A Medium Rare Dare in Amarillo

AMARILLO, Texas —  “Oh, man,” said Luis Rodriguez, eyeing the steak dinner headed his way. It was the voice of dread more than desire. He rubbed his belly, a condolence to his own innards. What on earth could have possessed him to attempt such a gluttonous feat?

In front of this slim, mild-mannered, 31-year-old data analyst was now the mightiest cut of meat he had ever seen: the Big Texan Steak Ranch’s 72-ounce top sirloin, a slab of beef the size of the Yellow Pages, so colossal that McDonald’s could turn it into 18 Quarter Pounders. You can only get two of these steaks out of a single cow. Each one weighs more than six times the human heart.

“Oh, man,” Rodriguez said again.

Just finding room for it inside his 130-pound frame would have been a sizable achievement. But Rodriguez was after something even grander, driven by a Texas-size challenge that lures hundreds of cross-country travelers to this Panhandle eatery each year: Consume all 72 ounces in an hour and the meal would be his free. Lest that appear insufficiently Herculean, he would also have to wolf down a baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad and roll. The price of failure is $50--payable in advance, given that most contestants are too indisposed afterward to be reaching for their wallets.

“Oh, man.”

The Big Texan is the carnivore’s Everest, a gamble for glory that mocks the rational mind. Dozens of billboards along old Route 66 whet appetites from Missouri to New Mexico. “Why do people do it?” said general manager Dan Lee, repeating a question that has been asked of his family-run restaurant for nearly four decades. The answer is well-rehearsed: “Because it’s there.”

The 72-ounce sweepstakes dates to the Big Texan’s inaugural year, 1959, when (according to legend) a real-life cowboy sauntered in off the range and told Lee’s father, the late R.J. “Bob” Lee, that he was hungry enough to eat a whole dadgum horse. The elder Lee served him up a steak, then another and another. By the time the cowboy said stop, he’d devoured 72 ounces--a big enough pile of bull, as the Lee family delights in noting, to make anybody a genuine Texan.

Since then, about 27,000 people have tried to scale that summit; only 4,600 have succeeded. No one has died (at least not inside the restaurant), but more than a few have spewed up their steak dinner (yes, right there at the table). The youngest to get it all down was an 11-year-old boy. The oldest was a 63-year-old grandmother. Klondike Bill, a professional wrestler, ate two dinners (that’s 9 pounds of beef) in the allotted time. Frank Pastore, a pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, set a speed record by inhaling his meal in 9 1/2 minutes. “It’s all in the wrist,” he explained afterward.

Going mano a mano with gastronomic history was not exactly on Rodriguez’s mind when he stepped into the Big Texan’s faux 19th century yellow-and-blue gingerbread dining hall on a recent September night.

As far as he knew, he and his girlfriend were simply having dinner with two German tourists, one of whom worked for the same international oil pipeline company that employed Rodriguez in Houston. Thomas Meinzer and Hans Binkele, both 30, had a better idea of what they were in for, the Big Texan being one of the must-sees on their three-week trek through the heart of Americana.

“Do you understand what we have to eat?” Rodriguez asked them incredulously upon reading the contest rules.

“Hans says it’s no problem,” said Meinzer, his Pipetronix colleague, who helped translate for Binkele, a police officer whose chiseled face and rippled 188-pound physique bore a striking resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I think you’re all insane,” said Rodriguez’s girlfriend, a 24-year-old psychology major named Kristen Watrous. Her perspective was somewhat colored, however; she’s a vegetarian.

After waiting an hour--that’s how long it takes to grill a 72-ouncer--the three men were led to a small stage, where they were seated side-by-side and introduced to the Big Texan crowd by Hody Porterfield, an adopted member of the Cree Indian Nation who wears buckskin britches and lives in a teepee on the restaurant’s gravel parking lot. He went over the rules with them, explaining that they would have to eat everything but the gristle and the potato skin. Nobody could help them cut or chew. They couldn’t stand up or leave the table. And one last thing:

“If you get sick,” Porterfield cautioned, “the contest is over.”

He looked at his gold pocket watch. It was 9 p.m. “Let’s give these gentlemen some applause, a little encouragement,” Porterfield implored, egging on the crowd like a circus barker. People whooped and hollered. Flashbulbs popped. Some diners walked up to the stage and gawked, picking favorites and placing bets.

“I always wanted to be famous,” Rodriguez said.

“This is your 15 minutes, baby,” his girlfriend told him.

Then it was time to eat. Binkele lived up to his image by slicing into his 2-inch-thick, 9-inch-wide and 11-inch-long steak as if it were a wedge of cheesecake. There was no wasted motion, no ironic banter, just the ceaseless swing of elbow and jaw, cutting and chewing, chewing and cutting, like the silent arc of an oil pump. “Go, Hans, go,” someone at another table shouted.

Meinzer’s first move was to unfasten the top button of his size 33 jeans, a tactic that did not inspire great confidence. After a few bites, he had spattered steak juices all over his shirt, then squandered several minutes draining the broth from his plate into a butter dish.

Rodriguez asked for a bottle of A1 and emptied it onto his meat. But even with the puddle of sauce, his chewing soon began to look labored, head rocking, eyebrows arched, cheeks bulging like Don Corleone.

“Oh, man,” he managed to mumble.

It takes more than hunger to make good on the Big Texan’s dare. Strategy is as important as a rumbling gut. The restaurant recommends ordering your steak medium-rare and slicing it into thin bites, the better to conserve those all-important mandibular muscles. Many folks make the mistake of ordering it well-done--thinking that the extra cook time will shrink the corpulence of the meat--only to end up with lockjaw. A few have even asked for their steak chilled and raw, with the idea that it might slip down the gullet more readily, but the potential benefits of that technique remain unconfirmed.

“You can usually tell within the first 10 minutes,” said Lee, adding that some contestants have been caught trying to slip strips of beef down their boots. “If they’re going to finish it, there’ll be just something about the way they attack it, the rhythm, like a machine.”

Binkele proved that theory true, effortlessly shifting gears between his steak and the side dishes; meat to salad, salad to potato, potato to meat, meat to roll, shrimp cocktail in three spoonfuls. He finished it all in 37 minutes, then momentarily dropped his head to his chest--his only acknowledgment the entire night that this had been anything but a normal meal. As he got up and walked to the bathroom, the dining room burst into applause.

“Damn, I don’t believe it,” Rodriguez said. He and Meinzer still had huge piles of beef in front of them, getting colder and tougher by the minute. They were picking at it, stalling. Every bite was painful.

“You only got 12 minutes left, now shovel it in!” commanded Watrous, who had made a rather easy transition from critic to cheerleader. She was eating a strawberry shortcake, sharing it with Binkele, who seemed pleased to be getting his $50 back.

Rodriguez hugged his middle and moaned. “I think I’m pregnant,” he said. “I think I’m going to have a cow.”

Mercifully, the hour expired without a birth. Rodriguez’s plate was weighed, revealing that he had left 16 ounces of meat. Meinzer, who had left 16 1/2 ounces, took one more bite to lock them in a tie. They were offered a doggie bag. Both declined.

In the lobby of the restaurant, Binkele was asked to add his name and address to the Big Texan roster, making him a member of America’s “most exclusive” steak-eating club. For a moment, it actually seemed heroic--a chance for one man to leave his mark, no matter how insignificant, on the world.

Outside, in the car, as the four of them headed toward a motel, Rodriguez asked Binkele to pull over to the side of the road. There, on Interstate 40, doubled over under the endless Texas sky, he too left a mark of his own.