If you ever dreamed of co-owning a restaurant for free, this may be your best shot. A New York chef is offering a lifetime 10% of his restaurant’s profits to whoever completes his crazy food challenge. All you have to do is polish off a ginormous 30-pound burrito worth $150 in under one hour!
The offer is currently on at At Don Chingon, a restaurant in Park Slope Brooklyn, where chef German Villatoro created the monster wrap aptly named ‘Gran Chingon’ (huge badass). It consists of a handmade tortilla about three-and-a-half-feet in diameter, filled with chicken, steak, carnitas, chorizo, cheese, rice, beans and salsa. Only one Gran Chingon burrito is made every day, and the order must be placed 24 hours in advance, because it takes two hours just to prepare.
To win the contest, you have to finish the giant Mexican dish in under 60 minutes and as if that wasn’t hard enough for anyone with a normal appetite, there are a few other rules challengers must abide by – contestants must have a ghost pepper margarita along with the meal, any bathroom breaks or “discharge of bodily fluids” (vomiting) will result in a forfeit, the restaurant is not to be held accountable for any sort of health complications or the death of daredevils attempting the Gran Chingon challenge, and ownership of the prize is not transferrable. But follow the rules, eat everything in an hour, and in the words of co-owner Vic Robey, “you’ll have free food for life, in addition to 10 percent of the profits.”
Photo: Don Chingon
“This challenge is very difficult,” he added. “It will take one of the best eaters in the world to accomplish it.” He warns customers to “eat at your own risk.”
The restaurant does allow “tiered challenges”, where two people try to finish the burrito together, and they each stand to win $500 in cash, food worth $500, beverage credit, and T-shirts. No one has completed either challenge yet.
Photo: CNBC video caption
This sort of challenges are not uncommon, but they usually only get you bragging rights, a fre meal or a small prize. That’s what makes Don Chingon’s so special. “You’re way beyond getting your name on the wall. You’re getting the wall. You’re becoming an owner,” Vic Robey said.
He added that they wanted to “make it a challenge, but not completely impossible” I don’t know, though, 30-pounds sounds pretty impossible to me, and apparently George Shea, partner of the International Federation of Competitive Eating agrees with me. “There’s no human alive who could eat a 30-pound burrito, in my opinion,” he said, noting that he’s been proven wrong before.
“What they’ve done is take the challenge to an absurd level, and it’s funny,” Shea added. He also mentioned that the Gran Chingon was not sanctioned or endorsed by the International Federation of Competitive Eating, and it does not meet its safety standards.
Sources: Food and Wine, CNBC
