For as long as I can remember, I've been a big fan of food. An older cousin claims that, when I was a baby, she could get my attention by waving a piece of chocolate cake in the air from across the room, and would laugh as I scurried over to get it. In those same early years, my parents recall that I would often fall asleep in the meal I was eating. So yeah, I like food, is what I'm saying, but if you've been reading this blog, you knew that already.
At the same time, though, it seems that many of the places where I like to eat are not very popular. Why this is, I don't know. My tastes are not rare or impeccable; quite the opposite, in fact. You could say I'm a picky eater, so long as you mean I am committed to cheap, large quantities of plain food. And yet these are the places that seem to suffer. First, there was Quizno's, a Subway competitor restaurant chain that opened a location within walking distance of my Loveland home. Frequent visits there convinced me it was superior to Subway; few agreed, and it soon closed (presaging larger struggles for the parent brand itself in subsequent years).
Then, there was the poor 20-mile house, an historic building (formerly) located exactly 20 miles north of Cincinnati, where before cars travelers would rest before making the journey into town. The location cycled through dozens of owners, including one who seemed to make it work (and they offered bottomless rolls!). Impressed, my family actually returned for a second meal, only to find that management had changed yet again (I like to think I put the previous owners out of business by eating too many rolls). A few years ago, the building itself was destroyed to make way for...a gas station. And finally (for now), there's Bob Evans, a restaurant franchise born in Ohio that has been struggling to define itself over the past several years. One casualty of this struggle was what I considered their flagship, self-consciously rustic location just outside The Beach Waterpark in Mason, Ohio. It closed recently, ending many years of post-Church or post-Beach meals. (And I'm not going to count the self-consciously modest Decent Deli, a Blue Ash restaurant that closed before I had a chance to see if it was actually decent, as I long intended to do. I guess it wasn't?)
This trend even followed me to college. Oakley! (exclamation in original) was a nice little deli just off of my college's campus. I regularly treated myself to meals there, even though it was often short of basic ingredients (it was surprising how often I ordered something, only to be told "outta chicken" or "outta cheese" by the deli's owner). It closed before I graduated. And this example may be a bit of a stretch, but the dining company that managed my college's food provision also "closed" while I was there; it was replaced by another company that offered more exquisitely-prepared food, but in lesser quantities, and so I was not a fan of the change.
When Saga served Hillsdale's food, this page displayed the weekly menus. It went blank after Saga died.
Even in D.C., the places I like to eat have not been immune to market forces. I am a big fan of Cosi (which I incorrectly pronounce "co-sigh," thanks to this), a sort of Panera competitor I had never encountered before coming to D.C. for the first time, but which now I can barely imagine life without. You can watch them make all of their bread (they do it in an open-fire brick oven), and, best of all, they leave out all the bread they don't use to make their delicious sandwiches in bowls for anyone to grab and eat. When I learned that my company's new workplace would be right next to a Cosi location, I feared for my wallet...until I walked by it one day and discovered that it, too, had closed. Alas.
But the loss of a single Cosi franchise pales in comparison to the sheer injustice of the closure of Armand's Chicago Pizzeria's Capitol Hill location. Since my first internship in D.C. in the summer of 2012 (!), this Armand's has always been about a five-minute walk from where I have lived. I have no idea how many times I've been to the place, how many times I've sampled their decent, if unspectacular, Chicago-style pizza and Italian cuisine. I've been there alone, with D.C. friends, and with visiting family and friends. For sheer convenience and reliability, it was hard to beat Armand's.
And for sheer value, it was hard to beat Armand's Saturday pizza buffet. Every Saturday, from 11:30 am-2:30 pm (and every weekday, but I rarely went on weekdays), $8 would buy you unlimited trips to a constantly restocked pizza and salad bar. I like to think I never failed to make a profit on these days, as I would regularly have at least eight pieces of pizza (if not more; the pesto chicken pizza was the best, but the spinach and onion was a close second). Maybe my visits contributed to Armand's going out of business (my high school cross country team claims to have done the same thing to a Cici's). Although I brought enough costumers with me over the years that they surely couldn't have held it against me.
It could not last, however. Last fall, the signs began to accumulate. Friends of mine (several from Chicago), confused at my love of the place, cast aspersions on its quality, and wondered how it survived. One of them suggested that the busloads of tourist children the place would regularly feed artificially kept it alive, an assessment that is, in hindsight, almost surely correct. Another friend ate with me there on one occasion, enjoyed it, and then, after we left, claimed she had inside intel suggesting the location was doomed. I refused to believe.
In truth, though, I had seen the signs. The Saturday buffets were getting lonelier and lonelier; Armand's even raised the price (not that I cared; it was still a steal). This past January, I returned to D.C. after the holidays to find that Armand's had changed its Saturday hours and done away with the buffet on that day altogether. And then, on at what turned out to be my last meal there (January 15, 2017), I ordered my typical favorite non-pizza meal (pesto chicken pasta) only to be informed that they were "out of chicken." I remembered Oakley! and its twilight failures, and sensed only the same fate was in store for Armand's. And so it was that I, upon walking home from work one day, passed by the place, saw construction workers there, and confirmed with them that it was no more, another victim of the expansion of a certain organization (a Subway and a nice breakfast place also used to eb nearby).
Armand's, as it stands currently (original image here)
All of the criticisms of Armand's I heard may have been true (but at least it's not at the center of a conspiracy theory like another D.C. pizza place). But that didn't stop it from being a regular and extremely convenient source of perfectly edible food for me and for the friends and family that I brought there over the past five years. I'll miss it. In fact, I think I miss it already. Earlier this week, I had a dream that it reopened. But when I awoke, I found that it was only a dream, and that Armand's was still permanently closed. And it may be no more in the physical world. But this Armand's will forever live on in my heart...and in my stomach.
The purpose of this blogpost is, instead, to celebrate one of Kasich's non-political virtues: His voracious appetite. Throughout his campaign, the governor showed himself to have by far the biggest stomach of anyone who ran for president (even Chris Christie). And since I, like Kasich, am not only from Ohio (though he was born in Pennsylvania), but also possessed of a black hole of a stomach, I would like to take a moment to celebrate my comrade-in-forks-and-knives. For whatever you think of Kasich, he knows how to eat.
Perfect form
Kasich displayed his appetite on numerous occasions throughout the campaign. But his powers may have peaked when he visited a deli in the Bronx on April 7 in the lead up to the New York primary. Thus did Business Insider describe Kasich's diet there:
...Kasich visited a food market on Arthur Ave in the Bronx. He sat down
for what the owners thought would be a brief stop. But he had other
plans.First, Kasich ate two plates of spaghetti bolognese, a sandwich with mozzarella, pickles, salami, provolone, and hot peppers.
As a butcher behind the counter named Mike tried to take away his
plate of spaghetti, Kasich protested, asking for his plate back.
He then ordered pasta fagioli with cheese and tried some of the
antipasto that deli owner David Grecco left on his plate. Kasich turned
down the cannoli, though a staffer took some of them to go.
Kasich paused as he tasted the pasta fagioli.
"Mamma mia," he quipped.
"If I lived in the Bronx, I'd eat here every day," Kasich said. ["We'd like that" one of the deli's owners gleefully replied.]
Damn straight. There's a man who loves to eat.
Alas, perhaps the trough of Kasich's eating career also came in New York. Many people, local and statewide, mocked his attempt there to eat a pizza with a fork. I'll admit, this was a bit of a culinary faux pas. And though I, like Kasich, am from Ohio, I have no clue what part of his Ohio upbringing or background gave him any indication that eating pizza with a fork was a good idea. I spent an entire pre-college life of pizza-eating with nary a fork in sight (the only utensil anywhere near me when I ate pizza was that weird plastic white tripod thing whose purpose has always mystified me); only when I got to college (in Michigan) did I see anyone use a fork to eat pizza, and I scoffed at the practice. In Kasich's defense, however, I'll take him at his word that the pizza was hot. And I'll lightly chastise New Yorkers for being so obsessed with their state that they savage anybody who errs even in the slightest from local custom, especially Midwestern boys like John Kasich. But if we're going to be obsessed with our states, I'll take my governor's side in this eating dispute against self-centered New Yorkers.
I mean, come on. How can you insult someone with such intense concentration?
In the Kasich campaign's final weeks, Donald Trump, one such New Yorker, took to mocking Kasich's eating habits. "I have never seen a human being eat in such a disgusting fashion," Trump said at a rally (he's lucky he's never met me). We'll never know if this criticism, which a born-eater like John Kasich probably took pretty personally, was the reason that Kasich left the race, but it certainly couldn't have helped. If nothing else, it likely made Kasich realize that his presidential run no longer constituted a guilt-and-insult-free way to eat as much as he wanted, which I speculate was the reason he ran in the first place.
Indeed, I suggest that Kasich's desire to eat is the proper--maybe the only--lens through which to understand his campaign. He stubbornly stayed in the race because ending it would mean going back to his far more modest Ohio Governor food budgets, being prevented from traveling around the country trying new food, and being stuck with Ohio cuisine. It also helps to explain what may have seemed one of the more tone-deaf remarks of his campaign: when he said that women "left their kitchens" to vote for him. This is not an insult, or a reflection of a mind hopelessly stuck in the past. Rather, from a
man who seems to spend most of his time eating, it's either a
compliment, or a sign of where he spends most of his time when he's not campaigning or governing anyway. In other words, he thinks everyone spends as much time in the kitchen as he does, not just women.
John Kasich in a kitchen, the room where he probably spends most of his time
And so I salute you, Governor Kasich. Or at least, I salute your stomach. For, like me, you appreciate food, and can't seem to get enough of it. You even ended your campaign on National Hoagie Day. Your campaign greased the pan for other Stomach-Americans like yourself (and me?) to run for president and not be ashamed of eating while they do. Forget Donald Trump and New Yorkers obsessed with their state. You do you, and I'll do me (hey, maybe we should pig out together sometime! I wonder who would eat more...). There's nothing wrong with that--so long as you (and I) manage to avoid sinful excess.
In the winter of 2014, my sisters and I went out for dinner at Padrino Italian, a restaurant in Milford, Ohio. I can't remember exactly what I ate there (I don't have Hyperthymesia), though I do remember enjoying it. But my dominant memory of the experience was seeing the following challenge in its menu:
In case you can't read that for some reason, here is the description of "The $30 Spaghetti & Meatball Challenge":
Spaghetti & Meatball Challenge
2lbs. of spaghetti,
1lb. of meatballs, 1 lb. of marinara & garlic knots. Finish it and
it’s FREE! Plus receive a free t-shirt and your picture on the wall of
fame. 45 minute time limit. No excusing yourself from the table and NO
RETURNS.. if you know what we mean?
When I first saw this, I knew immediately that attempting this challenge was my destiny. Much as mountain climber George Mallory wished to climb Mt. Everest "because it is there," I desired to conquer the Padrino's challenge.
I was, moreover, confident that I would succeed. For I have always loved food beyond the mere physical necessity of requiring it to live. Indeed, often in my life this passion has swung dangerously close to indulgence, and perhaps even to gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Pictured: My death?
Fortunately, I recognized my immoderate tendencies many years ago. But instead of suppressing them, I balanced them against further immoderation in the opposite direction: I gave up junk food, dessert, candy, and pop; and I dedicated myself fully to running, a pursuit that just so happens to require a bunch of food to sustain. Between these two steps, I could still eat a lot (just ask any one of my running teammates over the years), but not constantly, and never unhealthily. My appetite did not recede; I just tried to satisfy it with healthier foods.
Which is exactly why I set my sights on the pasta-laden Padrino's Challenge. Though I held off from it for many months, it lingered in my mind. I was just waiting for the right time. When the opportunity to meet up for dinner with my old friend Ethan Bokeno, whom I ran against and befriended in high school, the weekend I was returning to Cincinnati for my twin sister's graduation, I insisted that we go to Padrino and try the challenge, and he accepted.
With my plans established, I went about preparing for the challenge--acclimatizing, if you will, to keep up the wildly overwrought Everest analogy. Quite unlike preparing to climb Everest, preparing for the Padrino's challenge did not require much hardship on my part. Two weeks before the scheduled date, I prepared and then consumed an entire pan of Chicken Parmesan, just to see if I could. It turns out that I was not only capable of this, but capable of eating it in about 15 minutes. I deemed this a satisfying proof of concept.
This week, leading up to the challenge, I didn't change much. I ate slightly less than usual day-to-day, but didn't reduce my caloric intake by so much that my stomach would shrink. Until the day before, that is. On that day, I ate a light dinner. And then on April 29, the day of, I ate only a yogurt for breakfast (at 3 am; I had a plane to catch), ran a fast 9 miles a few hours before the challenge, and ate only a half of an apple before journeying to Padrino for the challenge. Before entering, I boldly declared the following to the world, well aware that I might be inviting a nemesis to my hubris, a comeuppance to my arrogance, by doing so:
[Jack Butler] is about to attempt to eat 3 pounds of spaghetti, 1 pound of
meatballs, and one pound of rolls in 45 minutes with no restroom breaks.
It'll be free if he finishes it (plus a shirt and a spot on the Padrino
Italian Wall of Fame), and $30 if he fails.
But he won't fail.
I then walked into the restaurant with my friend and moral support for the evening. We both got menus. He ordered first, choosing a pizza. When Josh, our waiter, turned to me, I told him that I came here for one thing and one thing only: the Padrino's challenge. His calm face registered a small twitch of surprise, and then he asked me if I were sure about it. I told him yes, and he said he'd get it ready.
In the interim, my friend and I caught up with each other, and I experienced a nervousness somewhat comparable to that I feel before starting a race. Could I really do this? What if I couldn't finish? What if I thew up? Such thoughts raced around my nervous brain until my waiter emerged from the kitchen with this:
Appearances aside, this actually looked less intimidating than I expected. But I was still afraid that I wouldn't finish. Before firing the starting gun, Josh the Waiter announced to the restaurant that "if anyone cares, this man is about to attempt the Padrino Challenge...to eat all of this in 45 minutes, with no bathroom breaks." I started my own watch concurrently with his, and then I began.
My strategy all along was to eat as quickly as possible. My knowledge of my own metabolism and digestive system, combined with the well-known tendency of pasta to expand in the stomach, suggested this would be the best course. So, after saying grace ("I need God on my side for this," I told my dinner companion), putting the rolls aside for later and cutting the handful of large meatballs into smaller, more manageable pieces, I attacked like an animal the giant bowl of pasta before me. When I found the center too hot to eat fast, my dining companion suggested that I start at the sides, where the food would be cooler. Occasionally, I offered witticisms to my dinner companion between mouthfuls, wondering whether the other people in the restaurant thought I was an animal, whether the staff thought my relatively skinny outward frame could truly stomach the challenge, and whether we truly live in an America where, as a recent Onion headline read, a "Restaurant's Extreme Burger Challenge" could be "Moved Down To Regular Menu."
As my efforts continued, and I found myself nearly halfway done with my meal with less than one-third of the time expired, I began to become something of a cause in the restaurant. Staff walking in and out of the kitchen and tending to other customers cast smiling glances at me, noting my progress; patrons, enthralled by my progress, began to move to my side. "He's really gonna do it!" said one. "Good job" said another. And "only in America," said I, "would other restaurant patrons encourage me in this way. Well, maybe in Germany. But it wouldn't be this food. It would be beer and bratwurst or something." Elated by the support, by my progress, and by my stomach's not yet feeling the effects of my rapid consumption, I began to feel quite good about my prospects for completion.
And then I hit the Wall. In a marathon, another outrageous thing to compare my competitive gluttony to (especially since I haven't run one...yet), the Wall is when the marathon goes from hard to really, really hard. It separates the wheat from the chaff, the mere completists from the racers. I began to hit my food Wall when my dining companion decided to use the restroom, a privilege allowed him but not denied me. Alone, my resolve faltered. My stomach rebelled. The pasta and meatballs I had stuffed down my esophagus made several attempts to climb back out. It seemed all too likely that vomit, an outcome I had feared from the beginning, would soon follow. I began to lose hope.
But then I realized all that was at stake. And even though it wasn't really all that much--having to pay $30 for my meal, losing a shirt and a promised spot on the Padrino Wall of Fame--there was something far greater at stake: My pride. With my pride on the line, and aided by my inborn stubbornness, I carefully forced out a few strategic burps. From them, I got a second wind. By the time my dining companion returned to our table, I was back at my plate again, less than a third of my meal to go. Though my pace slowed a little, I still had plenty of time left. So I carefully cleaned my plate, and then triumphantly moved it aside, though not before asking Josh the Waiter "does this count as finished?"
With about 25 minutes still to go, I then moved onto the rolls I had moved aside at the beginning of my meal. Many of you know of my love of bread; these were really just footnotes to something I had already completed. But I still had to eat them to complete the challenge. So I ate them leisurely, taking each in with four roughly coequal bites. And though it was just bread, this was a surprisingly difficult part of the challenge. It took me a while to get halfway through, and when I finished the third, I suddenly began to worry that I would not finish, and that my old nightmare of never being able to accomplish anything to my own satisfaction, of always falling just short, would resurface, that the roll, or even the last bite of the last roll, would undo me. In the middle of the restaurant, I recited my own shorthand for existential dissatisfaction, a few verses from Tennyson's "Ulysses" I memorized from high school:
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
Or, if you prefer something a bit more lowbrow:
But in truth I suffered neither fate. I spent a lot of time chewing my last bite of bread, but I finished it all the same. It took me 30:25, a time I wish were my 10k PR; I had 14:35 left, a time I wish were my 5k PR. Upon completion, I raised my arms in the air and summoned Josh the waiter, who congratulated me upon my victory. In keeping with the terms of the challenge, he presented a bill only to my dining companion, and went to fish me out a shirt. Alas, they didn't have any in my size; I gave them my information, so I'll get it at a later time, which I'm all right with. I'm less all right with the apparent disappearance of the Padrino's Wall of Fame, but I have this blog to immortalize my experience, so I'm still OK with that. When I finally felt good enough to be able to stand, I asked to take a picture with Josh, my waiter, who currently wears a manbun identical to the one I sported this time last year (my shirt, by the way, will be identical to his).
Josh was a good sport.
Before I left Padrino, I asked Josh if he thought I would be capable of completing the challenge when I sat down at his table. "No," he admitted. "I thought you were just some guy who walked in here hungry and chose the biggest thing on the menu." Before I told him, he had no idea that I'd had the Padrino challenge on my mind for more than a year. Regardless, he was impressed, and promised to get me my shirt. I thanked him, and then walked out, a conquering hero.
So what have I learned from this experience? Many things. First, go to Padrino, even if you don't attempt the challenge. It's a nice restaurant in a great location with a good atmosphere, pleasant staff, friendly patrons, and good food. Second, it seems my 22-year-old metabolism is still burning strong; staying in good running shape, of course, helps. Third, It's possible that I've missed my calling--or at least a calling--by not starting to do these eating challenges earlier in my life. In fact, now that I've proven I can do this sort of thing, I may do it more often. But, finally, I've also learned that even my own body has limits. Apart from the difficult Wall phase of my challenge, there is also the obvious fact that I have barely moved since I returned home after my victory. Even with the running-enhanced metabolism of a 22-year-old male, I can only do so much. But the fact that I can eat this much means that I better keep running. Otherwise, I may suffer an unfortunate fate.
