of us until it was over.

Three minutes after the start of the finals, I had won by eating seven sushi rolls against Aaron's six. We hung out for a bit afterwards, having some more tootsy maki, dessert and Okinawan beer on the house. It was a delicious precursor to the $600 in gift certificates I had yet to enjoy.

Here's are the results and video of the final round:

1st: Johnnie - 7 sushi rolls

2nd: Aaron - 6 sushi rolls

3rd: Frank - 3 sushi rolls

4th: Tom - 2 sushi roll

An unexpected bit of fun from this competition came afterwards. I was invited to participate in a televised eating contest against anchors from the KTLA Morning News to promote the upcoming Huntington Beach competition. Ra Sushi's public relations girl, Lauren, did a great job of getting me sorted out as she did coordinating the eating contests.

I met her and Ra Sushi's regional manager, John, on an early Thursday morning at the KTLA Studios in Hollywood. Another fun surprise was getting to meet Chyler Leigh in the green room who plays my favorite tv doctor, Lexie Grey, from Grey's Anatomy. I had just finished getting caught up with the current season too, so it was somewhat surreal to meet up with her at the studio.

The televised segment was a brief one minute eat off between myself, the general manager from the Huntington Beach Ra Sushi and three of the KTLA Morning News anchors. Michaela and John provided commentary during the segment and I made quick work of my three sushi rolls. It ended up being so much fun that I forgot we were being televised and I just enjoyed the experience for what it was.

It must be great to come work at this studio every day and just have fun with interesting people. Here's the segment from KTLA's website:

http://www.ktla.com/videobeta/68af6d43-6cba-4c50-acba-ecf780916ca1/News/KTLA-Maki-Madness-Sushi-Eating-Contest

Lastly, I met up with Matt Cohen and Naader Reda at the Huntington Beach sushi eating competition to lend my support. Their Maki Madness experience was more stacked than the one I participated at in Tustin. They had to compete against last year's champion, Jed, as well a Jimmy L. and Jimmy P. who both had some nice showings at prior eating contests including IFOCE qualifiers. Frank and John K. from the Tustin contest also participated.

This definitely wouldn't be an easy win for anyone. Part of me wanted to jump in for the sake of competing against this strong field, but I promised to share the wealth of gift cards being offered. So I avoided being a douche and enjoyed watching an exciting set of preliminaries.

Unfortunately, both Matt and Naader were eliminated prior to the final round, being paired against Jimmy L. and Jed early on. Matt especially put up a decent fight with excellent form the whole way through. The final four ended up being Jed, John K, Jimmy P. and Jimmy L. They brought out a plate of 10 rolls for each of the finalists to consume in the 3 minute round.

Both Jed and Jimmy P. maintained strong form despite all the sushi they ate in the prior rounds. John ended up eating the least but was promoted to 3rd place after Jimmy L. reversed at the end of the contest. Both Jed and Jimmy P. were able to start on their 7th sushi roll as time ran out and a one minute eat off began 5 minutes later to determine who would be this year's champion.

The tie was arguably close but both eaters seemed determined to take home the $600 prize during the eat off. Despite Jimmy P's strong showing, Jed was able to push past and consume more sushi in the eat off. Eating 3 more sushi rolls after consuming over a dozen earlier is no easy feat, he definitely deserved the win.

Who knew sushi related activities could be so much fun? Never have I spent more time thinking about and having such an awesome time because of sushi. Ra Sushi deserves much gratitude for putting together such wonderful events and for giving out so much sushi.

This has also been an excellent opportunity to continue developing my competitive eating skills. Another win for me and for sushi. I can't wait to eat some more.

www.rasushi.com

Three Guys, a Girl & a Pizza Place

2011-03-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

About half a year ago, I discovered that I could get free food, prizes and money for eating a lot of food.

This discovery is sort of like how a comicbook hero figures out their super powers for the first time. Only that the super power is just eating a lot of food.

Like Spiderman, you get the desire to test the limitations of your abilities. And like Spiderman, you evetually get your ass handed to you by the Hobgoblin. In my case, the Hobgoblin was a pizza.

Not just any pizza, but the largest deliverable pizza in the world. This was the 50 pound, 54"x54" Giant Sicilian at Big Mama's and Papa's Pizzeria in Hollywood.

The challenge is normally for 7 people to consume the entire pizza within 2 hours. This achievement awards $1000 cash and a refund for your $200 meal. The only team to ever succeed was a strong team of 7, who polished off the Giant Sicilian in one hour and fourty minutes last year.

Some of my competitive eating friends and I have been discussing just how few people it would take to finish this challenge. Obviously that depends on the people involved, but at minimum for a group of four, you need individuals who can eat 12.5 pounds worth of pizza by themselves.

So we put together a team of strong competitive eaters to see if we could handle the task with four. This included myself, Matt Stonie, Tom Gilbert and good ol' Xanadu. Kind of like a competitive eating Fantastic Four. I was confident in my team mates, each person had some pretty impressive eating achievements.

As for myself, there's always some doubt before I do these sort of things, even for the smaller eating challenges. That's why I practiced last weekend at the Red Devil with their 10 pound pizza challenge to see if I could handle a lot of pizza. I had no idea what my eating limit was, but knowing that my typical Souplantation visit runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 or 13 pounds, I felt that I had a decent chance of pulling my share of the pizza.

Our buddy Matt Cohen got us sorted out with the pizza place and we all got together Saturday afternoon to give this thing a shot. There were also a bunch of our competitive eating friends present to watch the challenge and encourage us. I really appreciate the sense of community we've been fostering with the competitive eaters in California. It was awesome to have everyone there.

Their presence certainly helped. We weren't sure if this challenge was possible to complete with just four people, but we were sure that it was going to be incredibly difficult.

That's the whole point.

Even though they doubled the prize money to $2000, it was never about the money. For me, it was just to see what my limits were. I've never lost an eating challenge before and it would be kind of silly to just keep eating 5 or 6 pound portions of food and be surprised to have completed it. It's like Spiderman beating up children then bragging to his friends of his accomplishments on Facebook.

Nope, there are bigger mountains to climb. I think that's the true spirit behind an eating challenge. To try eating something that you're not sure you can finish and the main reason we set out to eat 50 pounds of pizza with just four people. So we got ready, drove to Hollywood and waited an hour for this thing to cook. Then we just started eating.

We each claimed a quadrant and dove in. It was interesting to see the variation in eating styles. I ate mine just like the Red Devil pizza by folding slices together to form sandwiches while Xanadu tore hers to pieces, eating the cheese first. Matt ate his straight, saving the crusts for later and Tom just went at it. No fancy strategies, he was remarkable.

We got through most of it in the first hour but that's when things really slowed down. It seemed like we all hit the wall about then, and our large, mouthful bites turned into nibbles. I mixed up my drinks. Which was probably a bad idea in retrospect because after water than lemonade, the Coke I used next really hit my stomach hard. Aaron Ybarra was there and very helpful in fetching drinks and napkins while we ate.

I broke my own rule about using stomach filling carbonated beverages during competitive eating. After the Coke, I was constantly burping. I hoped it would make more room for slices I still had left. I felt sick, I was drunk on pizza. It didn't help that people were resorting to using strange condiments to mix up the flavor, it really grossed me out. Perhaps I should have used my mayonnaise to settle my stomach. Everything is better with a mayo.

The last burp I took around 75 minutes, didn't return air, but a mouthful of chewed pizza. It totally caught me off guard but I quickly put a napkin over my mouth to avoid making a mess and ran for the bathroom. I hit the limit, Hobgoblin wins this round. We were disqualified because of my reversal, and I felt awful. Not from reversing, but from disappointing my team. Everyone did such a great job, we had about a fifth of the pizza left.

Who knows how much more we could have eaten in the remaining 45 minutes, or what would have happened if I just took a break from eating to let my stomach settle. But I won't live in hypotheticals, I'd rather accept my first defeat at an eating challenge and plan to improve for the next one. It's at least something to work on and besides the eating challenge, it was a wonderful experience to just hang out with so many of my competitive eating friends and talk about food for hours. It's a strange coincidence that the nights I throw up are usually the most fun.

I'll definitely work on my capacity and return to eat that Giant Sicilian. That's what Spiderman would do.

Pregnant Eating

2011-03-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

Pregnant women are a severely under-admired group of people.

Simply because of the fact that these women truly know how to enjoy food. They understand the importance of satiating one's cravings, going at great lengths to satisfy such appetites, eating more food than a typical person would consume and accepting the masochistic inevitability of their condition. I have true admiration for these women.

In my recent weeks of competitive eating, I've realized that my behavior pretty much falls in line with that of a pregnant woman. I've gone to great lengths to enjoy food in order to satiate my cravings too. And I also tend to waddle like one after doing so.

My first craving led me to a lively turkey taco eating contest in Encinitas. Mr. Peabody's hosted their Turkey Taco Showdown as a fund raiser for a local girl's water polo team. They offered $100 to the person who could eat the most 12 ounce turkey tacos in 15 minutes. Having tried a couple for practice previously, I certainly had a craving to eat more tacos and hopefully win some money in the process.

The contestants included myself, my buddy Aaron Ybarra and some colorful characters. There was a cowboy who competed as 'Chuck Norris' and 'The Norweigan Hammer' who wore a giant foam hammer hat during the contest. Brie Cardosa of Mr. Peabody's did a wonderful job organizing the contest and coordinating with the girl's water polo team.

The contest itself was extremely hectic. We had tons of yelling and cheering from the semi drunken audience as well as the water polo girls that were assisting the eaters by keeping track of the tacos they consumed. The turkey tacos themselves were just as tasty as I remembered though somewhat difficult to eat due to the amount of ruffage on top.

I paced myself given the long duration of the contest. A strategy which had me worry in practice because Aaron, a guy competing as 'Wyatt Earp' and Neil were all eating at a frenzied pace, putting up some strong numbers early in the contest. Though I could barely tell what the actual count was with all the noise from the yelling and the hammer reversing after eating four tacos. I decided to ignore the the distractions, keep form and just steadily eat. This led me to victory. I ate 11 turkey tacos, just over 8 pounds worth, in 15 minutes.

Neil did an excellent job coming in 2nd with 9 tacos. While Aaron and Wyatt tied for 3rd with 8 tacos a piece. In retrospect, I probably should have eaten at a little faster pace because I still had a bit of room after. This was remedied with some Guinness, Cap'n Crunch, an ice cream sundae, hamburgers and fries with friends afterwards, definitely good times.

The t-shirts they gave us, the tacos and the overall experience of the contest were awesome. And the $100 didn't hurt either.

Here's the full contest results and contact information for Mr. Peabody's:

1st - Johnnie: 11 turkey tacos
2nd - Neil: 9 turkey tacos
3rd (Tie) - Aaron: 8 turkey tacos
3rd (Tie) - Wyatt Earp: 8 turkey tacos
5th (Tie) - Mike the Plumber: 4 turkey tacos
5th (Tie) - Chuck Norris: 4 turkey tacos
7th - The Norwegian Hammer: 4 turkey tacos

Mr. Peabody's
136 Encinitas Boulevard
Encinitas, CA 92024-3657
(760) 753-7192

My next eating event was an unsanctioned eating duel with Kirk Bernard. This guy contacted me on Facebook and challenged me to an eating showdown after I beat his record of 38 plates by eating 60 plates of sushi at Sushilicious in Irvine.

I happily obliged mostly because I was craving sushi, one of my favorite foods, but also because I wanted to see what kind of capacity Kirk possessed. I love to eat with other sushi enthusiasts, especially those with large capacities. And I'm not one to back down from challenges.

Our duel occurred at Zenko Sushi in Mission Viejo during their $19 all you can eat sushi lunch. Kirk told me that after being kicked out of several local sushi places that Zenko Sushi caters to those with large appetites. He regularly eats there 3 or 4 times a week. I was pretty damn excited!

We ended up sticking to nigiri sushi with extra rice and salmon skin handrolls for the sake of counting. The food was delicious, especially the warm salmon skin hand rolls they served. Kirk put away a decent amount of sushi, eating 80 pieces of nigiri and 11 hand rolls. I ended up winning with 120 pieces of nigiri and 5 hand rolls. Kirk was oblivious to most of my eating exploits and seemed genuinely surprised when I kept pace and exceeded his consumption.

The duel turned out to be less of an intense, macho driven battle and more of a casual lunch discussing the competitive eating world and personal training. I can't say we really drove each other to eat more. We didn't push to capacity nor ate quickly, but rather just enjoyed our all you can eat sushi lunch. It was pleasant.

Afterwards, I encouraged Kirk to try out eating competitions because of his strong competitive drive and good capacity. We'll definitely have some return trips to Zenko Sushi.

Zenko Sushi
28892 Marguerite Pkwy # 190
Mission Viejo, CA 92692
(949) 347-0844

My most recent craving ended up with me trying something different in Granada Hills. Different not because of the type of food but because of the format of the challenge. I would attempt to be the first person to complete the 2 person Red Devil Pizza Challenge alone.

The challenge is a straight forward 10 pound, 28" pizza with four toppings. They give you and a partner half an hour to complete the challenge. You are awarded the meal for free, a picture on their wall, a t-shirt and gift certificates for 2 more 28" pizzas for completion. The real challenge for me wasn't only the time limit but just being able to consume the entire thing. I wanted to test my capacity and had no idea if I could pull it off.

I had done a similar challenge with Stephanie Torres a couple months ago in about 17 minutes. I knew that I really had to hustle to get it under the 30 minute time limit. She also held the time record for this pizza, completing the challenge with our buddy Aaron.

I was really craving pork. That led to my invention of 'The Extreme Hawaiian' pizza. It's like a regular hawaiian, pineapple & canadian bacon, but with the addition of bacon strips and bacon bits as my third and fourth topping. Lots of bacon, this pizza was fantastic!

I ended up powering through the first half in about 8 minutes and sluggishly finished the rest in 29:38, just under the time limit. The bacon flavor was amazing the whole way through which certainly helped. I could have saved some time by talking less and not fiddling around with the tray so much.

It felt awesome to be the first person to finish this challenge alone and the group of guys watching were very supportive. More importantly, it helped me realize that I still had room for more. I ate an ice cream sandwich for dessert after and drank a pitcher of water, a very good meal.

I did this one as practice for an even harder, upcoming challenge. Which I feel more confident about now that I've eaten this pizza. I strongly recommend trying this solo for strong eaters looking to guage their capacity.

Here's video of the challenge:

Red Devil Pizza
17553 Chatsworth Street
Granada Hills, CA 91344
(818) 832-0950

Turkey tacos, nigiri sushi and bacon pizza. Cravings surely fit to satisfy a pregnant woman or at least a competitive eater.

With the excessive eating and swelling of your abdomen, it's a common analogy to compare how you feel after competitively eating to being pregnant. And though I will never get to experience such an event, I like to think that I'd have what it takes to carry a human child. I certainly behave much like a pregnant woman. Well, except for the routine consumption of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine.

Something Old Something New

2011-02-21T09:01:00.000-08:00

Food constantly changes.

Like other facets of human culture such as language, politics and music, food evolves. It represents the amalgamation of culinary ideas handed down through generations and the influences from other cultures that it interacts with. Few things reflect the richness of human diversity and development as much as food does.

My recent food journeys have led me to experience both something traditional and something modern. Food that has been handed down through generations and food that is reinventing classic cuisine. The latter of which involed a cookie eating contest in San Diego.

The Cravory is a Southern Californian cookie company specializing in new and unique interpretations of the classic cookie. They have about a thousand recipes available from their website. These include anything from a traditional peanut butter cookie to savory cookies such as prosciutto & goat cheese. These cookies are not the typical prepackaged cookie dough tubs from Costco you nurse your hang overs with.

They hosted a cookie eating contest on a bright Sunday morning at the busy Hillcrest Farmer's Market in San Diego. They had four different flavors of cookies for the competition; peanut butter overload, pancake & bacon, birthday cake and red velvet.

The Cravory had five contestants participate in their contest. I would compete against veteran competitive eaters Naader Reda and Matt Cohen, as well as newcomers Cindy and Mario. Everyone seemed excited and ready to compete for the 1st place prize of two dozen cookies and a Cravory t-shirt.

Though I must admit, I was disappointed in myself for not being fully prepared for this one. I broke a couple of my own competitive eating rules. I was hung over and sleep deprived from a long night of bar hopping through downtown Laguna Beach and also catching a cold. This made me feel like bailing out on the morning of the contest but I didn't want to disappoint anyone looking forward to having me compete. So I got my coffee and sluggishly made it to San Diego.

We were given the choice of milk or water to drink during the contest and we all opted for water. The 10 minute contest was fast and delicious. And about 4 pounds of cookies later, I managed to pull through to another victory. I ate 28 cookies in 10 minutes, with Naader coming in 2nd at 24 and Matt coming in 3rd with a respectable 18. Suprisingly, no one ended up in a diabetic coma afterwards.

I really need to commend Naader on his performance. He's had a nice string of competitive eating victories recently and gave me an awesome run for those cookies. He reminded me of why I need to take competition days seriously and I hope he continues to get stronger for future contests.

It was also fun to hang out with Cindy and Mario who put away about 10 or 11 each. I should also note that Mario is a serious athlete running sub 2.5 hour times in Boston and wore full on compression socks and armwarmers during the contest, so fucking awesome.

You can check out and order your own cookies at the Cravory's website:

www.thecravory.com

A few days later, my next eating destination was in Santa Paula, California to eat something more traditional. And by tradition I mean a hundred year old recipe for tamales at the Familia Diaz Cafe. Why mess with something your great grandmother got right a hundred years ago?

To commemorate the restaurant's 75th anniversary, they created a 75 ounce tamale eating challenge. They give you an hour to finish three consecutively larger pork tamales covered in red sauce for a combined weight of 75 ounces, about 4.68 pounds. If you succeed you get the meal for free and $75 cash but failure yields you a bill for $19.36, a number representing their year of establishment.

I enjoyed their playful numbering system, but wished it was their 100th anniversary so I could eat a larger tamale and get paid more money. Oh well, maybe in 25 years.

Due to the inclement weather coupled with the typically awful Los Angeles traffic, I arrived very late. However, they gathered a decent sized crowd to watch my attempt and take pictures. That got me fired up and ready to dive into these tamales.

I have only eaten a few tamales in my experience and have never tried a pork one before. The owner explained that it would be nice and soft so I had no reservations about taking large bites and eating quickly. And that I did. I voraciously tore through the delicious compressed corn and pork mass finishing the smallest of the three tamales in half a minute.

My pace remained consistent as did my technique which led me to complete the challenge in one of my fastest paces. I finished in 5:28 which broke the record of 14:20 from the only other guy to complete the challenge out of 6 attempts.

The magic of pork really never ceases to amaze me, I'm glad to have finally tried a pork tamale because it was really delicious. Afterwards, I ordered a platter of food, fried ice cream and a margarita to complete my meal. That was also very enjoyable, I had a great night at the Familia Diaz Cafe.

Here's footage of the challenge:

As the saying goes, something old, something new...

The most valuable lesson I learned in the past week of competitive eating is that food is timeless. It's great to encourage innovation and try new things for our palates to enjoy but it's also important to preserve what we already have. To continue our parent's culinary traditions so we may hand it over to our progeny for future generations to enjoy.

That's definitely the most valuable lesson from this experience. No wait, nevermind, it's don't get shit-faced when you have to competitively eat the next day. Trust me, you'll eat much faster. But the whole honoring both tradition and innovation thing is definitely a close second.

Pastrami War

2011-02-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
-Bertrand Russell

If you're going to have a war, it might as well be about food. This weekend I was involved in a war, a pastrami war.

About a month ago, Tommy Pastrami announced they would host an eating contest to commemorate National Pastrami Day. They would have a series of qualifiers with the fastest eaters from all of their locations would congregate at the end of the month in Huntington Beach, CA for the "Pastrami Wars" finals.

I participated at the Irvine store qualifiers. I've had very little exposure to pastrami. Sure, I've eaten it occasionally, usually as an accompaniment to a sandwich or even chili fries but never by itself. And definitely not in these quantities. I was pleasantly surprised with how delicious their pastrami was, eating a pound and a half of this brined and smoked beef was awesome.

I could have easily gone for seconds and thirds.

The qualifier involved eating two Skyscrapers, their 12oz pastrami sandwich, in as little time as possible. I finished my two skyscrapers in 4:31 setting the fastest time for all the locations and securing my place for the finals. The guys at the Irvine location were very encouraging and did an awesome job cheering me on during the finals. I think there was a bit of a war between the various locations as well. They really wanted their store winners to take home the prize.

These guys provided some colorful competition for the $500. Though I was a little disappointed that a couple of other notable eaters didn't show up for the finals. I was looking forward to competing against them and really wanted to earn that 1st place spot. At least my long time eating buddy Aaron Ybarra also qualified and was ready to give me a proper run for the money. We were both extremely excited for this day.

On a drizzly Sunday afternoon, we gathered and got ourselves ready to take on a giant pastrami sandwich. The winner of the finals had to be first to finish a 3.5 pound, triple decker pastrami sandwich. We were allowed to drink the beverage of our choice, including au jus, and could consume the sandwich however we wanted to.

I ended up opting for my usual water and tearing food apart with my bare hands combination. One of the guys brought a container of special fluid and his own bowl to dip the bread in. Everyone seemed determined to win, I think having a nice cash prize really helps motivate people to perform. Money is the best prize.

The sandwich proved to be formidable. I started by separating the bread from the pastrami and going at the pastrami first. I'm no stranger to eating pounds of food but much softer and less meaty foods. 3.5 pounds of pastrami was brutal. You really needed to tear into the meat and take strong swallows if you wanted to eat this thing quickly. My technique fell apart after having some difficulty swallowing wads of delicious pastrami, I nearly choked a few times.

It didn't help that Aaron was doing an incredible job during the middle of the contest. Eating in a very efficient animal style. I was worried, we were really close during the entire contest. In the last portion of the competition, I felt that I really needed to step it up in order to win. My friends, the crowd and the guys from the Irvine store did an awesome job of yelling me to victory.

10 minutes and a few pounds of pastrami later, I was victorious. Though to be honest, it really wasn't a filling meal, just 3.5 pounds of food and a bit of water. But my jaw was exhausted from the chewing. I felt elated after, especially when they presented the prize to me, a giant check for $500. I never received a giant check for anything before, consider another bucket list item checked off.

I ended up having a slice of cheesecake for dessert and seriously considered ordering more pastrami. I did just win $500, that would buy a lot of meat. I think it was Benjamin Franklin that said, "The best wars are those without casualties, that require eating a large quantities of food and award giant checks of money," but I could be wrong.

Here's footage of the contest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlJdkcYOXh0

The experience really intensified my desire to compete in up coming contests. I won my first eating contest of 2011 and more importantly had an awesome time doing so. Not a bad way to start the year.

Another Burrito and a Jar of Mayonnaise

2011-01-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

The recent weather has been incredible.

Almost every day this month has been perfect convertible weather. If this is the result of global warming, then we ought to keep burning more melted dinosaurs. The drive home on Pacific Coast Highway yesterday was glorious:

This warm, California winter is the kind of weather that totally puts me in the mood for adventure, just getting out there and getting my hiking shoes dirty. And the adventuring in turn gets me very hungry, in the mood for a hearty meal.

So I decided to eat another burrito. Yes, one challenge burrito right after another.

I did this to practice my eating technique with burritos and hopefully develop my palate for Mexican cuisine. Learning to enjoy more styles of cooking is always wonderful and I don’t really consider the B3 burrito challenge to be proper representation of Mexican cuisine because of its abundant use of processed cheese sauce.

The burrito challenge I would attempt is a relatively new one in Anaheim at the 195 Downtown Grill. My buddy Aaron wanted to try it out too, so we did the challenge simultaneously. We ended up with these two gorgeous burritos:

The rules are as simple as it gets. You have to finish eating a five pound burrito in half an hour. If you do this, it’s free. Otherwise, it’s a $15 bill. I really appreciated the simple elegance of this challenge and even more so, how awesome it tasted.

It’s a wet burrito that's served with sides of salsa, covered with melted cheese, stuffed full of grilled meat, beans, rice and sour cream. The amazing part is the variety of grilled meats inside. You get grilled chicken, carne asada and carnitas cooked in a way that you can actually taste and enjoy each distinct flavor. You can tell you're eating grilled meat, even if you’re it eating quickly.

So far, only one guy has successfully completed this challenge. He finished just under the 30 minute time limit. As usual, Aaron and I would do this challenge as fast as we could in the messy, bare-handed eating style that we've grown accustomed to. It went down quickly, the texture from of the chunks of meat made it a little tough to swallow but the delicious flavor definitely helped. It’s always fun to share the eating challenge experience with others, especially the victory part:

I finished in nine minutes and Aaron finished just under fifteen minutes. We both agreed the remaining bit of burrito at the end was the most difficult part of the challenge but we were both very satisfied with the taste. The guys drinking at the bar were very encouraging as was the co-owner Andrew who arrived right before we started. The environment is really half of the eating challenge experience and the 195 Downtown Grill didn't disappoint. Apparently they host great parties here too.

Here’s the information for this venue:

195 Downtown Grill
195 W Center Street Promenade
Anaheim, CA 92805
phone: (714) 999-8699
http://195bar.com

And as this month comes to a close, with the lack of actual eating competitions, I decided to film another eating stunt. This one is pretty popular on YouTube and it surprised me that so many people didn’t enjoy the experience. What’s so bad about eating mayonnaise? It’s a delicious, stable emulsion of oil, egg yolk and acid.

It’s my condiment of choice, I absolutely love mayonnaise.

My buddy’s wife gets grossed out when I use mayonnaise at their dinner parties. I’m dedicating this one to her, my mayonnaise eating video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TqTyeKAIM4

That’s 32 ounces of delicious condiment sex. I hope you guys enjoyed that one because I certainly did.

I also re-edited my first eating stunt. It’s me eating over six pounds worth of BLT ingredients:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DRz_ypWI8o

That one was not as fun, but at least it involved bacon. Bacon makes life so wonderful to live. Much like how perfect weather does. I should eat some bacon while the great weather lasts, that would be awesome.

A Big Burrito & New Years In Vegas

2011-01-14T16:07:00.000-08:00

Before you die, spend at least one New Years Eve of your life in Las Vegas.

I impulsively decided to gallivant with some friends in Vegas for New Years Eve. It was absolutely brilliant. A lot of people will complain about the traffic, the crowds and the surprisingly chilly desert weather but all these inconveniences are very minor compared to how much fun you can have.

Just bring good company, some of your favorite alcohol and a sense of adventure. You will definitely have some great memories or at least a digital camera full of memories if your's is too impaired from the booze.

There's a certain magic to the experience. For me, it was the ambiance of lights and music at Surrender night club inside Encore combined with the nostalgia from all the prior New Years Eve experiences I've had. There's something about watching the fire works go off directly above you and your friends in a half drunken haze when the clock hits midnight that makes you realize your life is happening right now. The Red Bull and vodka also helped.

As for hang overs, yes, like the movie about hang overs in Vegas, you will have to deal with that. Fortunately, Las Vegas has a few different solutions to nurse you back to health. From spas to entertainment, there is bound to be something to make you feel better. I was pretty hungry the next day and glad there was an abundant availability of one of those solutions, food. I could have opted for the awesome $35.00 24-hour buffet pass available at Caesar's Palace and Rio. Instead I decided to go for the famous, as seen on Man v. Food, B3 Burrito Challenge.

There is nothing like smothering away your hang over with a six pound burrito. The Nascar Cafe at the Sahara offers a free if completed in 90 minutes, giant burrito. You get the typical challenge t-shirt and picture on the wall if you win. But the real draw to this, at least for competitive eaters, is the staggering amount of people to fail this challenge and the very few to have actually completed it. About 30 successful attempts in over 5000 loses.

Joey Chestnut currently has the fastest time, putting away this thing in a mere 6 minutes. There was no chance in Hell I'd complete it at that time, but like always I had to give it my best shot. I came into this very hungry and excited to finally be attempting the burrito that so many have talked about. Would this be my first eating challenge failure?

Pictures of this are one thing but to actually hold this in your hands is a totally different experience. It was easily over eight pounds, it felt like cradling a human baby. A baby you would soon lovingly devour with the ferocity and vigor Saturn would be proud of. I dove right in with my bare hands, no utensils for me today.

I started off well, eating more than half of it in about eight minutes. I had mixed feelings about the taste. I liked the amount of shredded beef loaded into this thing, it was very satisfying to consume that much meat. Though I could have done without the excessive amount of jalapeños and gratuitous nacho cheese sauce poured on top. Taste really matters, as it compounds in your mouth after the fifth or sixth pound. Your tongue becomes so over stimulated that it does a very poor job of distinguishing between flavors.

I severely slowed down when I got to the last 10% of the burrito. I already had 17 minutes on the clock by that point and then the "food wall" kicked my ass. I was disgruntled, happy in the respect that I finally found a true challenge but intimidated at the notion of actually failing. The crowd watching was very encouraging and the last thing I wanted to do was disappoint them. I nearly reversed it in my last few bites, but I finished it. 27 minutes and 52 seconds later, I scored another shirt for the growing collection and my insides felt like trash.

Here's video of the action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tayr0ydFtXI

Lastly, my New Years tour of Vegas would end with some sightseeing and a bit of reflection. I walked around the strip with my friends, prospected future eating challenges and realized another year was over. 2010 was done and we're in an entirely new decade. Oh the possibilities. We needed to see something epic to start off the year.

Despite my innumerable trips to Las Vegas, I never bothered to drive the 30 miles to check out this behemoth. I'm glad my company really wanted to see Hoover Dam, it was worth the ridiculous traffic to see. I find my most satisfying adventures are those with the greatest challenges. With a big burrito eaten and a big dam visited, I hope 2011 will be a big year for me.

The Godzilla Roll

2010-12-30T13:52:00.000-08:00

What is it about a sunny Christmas day that just makes you want to go out and get drunk?

Like absolutely shit faced, I'm going to be regretting this in the morning wasted. It's probably the egg nog, or maybe all the time off you get from your usual routine. All that time you get to ponder on what is truly meaningful in your life.

For me, it's Scotch. A whole bunch of it.

And a few pounds of rare prime rib for good measure.

That pretty much summarizes the holiday for me. It was a pleasant, great drink & food with a few random twists to keep it fresh. Oh Christmas, you never fail to surprise me.

Also, the Christmas tree at Fashion Island in Newport Beach was gorgeous this year:

But down to business, all this festive gluttony comes at the cost of taking a break from the joys of competitive eating. Pondering all that with Scotch in hand, I came to the conclusion that I should do one more eating event for 2010.

So 2010, this one's for you.

My quest led me to Sushi Delight in Lomita, California for their Godzilla Roll challenge. A giant sushi roll weighing over four pounds, filled with delicious things from the sea and smothered in three types of dressing.

They give you an hour to finish this one.

If you succeed, you get the meal for free, a t-shirt and a spot on the wall of fame. Failure yields you a bill for $35, left overs in a box and a spot on the wall of shame. There is a less than 4% success rate with this one, so I figured I'd end my 2010 with some challenging fun.

There was also the matter of the record my buddy Xanadu set in October at 11 minutes flat. She truly amazes me.

It was packed when I walked in, not the best conditions for competitive eating but at least business was good. I had to wait a bit since the chefs were incredibly busy, but that just added to my hunger. I haven't done sushi since I set the men's record a Sushilicious a couple months ago and I was definitely looking forward to this one.

My Godzilla Roll arrived in a big, white plate with sauces drizzled artistically over the massive slices of the sushi roll. My usual food excitement kicked in and I thoroughly enjoyed diving into this one. It tasted much like a tempura or crunchy roll, with hints of sweetness and creaminess from the various sauces.

It was truly a pleasure eating through this one, and I regret not taking the time to properly savor the taste. I'd like to return one day to eat another one at a casual pace.

Like Christmas, the enjoyment was over far too quickly. I ended up finishing in 7:20, beating the prior record of 11:00.

I wanted to eat another one, but I had to be somewhere after. Though I did have some celebratory dessert with happy hour Kirin and green tea mochi. Some nice sweetness and bitterness to create a sense of umami after the sushi roll.

Here's the video of the challenge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw7k8PzPgvg

There you go 2010, one last one for the road. Off to 2011 for bigger and better adventures.

Keep it awesome in the new year guys.

Hamburgers, Hot Dogs and Cheese Steaks

2010-12-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've been hungry. Very, very hungry.

Hungry like Pac-man on anti-depressants. I want to eat everything in my path while avoiding those creepy ghosts. I'm hungry for food, competition and life in general. This is what drives me to competitively eat, a passionate pursuit to satiate my hunger for challenge and to devour delicious food in the process.

The past few weeks have been amazing for my competitive eating endeavors. I was inspired by the local Laguna Beach homeless looking to gain work on their own devices, so I made a sign to help:

A couple weeks ago was the first Mr. Dash Hamburger Eating Contest at the Bay Hill Tavern in San Diego. Pete Dash wanted to advertise his gourmet hamburgers from Pennsylvania to new markets in California and offered $500 cash plus prizes in an eating contest. I invited Tom "Goose" Gilbert from my first eating contest in Mission Viejo to compete. My buddies Aaron Ybarra and Stephanie Torres were also competing. This would be very intense competition.

As formidable as Pete Dash was in stature, he was a pretty cool guy and made the rules of our contest simple. You and your competition have 10 minutes to consume as many of his hamburgers as possible. You're allowed glasses of water to do with as you please and the winner would be the person who ate the most and held them in for 10 minutes after eating. The hamburgers were very tasty, unusual because there was a lot more seasoning in the meat than a typical hamburger. But like he was claiming, you can eat them naked.

We started late and the hours of waiting really drove the appetites of the six competitors. When we finally started, Goose took the initial lead just devastating burger after burger at a staggering pace. Though as I explained to Stephanie beforehand, like our last contest, Goose's incredible speed would taper off near the end. We just needed to maintain a steady eating rhythm as usual. And that we did, keeping pace with each other until around the 13th burger a couple minutes from the end of the contest.

Then me and Goose started to slow down, while Stephanie kept her mouse-like eating style going. She was amazing and nearly caught up to Goose at the end. She ended up coming in 2nd with 18 hamburgers in 10 minutes just half a hamburger shy of Goose's 18.5 total. I came in 3rd, two behind Goose with 16.5 hamburgers and Aaron came in 4th with a respectable 11 consumed. This was such a fun competition, my appetite was definitely satiated that night.

However, the next weekend, I found myself in the same hungry predicament. I impulsively decided to participate in a hot dog eating contest hosted by The American Festival in Long Beach. There were just four of us competing, me and three random people from the festival in a five minute picnic style eating contest with bottled water. Dunking was out of the question.

The contest was quick, I won with 14 hot dogs and buns in 5 minutes. The next guy did 7, pretty decent for a 15 year old with no competitive eating experience I think. The hot dogs themselves were pretty bland, but at least the prizes were unusual. I won a pair of hand made Indian moccasins and a dinner-cruise for two in Long Beach. Not bad for an impulsive contest and definitely a nice warm up to defend my cheese steak title the following day.

I was back in Corona for the third time to defend my cheese steak title and to attempt to break my prior record of eating 4.75 foot long cheese steak sandwiches in 10 minutes. My competition included 5 first timers and two women. Not very intimidating, but at least Kevin Ross from the MLE was there to check out the contest and to capture video for me. He also ordered some very creative food, French fries covered in Cheese-wiz, sautéed mushrooms and onions with a ginger ale. I wanted to try them but I still had a contest to sort out.

The contest was very enjoyable, the cheese steak sandwiches were the most delicious I had eaten yet. I ended up winning and beating my old record with 5.2 cheese steaks in 10 minutes. I consumed the remainder of my sixth cheese steak while the results were being announced. They were so damn good, it was like the steak and cheese were tongue fucking my mouth. I could have eaten 6 more.

Here's video of the action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD8CCUsJnHE

That's it for now however, I don't have any eating events planned until the next year. I'm taking a break for the holidays. I feel like what I imagine Pac-man would feel like after he finishes a level. No more orbs, random cherries or even ghosts to devour.

On the bright side, I found my new favorite artist on Pandora. I entered Vanilla Ice into my create station field and it was amazing. After "Ice, Ice Baby" the theme from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-air" came on, it was like magic coming through my car's speakers. I suppose I'll just be chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool until the new year. Merry Christmas!

Five Weeks Ago

2010-11-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that it was just five weeks ago when I attempted my first eating challenge. I figured with no eating competitions at the time that I might as well see how I fared as a challenge eater. With a bit of coercion from some awesome people, I found myself in San Diego at 9a, bright and early, to take on the Broken Yolk Iron Man Special.

This challenge was featured on Man v. Food with Adam Richman. The five-pound chili-cheese omelet with a pound of home fries and two large biscuits took him 32 minutes to complete. He was one of the 400 people to finish the challenge in under an hour with more than 10,000 failing to do so. To be perfectly honest, I was both worried and excited to try this because I wanted to do well and I was famished from the lack of sleep and hang over from the prior night.

My buddies Lisa and Joyce went with me to the Gaslamp Broken Yolk location and provided great support, documenting the entire challenge. I've been told by people who have attempted this challenge that it would be delicious. And when I started, I was not let down. This omelet was delicious!

Scarf isn't just an accessory used to keep your neck warm, it's how you eat this omelet. This baby was made to scarf. The amalgamation of egg, cheese, chili and mushrooms went down very rapidly. Despite the food being served steaming hot, I managed to consume the entire omelet portion of the challenge in about four minutes.

The pound of home fries and biscuits would prove more daunting however. In competitive eating, you generally use liquid to help get the starches down. Drinking water helped immensely because taking on the remaining fries and biscuits was like being apprehended and beaten mercilessly by the carb-gestapo. This is when I realized why they call this a challenge.

I managed to power through it, even taking a couple moments to take pictures with random strangers. There's something about having great company and a cheering audience that helps you eat food faster. I ended up finishing in 13 minutes. I scored my free t-shirt, picture on the wall and my $30 meal for free.

They also said that I had set the record for the location, besting the previous record of over 14 minutes. Though after doing some research, I found out that Ben Monson had set the record at 11:12 for all the Broken Yolk locations. And since then Matt "Mega-Toad" Stonie had set a new record at an incredible 7:15! So I'm not sure where that leaves me, I suppose I'll eventually head back there to sort this out. Being that this was my first attempt at an eating challenge, I'm sure I can do better.

Here's footage of the challenge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz5gMvHN_5g

With that said, I'll be focusing more on eating competitions in the near future and less so on challenges. I have a few lined up, but my heart really is in competition.

I can't wait to return to San Diego.

A Whole Bunch Of Noodles

2010-11-26T21:50:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving Day was a special day at Shin Sen Gumi in Fountain Valley, California. They were again hosting a special all you can eat ramen challenge. I've been excited about this challenge for a couple weeks now, it's a great warm up meal for my epic Thanksgiving dinner later that night.

The challenge is very straight forward, you are given 45 minutes to consume as many additional orders of ramen noodles as you can. Those who eat the required amount of additional orders of noodles are given their additional noodles for free and a t-shirt. Men must finish an additional six orders of noodles and women must finish four additional orders respectively. You must also first finish the initial bowl of ramen you pay $10 for before ordering additional ramen noodles. Also, the person who consumes the most additional orders of noodles during the day is awarded a $50 gift card.

I wanted to win this day.

I met up with my adventuring buddy Ang and his coworker Doug, for the challenge. We also met a couple guys who were also doing the challenge, Mike and Anthony. Everyone was excited to get into their ramen, though we ended up starting two minutes after the restaurant started the clock. Our ramen came out hot, much like the pho 20 challenge I did recently. The experience from that challenge really helped, I immediately poured my ice water into the hot broth.

The challenge went by quickly. I kept up a furious pace through the succession of hot noodles. There was a slight delay between the servings of noodles, but the chefs did their best to keep the supply of noodles coming to the five hungry contestants. Mike and Anthony finished first, they stopped after consuming 7 plates of noodles to qualify for their t-shirts. Me, Ang and Doug took the entire time however. I felt like trash towards the end.

I ended up beating the house record of 8 additional orders of noodles, by consuming 16 additional orders of noodles in 45 minutes. That's a total of 17 servings of noodles. Ang ended up eating the 6 additional orders of noodles to make the cut for his free noodles and t-shirt. Though his coworker Doug fell one order short as the time limit came. They had us write our names and amounts on a dry erase board.

It's a weird sensation to be full both of noodles and satisfaction. Also knowing that you have a 6 pound Thanksgiving prime rib roast waiting for you at dinner definitely messes with your foodie psyche. I estimate that each serving of noodles is about half a pound, so that makes for about eight and a half pounds of noodles plus the broth, meat and vegetables from the first bowl. That's a whole bunch of noodles.

But Hell, we got free t-shirts, noodles and I ended up winning the $50 gift card for consuming the most ramen that day. This was a great victory. You can see the mirth in our faces, especially Ang.

Here's the video from the challenge, sorry again for the technical difficulties. I'm still getting the hang of this video production business:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH9xif03amo

I'll try to recover and make the most of the long weekend, I hope you guys are having an awesome Thanksgiving weekend too.

Top 5 Buys of 2010

2010-11-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

Every year at this time, I like to look back and analyze what I've spent my discretionary income on. What have I purchased in this past year that I'm truly thankful for? That I've really gotten the best bang for my buck from. With Black Friday looming, I thought I'd share my top 5 buys of 2010. Previous top 5 buys have included the likes of Little Big Planet, my roomba and the Droid. Here's what made the cut this year:

#5 - Vingette App for Droid / €4 (~$5.33) at the Android App Market

Take that boring coffee cup picture you took with your Droid and turn it into an artsy masterpiece. The camera on my Droid left much to be desired in terms of dynamic performance. The Vingette application fulfills those desires and then some. It's vastly superior to the stock camera interface and improves flash synchronization for night shots. It's also fun to simply play with the filters to see what you end up with. Good stuff.

#4 - Spare Battery for Droid / $5 with free shipping at Amazon.com

As much as I'm addicted to my Droid, my #1 buy from 2009, I find myself killing the batteries. Often. From listening to Pandora at the gym, to watching Youtube, smashing pigs in Angry Birds or just killing time on homestarrunner.com, my battery dies. I weighed the options for viable battery extending solutions, from portable kinetic chargers to rechargeable 3rd party battery packs, and found that the most elegant solution to be a simple spare battery! They're only $5 with free shipping on Amazon!

When I have really long backpacking trips, I can keep my GPS running for days with spare batteries or just record hours of video. Video of me eating everything I can get my hands on. It's awesome to just swap out the battery and have a fully charged phone again, such a win.

#3 - Generic Aviator Sunglasses / $15 + tax at Pacsun

Yes, good old cheap, generic aviators. I got these on sale one day and I use them all the time. For when I need to get into my competitive eating mode, a simple pair of sunglasses does the trick. I'm really not sure why I love these so much, but maybe because for $15 I really don't care what happens to them. They're extremely liberating to wear. They've also held up quite well and have lasted me through several adventures. I find myself leaving my $150 Oakley's in the case more often.

#2 - Motorola Rokr Bluetooth Headphones / $25 with free shipping on sale at Verizon Wireless

Yes, I know, another phone related purchase, but I do love my phone accessories. Motorola took two things in life that I enjoy, music and technology, and combined them into a practical, compact package. For all my workouts or just when I want to ignore the world for a bit, these things are magical. The audio quality is great and they even have controls built into the headset so you don't have to pull your phone out to change the song, adjust the volume or even answer phone calls. And since they're bluetooth, the batteries last all day too. Brilliant.

#1 - Starcraft 2 / $59.99 + tax at Gamestop

As some of you may know, I'm a pretty hardcore Starcraft player. For the last 14 years I've been hooked, pwning Koreans on their servers and have been refining my zerg rush ever since. It's saying a lot, that for the amount of video games I play, Starcraft easily out ranks the total amount of time I've spent on everything else I've played - combined. That includes all of the Final Fantasies, fighting games, Metal Gears and even Gran Turismo!

The sequel to my most played game of all time came out a couple months ago and has lived up to all the hype and expectations! It has completely stolen my heart. Though with all the eating contests and adventuring I've been doing lately, my overlords have been getting lonely. I should really spawn more of them.

I hope this gives you guys some ideas for your own holiday shopping, and at least inspire you to quantify the enjoyment you've derived from the purchases you've made. It will definitely be a subjective measure. But for all of us, money is a finite resource, so we might as well spend it on things we truly enjoy. There's nothing worse than irrational exuberance.

Enjoy your Black Friday.

All twenty-eight inches.

2010-11-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

It has been a rather active week for me with the eating challenges. As much as I miss active competition, there is an allure to taking on a restaurant's eating challenge. Especially when there's money involved.

There's an XL Pizza Challenge that Ballpark Pizza has in Rancho Santa Margarita. Me and Stephanie have been meaning to attempt this. It would be nice to work as a team for a change rather than competing against one another. We also brought along our buddies Aaron and Sal to take on the challenge at the same time. On a stormy Saturday night, we all headed over to Ballpark pizza to devour that cheesy beast.

The challenge itself is pretty straight forward. You and your partner get an hour to eat a 10 pound, 28 inch cheese pizza. If you complete the challenge you get $100 and the pizza is free. Though if you fail, you need to pay $40.

Our pizza arrived first, but we decided to wait for Aaron and Sal's pizza so we could start at the same time. You are given a choice of beverages and condiments to consume with your pizza. I went with my usual cups of water and Stephanie chose to go with tea, no ice. We also opted to go without condiments.

We dove right in. Although quite haphazardly on my end. I began by stuffing an entire slice of pizza into my mouth and the thick, gooey cheese lodged itself into my epiglottis. My throat refused to cooperate... air? Food? Nope, you get neither sir. I am Johnnie's apathetic epiglottis. Fortunately everything came up into my mouth again, I drank a bit of water and swallowed it all. This cost me some time.

Stephanie was absolutely in the zone, with headphones on and a comfortable rocking eating rhythm she put away that pizza with ease. At this point, I was behind but slowly got into my eating groove. I have to admit that my lack of sleep and excessive drinking the night prior didn't help the situation. We eventually powered through it all and set a new house record of 16:55. Aaron and Sal would follow soon with a time of 21:50.

We all got paid.

Apparently victory smells like pizza grease. And after the challenge, we were all thick with the smell of victory. All in all, the challenge was very satisfying and besides the near-death experience, the pizza was very enjoyable. Though there was definitely room for improvement for me. I have another pizza coming up soon.

You can check out the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv2B8QlsnPg

Before this, I had an enjoyable day looking for accessories at the mall with my buddy Suzie. I'm still searching for colorful rings to wear for my eating events. The closest we got to finding some was at Claire's and the Sanrio Shoppe, but unfortunately I have giant hands and all of their accessories are made for elementary school aged girls. We did find some slick sunglasses at the Diesel store however.

She ended up painting my nails black too. I loved the contrast between my black nails and my bright blue "I <3 BOOBIES" bracelet. I'll keep this up for future events. I wore it to the XL Pizza Challenge.

The next day, after the challenge, the rain finally stopped in Laguna Beach. I stepped outside and caught a glimpse of pristine sky over the ocean. Winter isn't my friend, but the sunlight and ocean help make it tolerable.

Clear skies are one of the most under appreciated luxuries in life. They make eating days so much more pleasant.

Hot Pho!

2010-11-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday night I drove down to Ocean Beach to take on the Pho 20 Challenge at OB Noodle House. The restaurant was surprisingly packed at 8:30p with people watching the hockey game, hipsters drinking from an incredible beer selection and drones like myself enjoying some hot Vietnamese pho.

About 150 people have attempted this challenge and only 9 have completed it under the 42 minute time limit. It involves eating a jumbo bowl of pho with two pounds of noodles, a pound and a half of thinly sliced beef and a pint of beer. I was happy that they let me pick my beer. I ended up going with Kirin, a beer I'm pretty familiar with.

My food came out piping hot, so I decided to implement my strategy of pouring the beer into the broth to help mitigate the excess heat. It definitely helped, albeit somewhat less than I had hoped for. It was still really hot, I wished I had another beer to pour in. But victories aren't forged from comfort, so I dug in and tried my best. Trying to ignore the searing fluid going down my throat, I focused once again on process and timing. I wanted to keep a good rhythm to efficiently devour my hot pho.

Aside from the gross, sweaty agony, this challenge was actually really tasty. I've never come across a bowl of pho I didn't enjoy and this massive bowl was certainly no exception. It was delicious. Even without the sprouts, mint or other condiments I sincerely enjoyed the flavor of my challenge.

I ended up completing the challenge under the 42 minute limit and beating the previous of record of 20 minutes by finishing in 9 minutes. I was very satisfied. The people nearby were awesome and incredibly supportive. The bartender let me drink for free afterwards too. I gladly took him up on that offer.

Here's the video of the challenge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8UFe7wxj2s

I did have a bit of a snafu whilst editing the video for Youtube. In the middle of processing the data, my video card decided to melt. I spent a good portion of the following night troubleshooting and fixing my computer. On the bright side, I've been meaning to upgrade my video card and did so accordingly. I got the old rig patched up and running like new again. I love Micro Center.

On an unrelated note, last night, in my usual Friday night inebriation, was the last day you could legally purchase alcoholic energy drinks in the United States. I downed a can of Four Loko for good measure. Thanks FDA for keeping us from doing harmful things to ourselves. Now I can stick to the "safe" method of getting energetic and drunk at the same time: shots of 151 with 5 Hour Energy Drink chasers. :-(

Also thanks to Lisa and Joyce for their awesome support and sorting out the pictures. Lisa did such an amazing job covering the action. :-D

B.L.T.

2010-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

Today I had an argument with my old buddy fat in regards to how much of him I want around. So I'm taking a couple weeks off from the eating and focusing on my adventures. My last competitive eating event was last weekend in Corona and I will do another challenge next weekend. However, I will be out in the wilderness both days this weekend.

I'll be hiking up Los Pinos Peak near San Juan Capistrano and doing my routine Crystal Cove walkabout in Newport Beach tomorrow. The weather has been fantastic, and I'm really looking forward to getting some dirt on my hiking shoes again.

I did put together a video for you guys who like watching me eat. Last week, I recorded the first episode of an eating segment I'm posting on Youtube about me doing eating stunts called Johnnie Eats!

Yup, just like the blog name. In this episode I eat a BLT because I really love bacon. Seriously, like more than most people I know. And definitely more than my rabbit Black-black. You can check out the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/johnnieexcel?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/pUQeWJ4B1Qk

Thanks for reading my updates, I promise there will be some epic eats soon. I have some awesome eats planned for the Holidays.

An Extra Hour

2010-11-08T11:15:00.000-08:00

We all fell back yesterday. An extra hour.

I spent that extra hour camping with friends from the Sierra Club at the El Moro Campgrounds on the Newport coast. The prior night was a blur of conversations about camping gear, eating Chex Mix and drinking Rebel Yell. I honestly can't remember the details, one of the many ramifications of drinking heavily during a camping trip.

I did, however, feel that extra hour was well spent. My day began with waking up to this:

It was glorious. I just wanted to spend the rest of the day adventuring in the wilderness but there was a competition this day. I needed to head over to Corona to defend my cheese steak title at Philly's Best.

I picked up my eating buddy Stephanie "Xanadu" Torres (SXT) so she could compete in the women's division and we headed over to Corona. We arrived early so we thought we'd go ahead and use the racing gift cards I won from the previous cheese steak contest. The race was fantastic, I felt like the Stig from Top Gear:

With my heart beating like a high-compression F1 engine from the race, we went to Philly's Best for the competition. We would compete indirectly with one another, against both competitive eating new comers and veterans, and against my prior record of consuming 4.25 foot long cheese steak sandwiches in 10 minutes.

SXT would go first with the other women and end up winning her second competitive eating competition. She broke my previous best too by devouring 4 1/3 sandwiches in 10 minutes. As usual, I enjoyed watching her eat and welcomed the challenge of the raised cheese steak record.

I competed against 4 guys with no competitive eating experience. My real challenge this day would be beating Xanadu's number, so I kept that goal in my head while I ate my cheese steaks.

I was successful. I set a new record and defended my cheese steak title by consuming 4.75 cheese steak sandwiches in 10 minutes.

We each won 2 more passes for the kart racing, a t-shirt and a $50 Philly's Best gift certificate.

The cheese steaks were much better tasting than I remembered so me and Xanadu finished the remainder of our fifth sandwich then ate a sixth for good measure. We had some ice cream at a local Cold Stone afterwards to balance out the saltiness from the cheese steaks. I was very satisfied after.

We'll be back in Corona next month to defend our respective titles. I'm looking forward to doing more cheese steak eating and go-kart racing. These hours were well spent.

So I Made A Blog

2010-11-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

First post! :-P

So at the behest of others, I decided to make a blog to keep people updated on my on goings as a competitive eater & adventurer. I also made a Youtube channel this morning and posted my first video: Johnnie Eats The 5 lb Five Alarm Burger!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnVyNEl-EPM

I hope you guys enjoy it, and thanks for following my adventures.

I'll update more soon but I'll be in the Newport Beach wilderness tonight doing some adventuring and falling back an hour. I hope you guys make good use of that extra hour this weekend. Make it awesome! ^_^