The Seventy-Two Ounce Lunch
My brother-in-law bet me he could finish the famous Amarillo steak challenge, and the wager got complicated around the third baked potato.
Amarillo has a famous restaurant where, if you can eat a seventy-two ounce steak with all the sides in an hour, the meal is free. Nobody does, as a rule. But my brother-in-law Dale, a big man from Hereford with a very good opinion of himself, bet me twenty dollars that he could. We went on a Saturday, with the whole family in tow, to watch. I brought a folding chair, thinking it would be a spectacle. I was right in the wrong way.
They put him on a little raised stage with a clock. The steak arrived on a platter the size of a hubcap, with a shrimp cocktail, a salad, a roll, and a baked potato. Dale cracked his knuckles. The waitress said go, and he went at it like a man cutting hay. For the first twenty minutes, it was a thing of beauty. The crowd leaned in. A child at the next table asked his mother if the man was a machine.
Then the second baked potato arrived. We had not been told there would be a second baked potato. Dale looked at it with the expression of a man who has been misled by a contract, and he asked the waitress for the fine print. She pointed to a small sign that said, in tiny letters, that the potatoes refill automatically as long as the challenger is still eating. Dale put down his fork. The crowd, who had been cheering, now began to murmur. A third potato was already on the way.
He finished, in the end, with two minutes to spare, and it was the quietest triumph I have ever witnessed. He did not speak, and he did not stand. He rested his forehead on the table, and the whole room applauded. I paid him twenty dollars, which he accepted in a low voice without lifting his head. They gave him a photograph and a free T-shirt, which he wore as a nightshirt for a month. Later, I learned from a beef cattle guide that seventy-two ounces is a pound of meat more than a good steer gives up in a single cut, or something like it, and Dale will not discuss it. The story lives on in farm.FM food stories, where he is listed as a legend.
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