Steak - Mark Schatzker [10]
The catch is that you have to finish it. According to my waitress, most do not. “We had a couple of guys in yesterday who thought they could do it,” she said. “They didn’t make it.”
Finishing a Texas King is not just a matter of eating, but of eating under pressure. Challengers are seated at a table set on a raised platform—a stage, basically—so that the other patrons can take in the drama. They have sixty minutes to transfer the steak from their plates to their stomachs, and a clock above them counts down every second. If they encounter any fat or gristle, they may set it aside, but they must eat every edible bit of steak, along with the shrimp cocktail, roll, potato, salad, and ranch beans that come with the meal. A garbage pail sits at the end of the table. The day before, a man midway through a Texas King lowered his head into it and vomited. Vomiting gets you disqualified.
And yet, many have bested the Texas King. Out of the more than fifty thousand people who have attempted the feat—collectively ordering almost a quarter million pounds of steak—almost ten thousand have succeeded. The record for eating a Texas King the fastest was held for twenty-one years by a former Cincinnati Reds pitcher named Frank Pastore. He downed one in nine and a half minutes but was dethroned by a professional hot dog eater named Joey Chestnut, who beat him by more than thirty seconds. A Texas King was once fed to a Bengal tiger, who swallowed it all in less than ninety seconds, which included a fair bit of sniffing and licking, but he was spared the shrimp cocktail, bread, and other accompaniments, so the record does not stand. A Canadian pro wrestler named Klondike Bill, now deceased, once ate two Texas Kings in under an hour. That works out to an average-sized steak every six minutes.
I asked for an average-sized rib eye and gave myself more than six minutes. The Big Texan sprinkles Montreal steak seasoning on its steaks, but I wasn’t in Texas to taste food from Montreal, so I ordered it dry. It arrived, nevertheless, soaking in a half inch of dark liquid, which the waitress explained was “au jus.” To the French, jus is the precious intense, brothlike liquid that drips off beef as it roasts, but it didn’t seem likely that what was being billed as au jus was genuine jus, given that the steaks were grilled and that the liquid tasted strongly of powdered beef broth.
The steak itself was mildly worse than the one at the El Vaquero: somewhat drier, somewhat tougher, and a little sour, though in the end similar enough to be its first cousin. The only way to guarantee a succulent morsel was to carve a thin slice off and bathe it in the “au jus.” The best part, again, was that nub of fat.
I asked the manager where he got his steaks. In the thickest Texas twang I’d heard yet, he answered, “From a var-ah-ety of prov-ah-ders.” He singled out one in particular that does a lot of business with the Big Texan: IBP. Once known as Iowa Beef Processors, IBP is today part of an unimaginably huge company called Tyson Foods, the country’s largest marketer not only of beef but of chicken and pork, too. Tyson processes about 150,000 cattle per week, and each Texas King, at four and a half pounds, represents a small fraction of what the company churns out in a single second.
I pulled out of the Big Texan and back onto the interstate, which struck me as a slow-moving river, with fast-food restaurant signs reminiscent of overhanging foliage. America’s steak heartland wasn’t living up to its billing. So far, the steak just wasn’t that good. Another question formed in my mind: What makes a good steak good, anyway?
In Texas, there are people who know how a steak will taste just by looking at it. Even children have the