Adam Richman from Man Vs. Food is a freak. How do I know this about the Travel Channel’s eating challenge guru you ask? The answer came to me in one of those freaky dreams you have when you’ve eaten something rich too close to bed time. I watch Adam every Sunday night as he traverses America taking on ridiculous eating challenges all the while thinking that he must have the best job in the world. Boy was I wrong. After taking on a 2.5 pound burger at a sports bar in Surrey I had a dream that Adam Richman was chasing me through the streets with a giant pizza mocking my failure and calling me a loser, ouch.
The burger in question is from Baselines Pub located at 8233 166th Street in Surrey, it consists of two and a half pounds of beef with aged cheddar cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, onions , pickles and mayo on an 8 inch sourdough “bun”. Why the quotation marks around bun? The “bun” is a whole round loaf of sourdough bread, the kind you would hollow out for spinach dip. The burger “patty” was basically a 2.5 pound meatloaf made to fit in the “bun”, it was roughly 2 to 3 inches thick.
The rules for this challenge are pretty basic, one challenge burger per person, finish it and it’s free, don’t finish it and it will cost you $25. I opted for no tomatoes or onions as did my co-competitor Kevin. It should be noted that there was a third challenge taker in our group, Lee, but Baselines only had 2 challenge burgers ready to cook and making a third would have taken over an hour so Lee opted out, promising to take on the challenge another day. He did order a regular 7 ounce burger which provided a great visual reference for our monsters.
The burger looked to be around the size of a volleyball. The meatloaf patty was actually very tasty and the sourdough bun was also quite good. Eating this burger with your hands is not an option so I decided to attack the layers one by one. I cut the burger in half to give me a benchmark for progress. I ate the top of the “bun” with the lettuce on it, then the pickles and then I started on the meat. I soon realized that this was not going to go well. Our waitress came by and told us we were doing really well compared to previous challenge takers but doubt had already began to sneak into my mind. As I approached the halfway point I started to really slow down. I thought that it would be the bread that would be my downfall but the meat proved to be too much. When Kevin and I finally gave up neither of us could even look at the meat left on our plates without feeling ill. We came to the realization that spending $25 was better than getting sick all over the table, which allegedly happened to someone who finished the challenge.
I was left with a little under half of the meat and a quarter of the bun while Kevin had a little more bun left but I would call it a tie. We left feeling defeated, bloated, a little nauseous and with elevated blood pressure. Am I glad I tried to tackle this eating challenge? That is a question I don’t really have an answer for. I feel like I needed to at least try, which I did, but failure is a bitter pill.
If anyone out there thinks they can out do us I challenge you to head to Baselines and try. I will tip my cap to anyone who can finish this gargantuan burger but in the words of Mr. Adam Richman, in this battle of man versus food, food won. At least my dog got some yummy meatloaf when I got home.
Scott.
