By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When Randy Santel shows up at BG BurGers Tuesday at suppertime, he’ll have five specialty burgers waiting for him, and he’ll need to leave room for dessert.
Sandel travels the world taking on restaurants’ food challenges. He’s been at it since 2010. He’s had pig’s feet soup in the Philippines, haggis in the United Kingdom, and Rocky Mountain oysters, as bulls’ testicles are called, in Colorado. Mostly, though, he said he’s had a lot of burgers.
Even in Malaysia, he had burgers.
A restaurant , Santel said, may have some exotic challenge that gets social media buzz, but not many customers will take them on.
So, though, he’s never been to Bowling Green before — that’s a big part of the draw for him to come — he’ll be on familiar ground when he faces all that ground beef at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
BG BurGer’s owner Chris Kline will present him the Chef’s Monster 5 Burger Challenge, a stack composed of: a Hangover Burger with prettles and an egg; a Bacon Attack with mozzarella cheese onions and six slices of bacon; a Burger Blue with blue cheese and bacon; a Jalapeño Popper Burger with pepper jack cheese and jalapeños poppers; and Cheese Curds Burger with cheddar cheese, bacon and fried Cheese curds on top.
Then there’s the Reese’s cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory.
Santel has 25 minutes to down it all.
He’s confident he’s up to the task. “I have 769 victories since I started in 2010,” Santel said in a recent telephone interview. Given on a tour with almost one challenge daily, he’s probably won a couple more since.
In his biography, Santel, 33, reports he was a chubby kid, topping out at more than 200 pounds in fifth grade. He trimmed down using Weight Watchers, and put his size to good use as a football player. The St. Louis, Missouri native then went on to study construction management and play football at Missouri State University.
Santel said though he was big, he wanted to be ripped. So he took part in a fitness contest, The Spartacus Challenge, sponsored by Men’s Health magazine. He won, and earned a chance to make an appearance on the show “Spartacus.”
As he was still celebrating his victory , he and a buddy took a challenge to polish off a 28-inch pizza. They won $500. “Everything just spawned from there.”
Now he goes on tour, and when he’s not consuming enormous amounts of food, he’s dieting and exercising, which is a challenge in and of itself when he’s spending so much time in a vehicle moving from one mountain of food to another.
He has Facebook and YouTube channels as a business models. He has website foodchallenges.com devoted to the activity. He feels it has helped others interested in pursuing food challenges seriously.
It includes training advice, tips on strategy, and recovery methods. It also includes a database of challenges around the world.
Food challenges are different from eating contests. A food challenge is one eater against a monumental stack of food. Eating contests pit competitors against each other to see who can eat the most of a particular food — and, yes, there is a Rocky Mountain oyster eating contest.
As of May, he also has a master’s degree in dietetics. Santel plans to build on his food eating-fame to help educate people on nutrition and fitness.
He said he’ll probably step away from challenges in 2022, though he doubts he’ll fully retire.
Then he’ll use his social media presence to promote a nutrition education system he’s developing.
“Once I’m done doing these food challenges, I’ll be the No. 1 followed dietitian in the world. There are not many dietitians on social media.”
That’s a few years off. On the horizon is a plan to travel to Ukraine where someone is arranging local food challenge for him.
Before that there’s more burgers with a stomach distending amount of toppings in Bowling Green, and that cheesecake waiting in the wings.
