UEPa TAKES ON DENNYS BEER BARREL PUB

I suck. Let me just get that out of the way right now. If I’m ever in a competitive eating contest with you and I start talking trash, just say, “Hey Dave, how’d you do against that three-pound burger at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub?” That’ll shut me right up.

Yesterday Pete “Broken Wing” Maurizio, Derek “Wing Tut” Payne, Ian “The Invader” Hickman and myself met at Dennys Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, PA to eat some of the biggest burgers ever created. They all attempted the 6-pounder (10 pounds total) and I tried the three-pounder (four to five pounds total). And, even though we all failed to finish in the prescribed three hour time frame (90 minutes for mine), we learned a lot about ourselves as eaters and as men on that day.

I’ll let the pictures (and captions) below tell most of the story. A link to a full set of pictures is at the bottom of this post. Captions also accompany those Flickr photos, so don’t do the slideshow. For some reason it hates captions.



From left to right, Pete “Broken Wing” Maurizio, Dave “Mega Munch” Shoffner, Ian “The Invader” Hickman and Derek “Wing Tut” Payne. We look pretty happy here, even though this picture was taken about 10 seconds before we left. Pete, Ian, and Derek are all AICE guys. Since I’m not ranked in the IFOCE or AICE, I guess that makes me sort of a free agent. Regardless, this day wasn’t about AICE or IFOCE or any of that crap…it was just a bunch of guys who love food coming together to have a good time. The way it should be.



Here we see our waitress, Kimberly, bringing out the second of our three 6-pounders. That’s another in the background and my 3-pounder on the table. Something we learned when we placed our order is that you get to hold one ingredient (besides “beef” or “bun”). I held the onion, Hickman held the mayo, Pete held the tomato, and Derek held the…mayo? Funnily enough, only Pete’s burger came with his ingredient held.



This is me. Don’t I look so confident? So full of energy and machismo? About 70 minutes later I’d be full of beef and bread and mayonnaise and looking much, much less aggressive. I ordered a 26-ounce beer to drink with my burger (and I drank it). I’d like to blame that on my disappointing performance, but I know it’s not the Yueng-Ling’s fault.



I love this picture because it captures the mood of the day perfectly. That’s Pete “Broken Wing” Maurizio biting into his 6-pound burger for the cameras (Hickman laughing in the background). Of course, it’s impossible to actually eat the burger that way. In reality, Broken Wing would eat both buns, his veggies, his souplike mass of condiments and nibble about a pound of his 6-pound beef patty before calling it quits.



This is me with Denny himself, the owner and founder of Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub. He was really happy to see us and even dispatched his webmaster/local newspaper photographer to get some shots of us while we were eating. The pics will be on the Denny’s website and in the local paper. Denny said he’s already begun working on a new World Record “Largest Commercially Available Burger” (topping Clinton Station Diner’s recent 105-pounder) which he hopes to launch around the New Year.



Here we see Wing Tut after admitting defeat. He had hoped that the glare from his stomach would blind The Invader and cause him to lose his focus, but it didn’t work. On this day, Tut was nursing a “case of sniffles” and a “tooth brushing injury” he’d sustained a few days prior.



This is The Invader after he’d thrown in the towel. He outlasted us all. The angle doesn’t show it, but he ate about two-thirds of his beef, along with most of his buns and condiments. He was also the most upset at himself for not finishing the burger. Our humbling defeats lead us all to wonder exactly how an average gal like Kate Stelnick was able to eat that whole burger. The world may never know.

A full set of pics and captions can be found here. Don’t miss the shot of The Invader’s bread dunking cup. As Borat would say, “Very nniiiiiice!”