I seem to be writing a lot about meat here lately. Jerry's Nugget, a casino in Las Vegas, has a new eating challenge — a meal consisting of a dinner salad (with croutons), a baked potato, an ear of corn, a slice of garlic toast, a 48 ounce piece of prime rib and a banana split. If you can eat all this in under 45 minutes, you win a t-shirt and you don't have to pay the price of the meal, which is $41.89 plus tax and gratuity. Given the size of my gastric-bypassed stomach, I could maybe handle the baked potato and about 8 ounces of meat…and even as separate dining experiences, I couldn't eat the salad or banana split at all. Lettuce doesn't agree with me and I've developed an aversion to sweets.
So I won't be taking this challenge but I'm kind of intrigued to read the rules (PDF). And if I were to be a competitor, I would have a lot of questions…
- Does finishing one's salad mean not even a drop of salad dressing must remain? For that matter, could the "choice of dressing" be "none?"
- I assume one does not have to eat the corn cob but must one consume the potato skin? If not, how do they deal with the fact that no matter how much you eat of a baked potato, there's always a little more potato you can scrape out of the jacket?
- The size of the slice of garlic toast is apparently up to the restaurant. What's to stop them from making it the size of a Chevrolet? For that matter, they could put twenty heads of lettuce in a tub, say "Here's your dinner salad," and then when the person couldn't even finish that, hand them the check for $41.89 and say, "Too bad!"
- Can one specify the "doneness" of one's prime rib? A 48 ounce cut is so thick, it's probably not going to be consistent in that regard. What if portions of it are too well-done or rare for the diner's taste? (In a restaurant once, I was served a normal-sized piece of prime rib so overcooked, the Tasmanian Devil couldn't have chewed two bites, let alone swallowed.)
- Do you have to eat the fatty parts of the prime rib? The gristle? Even at Lawry's, which makes that cut o' beef better than just about anyone, I always leave a few of the less edible pieces. Would that disqualify me here?
- And then we have this banana split of no specified size. Since it's served if and when the person finishes everything else, it would be easy to make it too large to be eaten in the time remaining.
- Oh — and what if the food is just plain lousy? I guarantee you, I could cook a 48 ounce piece of prime rib so poorly no one would or could finish it if you gave them a week. But they'd still be on the hook for the $41.89.
I'm sure Jerry's Nugget wouldn't cheat at this any more than they'd rig their slot machines. Then again, the casino is struggling to rebuild after having declared bankruptcy in August of 2012. There's an old joke about the player in Las Vegas who loses a couple thousand bucks at the tables and then goes to the buffet and tries to make it up by devouring that much prime rib. This could be the reverse of that joke; where the casino tries to get out of bankruptcy by forcing people to eat more prime rib than they can handle.