Spoonfed Vs Hot Wings

Spoonfed Vs Hot Wings

20 September, 2012
by: Domzig

Pain is temporary, glory lasts forever...

According to Canadian hardcore band Brutal Knights, wings are the food of Kings and Queens. I’m not so sure about that, but I do know that if you cover them in hot sauce, you have one hell of an eating contest on your hands. That’s exactly what happened last night at the Blues Kitchen in Camden, as hot sauce guru The Rib Man challenged a group of hapless fools to trial chicken wings soaked in the four sauces on his range, before attempting a final course made up of the hottest sauce he’s ever concocted. Seeing that his creations are named after the response he got from the first person who ate it, and the second course was called Christ on a Bike, you get an idea of how hot it was.

Now being a vegetarian (or a pussy depending on your stance on such things), we decided to bring in our mate Johny Chhetri from Diverge to tackle this challenge. He may look small and harmless, but I’ve seen put Dave’s Insanity Sauce on beans on toast, so you know he’s got game.

Preparation



As any champ will tell you, preparation is two thirds of the battle, and Johnny was taking it seriously. Meeting up at the office before we caught the tube to Camden, we talked over the strategy and discussed his warm up. Basically the idea was to try and mentally separate the mouth from the brain, and to neck a milkshake before we got into it. I think his theory was that the milk would somehow neutralise the chilli, but I just thought it would make his puke look even more weird.

Arriving at the competition and finding myself with nothing to do, I decided to scope out the other competitors and see what preparations they had made for the contest. The responses ranged from a lady who said she’d been eating nothing but chilli all day, to a guy who was trying to zen it out and a scouse lad who kept shouting mantras like ‘pain is temporary’. This was going to be a walk over.

Round 1



The contest was to be made up of five rounds of eating, each progressively more hot than the last. To get to the end, all you had to do was to endure the heat without wiping your mouth or drinking any fluids. On the last round, everyone also had to take the searing pain for five minutes after the last mouthful had been eaten.

To be honest, the anticipation seemed to hurt the competitors much worse than the wings in round 1. They basically looked like normal chicken wings and Johny wolfed them down in no time at all. Looking round everyone was breathing a sigh of relief, but that was all put to a stop when The Rib Man explained that they’d just had the BBQ sauce.

Round 2



Right, game time. Round 2 was considerably hotter than round 1, but not to the level of being much of a challenge and Johny tucked into them like a man who’d not eaten in a few days. I asked him how it was going on the pain-o-meter, and he said that it was about a three, so we definitely had some headroom to play with. Things were looking good.

Round 3



After a couple of easy rounds, round 3 hit like a hammer. By now Johny’s hands and face we’re covered in hot sauce, and it was becoming a challenge not to wipe his mouth with the jumper that was sitting next to him.

I noticed everyone had slowed down a bit, and the guy two tables down from ours had started to weep. Biting into the first wing, Johny shot me a look as if to say ‘what the fuck am I doing here?’, but he managed to get to the end, even though his nose was streaming and his eyes were welling up. I looked around to see how everyone else was doing at the end of the round and disappointingly no-one had quit.

Round 4.



The sauce in round 4 was called Holy Mother of God and that was putting it lightly. Johnny chewed it like he was taking bites of napalm, and the lady next to us kept gasping for air like a dying fish. Seeing the holocaust unfolding around me, I decided that Johny could do with some moral support to make it through, so I sat there screaming things like ‘eye of the tiger!’ and ‘don’t give up the ship!’ until he’d painfully made it through the last wing. I don’t know why I kept shouting the ship thing, it was probably no help at all.

Round 5.



Round 5 was harrowing. As soon as they put the chicken in front of us, I could feel the heat wafting into my face. Bravely, and without any regard to his personal safety, Johny dived in, stripping the chicken off with his fingers and dropping it into his mouth, but there was no enjoyment this time, and he had the look of a wounded soldier in his eyes.

Getting them down him in the first three or four minutes could of been a mistake, as after the last bite had been taken, all of the challengers had to sit for the next five minutes and take the pain with no wipes or water for relief. One of the organisers even upped the ante by strategically leaving a pint of beer on one of the tables. Everyone had their own way of dealing with it, from jumping up and down to quietly sobbing into the table. Johny sat there physically shaking like a man who’d been pulled out of a frozen river. I asked him how he was doing but he didn’t say anything, he had fallen into some sort of zen-like trance to try and contain the pain.

Aftermath



With the five minutes elapsed, the hand towels and water were handed out and the contest came to the end. Apart from one person who was disqualified for wiping his hands, everyone who started had made it to the end, but like every battle, the hurting didn’t stop as soon as the fighting ended. It took one White Russian, two beers, a litre of water and a couple of ice cubes melted onto his lips before Johny felt up for talking, and even then it was to only express regret for what he’d just done.

As the contestants climbed the stage to collect their bottle of hot sauce, I had time to reflect on what had just occurred. What I had just witnessed was a group of people deliberately hurt themselves for nothing more than pride and keep going only because they didn’t want to be the first one to quit. God, people are so stupid sometimes.

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Domzig