Finally. After four years of talk and planning and dreaming,
downtown Toronto’s most widely
renowned and infamous eating competition/feastravaganza,
the Bloor Street Challenge, would finally be
attempted! Our time had come to pass!
Before we really get started, here’s
the run-down on precisely what’s involved in this here challenge.
It’s an endurance matter, not strictly competitive, first of all;
one competes against oneself, if against anyone. It’s a trek down
Bloor, sampling a number of the new and classic
landmark eateries along the south side, between Bathurst and Spadina.
The order and requirements are hereby laid out:
Stop #1
Yummy BBQ, the finest bootleg Korean food to be found in this
part of the city, without actually taking your life into your hands and
venturing across Bathurst, into the Haunted Treasure
Island of food known as Korea Town, where a man is as likely
to find his doom as his fortune. Here, one eats any main dish (side
dishes don’t count!), and everything that comes with it... and yes,
that includes the gross, weird macaroni salad you get with some of the
BBQ dishes.
Stop #2
Mariko, for two rounds of all-you-can-eat sushi. Sure, precisely
what constitutes a “round” is a little vague, but
competitors ought to have a general sense, and compete fairly. The
first major hurdle of the entire event is the difficulty of keeping
that mocking phrase “all-you-can-eat” out of your head.
Stop #3
Sarah’s, for any sandwich or platter. This is often seen
as the beginning of a short break, but it only is if you play your
cards right. This ain’t the time for a
fully loaded spicy beef shawarma, lemme tell ya.
Stop #4
Futures Bakery, for either a cheap student breakfast or a slice
of cake/pie. Frankly, I think you’d have to be either a lunatic
or some kind of always-eating shaved ape to go for breakfast over cake
here.
Stop #5
Mt Everest Himalayan Restaurant. Here, one entree of any kind,
and one carb, be it
rice or bread. Sound like it’s a little much? It is. This leg is
basically designed to catch those smart alecks who managed to get
through the rest on loopholes of some kind. No way around this one;
pure strength, endurance, and force of will here. Nothing else to be
said about it... for now.
Stop #6
Greg’s Ice Cream, where you get a medium sundae with at
least two toppings, one of which has to be Greg’s ultra-rich and
thick hot fudge. There was originally talk of ending the Bloor Street Challenge with just eating a pound of
butter, straight up, at Dominion, but it was decided that it should be
a little more challenging, so a Greg’s sundae tops it off
instead.
Now, on to the post-gluttony report and
highlights!
Shortly after four
o’clock, we headed over to Yummy BBQ to get going. Now,
I’m a pescovegetarian, and yet
I’m always torn between the beef and chicken cutlet here. Is it
that the slightly sketchy images of the menu on the wall tempt me into
breaking my ethical dietary restrictions? Nope; I’m just
fascinated by the way that they’ve managed to use the exact same image for both
dishes for all these years, and yet haven’t noticed/don’t
seem to care enough to change it! Is it the beef? The chicken? Some
mysterious intermediate animal flesh, like an...
uh... archaeopteryx cutlet? Who knows?!? In
the end, I got the kimchi fried rice...
basically the plainest thing on the menu, and it went down nicely with
the side of marinated tofu they give to everybody. Although that
heaping plate of rice did shake me a bit at first, I finished at 4:52, well ahead of Abe, feeling
like I could eat more. And I only had to use the weird, Wonderland-esque washroom in the forebodingly “Employees
Only” festooned basement because of all the water I drank earlier
in the day to keep my stomach capacity high. I was even feeling
magnanimous enough not to challenge Abe on the amount of soup broth he
would have to drink in accordance with the “Excess Fluids”
clause.
Feeling good, we went down a couple of doors
to Mariko Sushi, and got just a big ol’
pile of stuff here. I chose poorly in a couple of cases, though, and
was seriously slowed down. The normally fine salmon sashimi came in a
couple of knobby, skin-covered pieces which almost made me ralph, long before the amount of food in me would
warrant it, and the plain-Jane sushi pizza was a little cold and
unappetizing. While Abe feasted on delicate white tuna, in its many
forms, I struggled through broccoli tempura and heavy (though
delicious) tofu salad with peanut sauce. Bad scene. Still, I soldiered
on, knowing that if I got through this, I would have it made in the
shade... like a beagle. And so I did, finishing at 5:50, this time long after Abe.
We were on to Sarah’s, where I was
serious about ordering light, although fully in accordance with the
rules. Abe, the unthinking eating machine, was going to go ahead and
get a falafel combination sandwich or some insanity... until he saw
that I got a plain fried cauliflower sandwich, with as few toppings as
possible. Sure, normally I’d be all about the combinations, but
the Bloor Street Challenge is not a time for
eating well. It is a time for eating lots. The wisdom of this truism started really hitting us
about halfway through them sandwiches, too; we weren’t at Yummy
BBQ anymore, that was for damn sure. I
finished at 6:24, two minutes after Abe.
Next door, at Futures, Abe got some fruit
pie, while I got me some strawberry dolce de leche.
Now, I don’t even really like dolce de leche;
replacing real cake icing with whipped cream just strikes me as a
cheap, uninviting cop-out. But the fact is that I can eat a little bit
of whipped cream a whole lot easier than a big wad of greasy icing, and
I could eat strawberries until the cows come home. We both powered
through these meals, recognizing at this point that the only way to
make it through the rest of the night, if it was possible at all, would
be to just pin our ears back, put our heads down, and plow through, not
allowing anything the time to settle in our increasingly congested guts
and start screaming at our nervous system about matters of which we
were already very well aware, thank you very much. I swallowed that
last bite (man... swallowing seems like so much work, compared to
inserting and chewing, when you’re in that kind of state) at
twenty to seven, again just minutes after Abe, while one of our
photographers tried to convince the counter girls that he was shooting
us because we were important celebrities of some kind... like Paris
Hilton (who has somehow managed to transform that “of some
kind” qualifier into a substantive statement of its own). Feeling
okay... Not great... Not even good. But okay.
Next door, at Mt Everest, trouble began. Abe
and I both took the controversial (though, I believe, nonetheless
correct) path of ordering spicy vindaloo
dishes, he chicken, myself shrimp. Why would we do such a thing, you
ask? Sure, it’s hard to eat fast, and would probably give us
trouble for the rest of the night, successful or not, but here’s
the rub: vindaloo is fairly thin, not some
heavy coconut or tomato cream like a milder korma or makhani sauce. Also, it’s really good at Mt
Everest. I got mine with poori, realizing
that the fried but puffy bread, despite being a little heavy, was
probably the carb with the lowest gross
volume on the menu, and that’s all I was thinking about at the
time.
And we waited.
The food took a while. In one sense, this was
okay, because it allowed us to put it in the back of our minds for a
while, but we knew, deep down, that we were just prolonging the
inevitable. With those kinds of quantities inside you, a little bit of
waiting doesn’t make you less full; rather, you actually start to
feel more full as it starts
to break down and react. When that spicy goodness finally came,
watching it cool was like staring into the Abyss, and having the Abyss stare
back, down to the depths of my soul. Or maybe my duodenum... I’ll
admit, at that point it was getting a little hard to tell where my soul
ended and my G.I. tract began.
I went down to the washroom, hoping it
wouldn’t be for one of those demoralizing ghost-poops (it was).
Washing my hands after a gargantuan, but futile, effort, I burped. In
it, I tasted fried bread and cauliflower, strawberries with cream, kimchi, raw salmon, and curry. Not cool. I knew I was done, and as I came back up the
stairs, I knew that Abe was too. What I saw in his eyes, as they lifted
from his plate, I could feel in my own eyes.
That sentiment was not fear, or suffering, or
pain. It was not regret, or even resignation. What I saw there is that
feeling which is the bane of all human life, the real killer of the
spirit, body and mind. I saw something I haven’t seen very often
in my young life, and only in the most extreme of circumstances. And I
don’t bandy this word about without just cause. What I saw was
outright despair. Complete
and utter hopelessness. No fucking hope, for anything!
We forfeited, conceded, withdrew,
surrendered, egressed, quit, whatever,
together, at 7:40 PM. The Bloor
Street Challenge had felled us utterly. We didn’t even get to ice
cream, and went home, doggie bags and tails between our legs, wondering
if Rolaids or Tums makes a suppository, because I sure as shit
wasn’t in the mood for swallowing. I now maintain that the
Challenge is impossible for anyone under 700 pounds, who isn’t a
Japanese professional eater.
I do have to admit, though: I now feel like I
really understand, and respect, the “gluttony” guy from Se7en a whole lot more. Because
if I had been in his spot, judging by what I felt on the Bloor Street Challenge, I just would have told that
fingertip-less Kevin Spacey-looking motherfucker to pull the trigger,
because I was not taking one more
bite.
