This is a challenge I didn’t know much about. A friend sent me the link to the Facebook page. The image there didn’t give much away.
Man vs Food Burger – from Facebook
The menu didn’t give much away either.
The claim that it weighted over 3.5lbs is ambiguous. Did that mean just the burger? The burger and bacon? Burger, onion rings and chips? It wasn’t giving much away. Also, no indication of a prize if you finished it. At £14.50 its pretty cheap so I was guessing it was just a slightly bigger than normal burger weighing in at 3.5lbs in total.
So I get there and ask to do the Man vs Food burger. They have a special table for it so the bar staff can watch you. If you manage to eat the burger in 30 minutes, you get it free and you get your picture on the wall. Out of the 9 attempts so far, no one has done it. No one had even finished the burger. At this stage I was getting a little worried. No finishes and still no idea of how big the challenge was.
One of the things that I thought, limited the size of the challenge was the size of the burgers. Most burgers are in the 4-8 oz range with a really big burger being 12 oz. As there were 3 burgers in the picture, that’d be at most, 36 oz of burger meat. That turned out to be wrong. As these were home made burgers, they can make them as heavy as they want and the 3.5lbs was just the pre-cooked weight of the burgers! As it was lean mince too, there wasn’t much weight loss during cooking either.
The burger
Me and Richard the landlord
When I saw the basket of chips, that pretty much mentally defeated me. These weren’t just your normal, deep fried chips, these were thick home made wedges, really nice but fill you up. The burger was big but I’ve done burgers around that size before.
So I tackle the burger first. I eat 2 patties at the start, then the bacon and mushrooms. With whats left, I make a single patty burger and eat that. I am almost 20 minutes in at this point. I still have the majority of the onion rings left and barely touched the chips. Its pretty much a case of how much I lose by now rather than is it possible to win. I make the decision to just finish the onion rings and leave the chips. No point in making myself feel ill if I am not going to win.
What was left
I was full but not to the point of wanting to throw up. I think I could have maybe done half the chips but the full basket was a bit too much. I’ve gone down as the 10th person to try and fail then. I was the person who got the closest but still a million miles away.
I probably will have another go one day with some proper training. I don’t know though, I’d be a lot happier if someone else finishes it first. Part of me thinks it might be impossible.
If you fancy a try, here are the details.
The New Inn
Hemsworth Road
Sheffield
S8 8LN
01142551314
info@newinnsheffield.co.uk
Menu
Please call up ahead if you want to do the Man vs Food burger to make sure they have enough ingredients for it. Looking at the menu, its good value all round and no doubt if I lived closer, I’d be there everyday eating the food.
