Randy Santel’s belly is flat as a cutting board – giving no indication that the 25-year-old recently completed his 100th gut-busting food challenge.
Part food-consumption machine, part bodybuilder, Santel made history this past weekend by becoming the first person in a Seattle restaurant's 47-year history to finish its 72-ounce steak – along with the required salad, soup, baked potato, bread, milk, ice cream and a tomato juice to top it all off.
It all happened at Seattle’s Wedgewood Broiler. Derek Cockbain, who has owned the restaurant since 1996 and worked there since 1981, told TODAY.com that no one has ever before been able to finish that meal. According to Cockbain, even “World’s Strongest Man” winner Magnus Samuelsson couldn’t put away the massive steak.
Santel did it in just under 42 minutes, after completing two other challenges that day, and then strolled to the bar and had a beer with onlookers.
"It was an absolutely amazing thing too see," said the restaurant's manager Mike Hamman.
While others have completed 72-ounce steak challenges elsewhere ("Man v. Food" host Adam Richman finished one at The Big Texan Steak Ranch), Santel was the first to do so at the Wedgewood Broiler. And what's really astonishing is that he didn't stop there.
In addition to winning the 72-ounce steak meal, Santel finished four other competitive eating challenges. Here’s a taste of what Santel stomach-slammed over the course of three days:
- a 6-pound bacon burger featuring grilled cheese sandwiches for the buns along with fries;
- a 1-pound doughnut;
- a 2-foot chili cheese hot dog;
- a 3-liter bowl of ramen noodles;
- a 12-patty 3-pound cheeseburger, and;
- a 6-pound burrito.
Recent winners of the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest like Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayshi have proven that competitive eaters can be both trim and insatiable. But Santel takes it to the next level by incorporating intensive workouts, so he can be calorically irresponsible, functioning as a human disposal of food poundage, on weekends.
“When someone hears you are going to attempt a food challenge, they expect to see some fattie with high cholesterol,” the 6-foot-5, 230-pound Santel told TODAY.com. “That’s part of what I love about it. The shock factor.”
In addition to what he calls Monday through Friday’s “boring” diet of health food, Santel's recent weekend splurges have included a 28-inch pizza in St. Louis and a triple-decker terderloin and family-sized fries in Indianapolis.
Santel’s love of food goes way back. He was asked to “retire” from his first job in high school, at a Subway shop, after enjoying a few too many discounted subs.
“I always joke that I did the opposite of the Jared diet,” said Santel, referring to Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who touted his weight loss in Subway commercials. Santel, who would eat three double-meat subs a shift, admitted, “I was adding weight that I didn’t need with Subway.”
Santel struggled with his weight throughout high school, during his college football days at Missouri State, and in his post-college life. He has been on more than 20 diets. Ten different times, he lost 30 pounds.
But the weight never stayed off until Santel entered a Men’s Health magazine competition in 2010 to transform his body. His reward to himself after getting the physique he wanted? Eat something tasty, and a lot of it. So he and a friend split an 11-pound pizza. They videotaped it, and Santel decided that prodigious eating was something he could keep doing.
So he transformed into his alter ego, “Atlas,” and soon entered several eating challenges per weekend, once putting away 34 pounds of food in three days. Now he rocks his “These Aren't Guns, They're Cannons!!" cut-off shirt regularly as he tries to carve out his own niche in the eating world’s prime rib.
“It started out that my family said, ‘Gosh, you’re weird,’” Santel recalled. “Now my mom just doesn’t want me to get hurt. She tells me to avoid the spicy food.”
Santel isn’t sure what his next challenge will be as he tries to turn his eating and fitness combo into a profession, but he does hope to win a competition in every state. So far he is at 11 and counting.
But one place you won’t see “Atlas” flexing his jaw cannons is at Coney Island on July 4.
“I have no interest in eating 70 hot dogs,” Santel said. “Everything should be done in moderation.”
Matthew Moll is a multimedia journalist living in New York. You can follow his local food tweets at @tasteoflocal. For more of Matthew’s work, visit Taste of Local.
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