‘Professional eater’ set to visit 3 Wichita restaurants. Here’s what he’ll try to ingest.
Over the past 11 years, professional eater Randy Santel has attempted more than 1,000 food challenges in all 50 states and in 37 countries.
He’s won most of them — over the weekend, he digested his 990th win — and he’s built a huge online audience of fans who love to watch videos of him scarfing down towering burgers, enormous pizzas, 4.5-pound steaks and all sorts of other meals big enough to feed a whole family. For a week.
This week, Santel is bringing his act to Wichita, and he’ll stop at three local restaurants — Pizza Ranch , Doo-Dah Diner and Nortons Brewing Company. Though none of those restaurants currently has an eating challenge, where customers attempt to ingest ridiculous amounts of food in a given time period in exchange for a free meal, a T-shirt and a spot on a wall of fame, they all will once Santel leaves town. Part of the local restaurants’ agreement with Santel’s team is that they continue offering the challenge he takes on to their diners — a pledge he asks the restaurants to make in part so they won’t create a plate so monstrous that no human stomach could handle it.
Santel will start his gut-busting Wichita visit with a 6 p.m. Thursday visit to Pizza Ranch at 2121 N. Tyler, where he’ll have an hour to ingest 16 pieces of chicken, a family-sized serving of mashed potatoes and gravy, a large pizza, a small order of Cactus Bread and a chocolate chip cookie. At 1 p.m. on Friday, he’ll take a seat at Doo-Dah Diner, 206 E. Kellogg, where Chef Patrick Shibley will serve him a dish he’s calling Big Brutus’ Brother — a tower that includes a hash browns, a waffle, pancakes, a chicken fried steak, pork belly, and biscuits.
Then on Saturday, he’ll be at Nortons Brewing Company, 125 St. Francis, where at 2 p.m. he’ll take on the Munchie Monster Challenge, which consists of a four-patty burger that has a grilled cheese sandwich in the middle and full Monte Cristo sandwiches as buns, a double order of loaded Ranchero chicken fries and a side of bacon crack — and he has to eat it all in 40 minutes.
Wichita is invited to watch him at all three stops.
During a phone interview from his home in Springfield, Missouri, this week, Santel — who has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and 1.4 million Facebook followers — talked about how he got his start as a professional eater and about the unlikely reason he’ll retire in the next two or three years: He’s becoming, of all things, a professional dietitian.
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Santel, 34, grew up just outside of St. Louis, and in 2010, he won a body transformation contest sponsored by Men’s Health and the Starz Network. He and his six-pack abs won a trip to New Zealand, and when he got back home, a friend invited him to compete with him in a St. Louis food challenge, where he had one hour to finish a 28-inch, 11-pound, two-topping pizza.
He did it, pocketing a check for $500. A month later, he took on and won another pizza-eating challenge in Jefferson City. At the time, the show “Man v. Food” was a big deal on the Travel Channel, and lots of restaurants were offering challenges.
It became Santel’s thing, and he kept doing it — posting videos afterward and racking up followers. These days, he averages about 100 food challenges a year, he said. Before he arrives in Wichita this week, he’ll be participating in a giant cookie eating challenge in Overland Park, a chicken-and-waffle challenge in Kansas City and a pizza challenge in Topeka.
People love to watch him try to complete the challenges, he said, and he feeds off the crowd energy. He’s figured out mental strategies to help him succeed over the years, including famously turning his ball cap backwards when he’s ready to inhale, and they’ve worked. He’s lost only three challenges this year. He lost six last year and 12 in 2019. Most of the time when he loses, he said, he just runs out of time. At a recent seafood-eating challenge in Florida, he lost because as a Midwesterner, he just wasn’t quick enough at cracking crab legs and extracting crawfish from their shells, he said.
To win the challenges, Santel said, he must avoid sudden, ahem, reversals of fortune, and his body rarely betrays him anymore. He digests all his food, and he uses napkins and the best table manners he can manage to keep from grossing his spectators out.
A recent challenge in Albuquerque, he said, had him facing down a one-pound savory, stuffed sopapilla, and it was a close one. But he pulled from his experience.
“I was able to finish that one,” he said. “Those are the kind where you’re just hunched over at the end sipping soda and doing anything you have to do to get the win. You have to avoid any wrong move.”
He does gain lots of weight during his food challenge road trips, he said, though he tries to mitigate it by working out on a spin bike he takes with him when he travels. He tends to lose the weight again during his off time, he said.
Soon, Santel said, he’s moving to Milwaukee to start an internship as a registered dietitian, and by 2023 or 2024, he anticipates he’ll have finished school and will be working full time. Then, he said, his food challenge days will be done, but in the meantime, he’s focused on savoring his status as one of the country’s best eaters.
During the past year, he said, he’s found another role he enjoys: restaurant promoter.
“With COVID and all the restaurants struggling, they’ve got to do whatever marketing they can, and having me do a food challenge brings all kinds of people into the restaurants,” he said. “It gets them on Facebook and YouTube. It gets them more searchable.”
All three of the restaurants Santel visits in Wichita will soon begin offering the food challenge he tackles to the public. Most are still working out the details, though most will include free stuff and pictures on a wall of fame.
At Nortons, where the challenge won’t open to the public until next week, owner Dan Norton plans two photo walls.
“We’ll have the wall of fame and the wall of shame for people who fail,” he said with a laugh.
This story was originally published May 17, 2021 at 2:05 PM.
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