Randy Santel

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville restaurant scene. Now here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. My name is Brandon Styll and I am your host. Today's going to be a bonus episode of Nashville Restaurant Radio. We have a professional eater. His name is Randy Santel and he is kind of an internet sensation and he travels around the country eating, cooking challenges at individual restaurants. So he tells his story. It's super interesting. I hope that you enjoy it. It's a quick listen. Today's episode is going to be brought to you by foh and boh.com. They are faux and beau and they are taking off guys. If you work in the restaurant industry and you're looking for a job, you need to go create a profile now because this is where everybody is going to hire you at. If you're a restaurant and you're not signed up yet, go ahead and do it. This is where everybody's going to be. It is free to do. It's free to sign up for your restaurant. It's free to sign up if you're an employee looking for a job.

01:29It is free through the end of the month of August. So jump on it. You got like 10 more days. We also want to talk to you about Springer Mountain Farms chicken today and I talk about Springer Mountain Farms chicken a lot but I don't talk about their products. I know you know that there's fresh product out there. They've got boneless skinless chicken breast. They've got boneless skinless thighs, wings, drumettes, party wings, drumsticks, whole chickens, whole roasting chickens. But did you know that they have a full line of gluten-free frozen chicken in the freezer section of your grocery store? They have fully cooked gluten-free buffalo style wings, savory wings, gluten-free grilled chicken breast slices, gluten-free chicken breast, gluten-free breaded, breast strips, and breaded breast chunks. So there's lots of different options to get your healthy chicken. Find them at any Publix grocery store and select Kroger's. If you go to SpringMountainFarms.com you can see a full list of what is out there. So we thank you guys for listening today on this Saturday bonus edition. If you haven't done it yet, please go to the Nashville Scene website and click on the best of Nashville. And if you love this podcast, let them know. Go to the media and politics section and type in Nashville Restaurant Radio for your favorite podcast. The voting ends on August 31st, so every vote is a big help to us to get the word out and let everybody know. Another update next week coming up Monday, we will have Will Newman, who's the owner of Edley's Barbecue. Wednesday, we will have Pat Martin, who is the owner of Martin's Barbecue, as well as Hugh Babies. And then Thursday, we have Stephen Smithing for a full episode. He will be talking about everything. He's the owner of Green Hills Grill in Maribou. We've got a jam-packed week next week. We're excited to have you guys with us, so make sure that you are checking in. And if you subscribe on our YouTube

03:34channel as well as this podcast, I sometimes put out episodes at random. So if you're a subscriber, you'll get a notification when I put the episodes out and you want to be in the know. So without further ado, let's jump in with Randy Santel. All right, so with much excitement, I'd like to welcome into Nashville Restaurant Radio, Randy Santel. Welcome, Randy. Hey, thanks for having me on the show. This is gonna be fun. That is the understatement of the day. I have never in my life had a professional eater on Nashville Restaurant Radio. I've never, I don't think I've ever met a professional eater in real life. It's a very unique career. I've been doing it since 2010 actually, full time since 2013, so it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of work though, so it sounds awesome, but there's a lot that goes into it. Okay, so let's get into that, but let's first tell the story. How did you become a professional eater? Okay, well awesome. Well, I played college football at Missouri State University, which is in southwest Missouri, a city called Springfield. I've got two degrees from there now, but I graduated in 2008 and I was an offensive lineman. I averaged around probably, let's say, 315 pounds back then, and I knew that I didn't need all that weight on me after I got done, so I started looking into ways of health, nutrition, and stuff like that of getting my body weight down. In 2010, I actually competed in a national body transformation contest sponsored by Men's Health Magazine and then the television show Spartacus, and I ended up winning. I got flown out to Auckland, New Zealand as part of the grand prize with my buddy Zach, and I was on the set of Spartacus for a week, but to celebrate the end of that diet contest being over that period, my buddy invited me to do a 28-inch pizza challenge with him that he had lost before. It was two meat topping, 28-inch diameter, about 11 pound pizza. We ended up finishing it in 48 minutes to get the

05:38meal free, and then we got a $500 check too, so I was like, hey, I'm still a little bit hungry, not really hungry, but I knew I had more space for some more food, and so I knew I was pretty good, and a month later, I ended up doing an 18-inch square deep dish pizza that over 120 people had failed. I was the first person to beat that. I finished in 53 minutes, and I got a check for $450, so everything just has really gone from there, and fast forward, over 10 years now, I've got 863 food challenge wins in 37 countries around the world and then in all 50 states. I was the third person to get a food challenge win in all 50 states, so that's pretty cool. There's still only three of us. Wow, I don't even know how to unpack what you just now said, but I'm gonna start with the set of Spartacus. Okay. You win this contest, you get to fly to New Zealand. How was it? I mean, just have you been to New Zealand before? Well, it was actually my first time out of the country, so I had to get a passport just for that trip, and now I've used it a lot since, but that was actually kind of an eye-opener. I had never been out of the country before, really only to a few states, and it's whatever you want to call it, but it's kind of like that saying, the whole world is a book, and if you stay in the same place, you've only seen one page. It was an eye-opener of, wow, the whole world is pretty cool, I want to go see it, and the food challenges kind of have allowed me to be able to do that. So, but yeah, New Zealand, I've been back since I was there in 2017 on my way home back to the USA from Australia, and it's awesome. If you ever get the chance to go to New Zealand, definitely do it.

07:16So were you actually on the show, Spartacus? Did you get to act? Well, I was on the prequel, Gods of the Arena, episode number three, but if you blink, you'd probably miss me. I was just a background person at the, in the background of a scene swinging a sword, so I got, I got my face and bodies in there a little bit, but definitely not too much. Very cool. So you come back and you celebrate, you eat a gigantic pizza with your friend, and you say, I got more room, I could do this. Is there some, have you always been like a big eater? I mean, when you were a kid, or who like, damn, Randy eats a lot of food. I mean, you were an offensive lineman, so you obviously ate a lot. You had to be a big guy, but like, is there any practice or anything abnormal about you that allows you to eat this much? Yeah, it's, there's definitely a genetic component to be able to eat a whole lot, but I would say I've always been a big eater. Even in fifth grade, I weighed 205 pounds, which is pretty considerable. Yeah. So, and then I lost, my mom actually helped me with the Weight Watchers program, helped me get my weight down. I lost 40 pounds on that to get down to 165 pounds in sixth grade, but I, my actual first job when I was 15 and a half or whatever it was was Subway. I was a sandwich artist. I used to eat three double meat foot longs every time I worked. So that's a hell of a lot of food. So I've always been a big eater, but it wasn't until I did my first food challenge that I really got into all this. So you did your first food. What is your favorite food? Like if you're not doing a food challenge, what's your like dream food that you could eat? I mean, if I could only choose one restaurant the rest of my life, it would be Taco Bell, but I would say if I had to choose a favorite food, I love anything flavored buffalo chicken. So I would say a buffalo chicken pizza without blue cheese. A buffalo chicken pizza

09:22without blue cheese. Okay. I was thinking like- Blue cheese is nasty. You don't like blue cheese? No, not a bit. Not at all. And it's in a lot of food challenges. So that kind of sucks, but I'm able to eat it just without any enjoyment. I was going to ask that because I watched, I knew you were coming on the show today. So I went to YouTube, which you can find Randy Santel at YouTube. You have over a million followers on YouTube. Yep. Yeah. YouTube and Facebook too. So we get a lot of followers on Facebook. I think we're almost up to like 1.2 million on Facebook, but then we're almost up to 1.1 million on YouTube. So things are going really well. Yeah, I would say so. And every contest off, you do this at least, right? So tell me about that. Well, yeah, everybody that watches now, they all know about my pre-ritual. I've had it for years. The flexing actually, a lot of people give me crap because I don't really lift as much as I did in my football days or the earlier parts of my career. Now, most of my calorie burning is through cycling. I've got a spin bike actually. I'm in my van that I travel around with, but you can see here, I've got my spin bike that I ride. I put that in my hotels or sometimes in parks and stuff like that. So I do a lot of cycling to burn the weight now, but the flexing all has to do with stuff. And I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but I'm actually in the process of becoming a registered dietitian so that after I get done with all the food challenges, I'm going to be using my social media that I've been growing with the food challenges to help everybody with nutrition and weight management. So, but before I do any food challenge, I always do the sign of the cross. I can't exactly say I'm a practicing Catholic, but I grew up Catholic. My family's Catholic. So I pray before each meal, mostly that I do the best I can and don't choke. And then I will, have you ever watched a movie over the top?

11:19Yeah, with Stallone. Stallone. Yeah. Arm wrestling movie. It's one of my favorites, one of my dad and I's favorites, but before every food challenge, just like he does before every arm wrestling match, I turn my hat around and I transform into Atlas. And the guy that did the first food challenge with me, him and I before our pizza, we're trying to think of cool eating nicknames and we couldn't really think of anything. So he decided, Hey, I'll be Zeus. And since he was going to be Zeus, I figured I'd be Atlas. So that that's actually where Atlas and Zeus promotions came from. He only did the first two challenges with me. He lost that second challenge that he did. It was a solo challenge and then he quit after that. But I thought Atlas promotion sounded stupid and I liked that it had A to Z. So I just kind of came with it. But then in 2014, I started up foodchallenges.com with my friend, Magic Mitch Dombrowski, who still does the editing. He's been doing the editing since 2013. And then our friend Arthur joined in in 2016. But yeah, everything's pretty much foodchallenges.com. Now, any videos that you watch, I'm always wearing something with FC on it. The hat says FC. It all stands for foodchallenges.com. So you've made quite the business out of eating these food challenges around the country. Do you do any of the the big food challenges like where it's a fast eating competition like the hot dog challenge, you know? Yeah, well, you're talking about as an eating contest. So there's food challenges and eating contest. So the eating contest would be like the Fourth of July thing with Joey Chestnut back in the day, Takaru Kobayashi, all those guys eating a whole bunch of hot dogs to see how many they can eat in 10 minutes. That would be more of an eating competition or an eating contest. What I do is pretty much food challenges. Really, it is just man versus food, not to copy the show from the Travel Channel. But it's just whatever rules the restaurant has just finishing the food or whatever you got to finish within the time limit or whatever

13:25the restaurant has you do. How do you how do you find these challenges? Well, now that I've got so much social media and everybody just knows me from foodchallenges.com or I mean even the the new route, the reboot of man versus food, I've had a couple friends on there and most of them tell those people that frickin Randy Santel guy is everywhere. So I mean, you can't really look up food challenges without finding foodchallenges.com or else just my videos. I mean, if you type in food challenges just on YouTube, Randy's videos are going to come up. So most of the time, people will message me about them. I'll get Facebook messages, emails, stuff like that. And then I've got a guy that helps me keep the foodchallenges.com database updated. Have you failed any? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I failed one so far on this trip. It was a giant chicken fried steak challenge in Muskogee, Oklahoma. So that video will be coming up soon. But in 2019, I lost 12. So I think it was a 93 percentage, not too bad. But I was 100 and 121 and 12. So I had a very busy 2019. Well, I mean, you know, you got to think that at some point, somebody is just going to go here's a 300 ounce steak and you're going to go away, man. Like, I mean, yeah, well, I try not to sign up for any that I know I can't win. Like some people submit like 10 pound food challenges, 13 pound food challenges. And I know I can't eat that much before I'm all done. I do want to eat a 10 pound challenge that actually weighs legit 10 pounds. It's definitely not going to be tomorrow, though, I got to lose some more weight before I can do that. So let's talk about that. When you say you got to lose some more weight before you think like the big guys, you're almost like the the bigger you are, the more you could eat. Like you're saying you have to lose weight before you can eat that. What's the science there? Well, it's kind of known by the belt of fat theory is that the more fat you have around your midsection, your waistline, all that fat

15:28restricts your stomach and your internal organs from being able to move around inside you so that you can fit more food. So if you watch the Joey Chestnut, or any of those guys on Fourth of July, the people that are eating the most hot dogs are probably the thinner ones that don't have a lot of fat around their midsection, restricting their stomach from being able to open up and relax. So those big guys, I mean, three, and even when I get really big at the end of my tours, it's definitely a noticeable difference. I can't eat nearly as much as I was able to back when I first started. So I think that's the first thing people think, you know, hey, you're a professional, you go, God, he must be huge. So you actually go through cycles where you lose weight, and then you go out on tour, where you eat a bunch of food at different places, and then you bulk up and then what you take like, you hibernate? Like, what do you do? It's not really on purpose. But I mean, when I do tours, the most economical thing is I try to create as many videos as I can for the channels. And so I do pretty much a food challenge every day. It's not anything that most people do. I've got like, there's only like two or three people that have ever done a tour where they've even gotten close to even 25. I mean, there's maybe two or three people that have ever eaten 25 challenges in a month. I've done that probably 10 times maybe. So I mean, It's unhealthy though.

16:58Oh, no, I definitely never call it healthy. But like in 2015, I did I think 78 challenges in 80 days. So but that was I knew I was going to be starting school again to become a dietician. So I had to get as many videos as I could film, because I knew I was going to have to be in school and I wouldn't be able to go around doing any challenges, maybe a weekend here and there. So we just tried to do as many as you can. So I mean, there's been trips where I've gained like 50 pounds. So yeah, it's by no means healthy. But I mean, the body is a very strong, powerful thing. And I take a couple of months off after those big trips, in order to ride my bike or workout, do everything I need to do, eat a lot lighter, a lot more healthy vegetables, leaner meats, healthier carbs, stuff like that, in order to get my weight back down, get all my blood levels back in check before I do it all again. Part pardon me, I just feel like, for what you do for a profession, and then going into being a dietician is like, is that like, I'm not the first person to recognize the irony. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know, it's almost like I'm going to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day or an hour so that I can learn how to stop lung cancer. It's like, Well, I mean, it's one of the things is we'll be able to relate with people. In the world of dietetics, dieticians, like 95% are women. And a lot of those women have never been big. So it's very hard to relate to bigger people. So people will obviously be able to relate to me and they'll know that I've got experience. Because once I'm a dietician, I'll weigh around 245 pounds. And I'll maintain that because I won't be traveling around doing food challenges. I'll instead be traveling around to do public speaking at conferences and stuff like that. And then I'll obviously have two or three videos a week, probably helping people with different stuff related to nutrition and weight management. So in essence, like you by you doing this,

19:04so I guess you see the irony, but I feel like what you're doing is fantastic, because it's like, uh, I'm going to, I'm intentionally doing this right now. I'm building up a following. I recognize what builds up the following. And then when you do go into the dietetics, you're, you're going to have this gigantic following of people, um, that you can now help. Yeah. You can't get 5 million subscribers by posting pictures of kale. You can use have to be like Thomas. I don't think you can or else you'd have to have like a swimsuit, sexy body with a big booty, uh, twerking all the time with the kale in the photos. Well, that might be the next career. I don't think so. We'll see. So what's been your favorite food challenge you've done so far? Like, is there one that you went into that you were most afraid of and turned out really good or just best food? What like, what do you got? I've got two videos on the channels. One's the most delicious food challenges and one's favorite food challenges. They're two very different videos because I mean, I could eat garbage food, but if 300 people come to watch me, I'm of course going to love that because that's awesome. Uh, this just actually happened to be delicious food. It was a three kilogram burger in Melbourne, Australia, and it was on my 31st birthday. I think it was, and over 250 people came to watch. There were actually more people watching from the windows outside than there was able to, uh, people able to fit into the restaurant, but I ended up winning.

20:39I beat the record that I wanted to beat by like 12 seconds. So it was really intense. It was an awesome challenge. That would be my favorite. Definitely. It wasn't in my top 10 most delicious foods or anything like that, but just because so many people were there, uh, just the experience overall, that was definitely my favorite. So you really get, you, you really get a charge from when people are there and they're cheering and watching the videos, you have all these people towards the end, they start cheering, they start getting you going. I mean, oh yeah. And I needed that last night. I was at a restaurant called Cha Time, uh, here in Nashville and it was the, we were starting the challenge and it can be a little bit different when starting challenges because nobody's ever done them before. And oh my gosh, so much food. It was, I would say it was definitely eight or more pounds of food between a whole bunch of ramen, udon, noodle bowls, appetizers. There were rice dishes. It was crazy, but I had an hour to do it. It took me like 56 minutes. It really helped that there were a lot of people there inside the restaurant cheering towards the end. And can anybody do that challenge that you did last night? Is that something? Oh no, no, there's not going to be many people beating that. Uh, that's actually one of the problems with food challenges all around, especially the United States now is just kind of the bigger is better attitude and the bigger you go, the fewer people that can actually win. There's a lot of places all around the country where there's pretty much only professional level people, uh, on the wall of fame. So a lot of the bigger challenges that I've done, I know most of the people that are on the wall of fame with me.

22:16How big is the community? How big is the community of professional? It's, it's dying. I'm not going to say it's dying, but it's definitely not growing. So, and it's a lot smaller than it was in like 2010, 2012, 2013, even back in kind of the glory days of when the show with men versus food, uh, with Adam Richman was really big. So he wasn't an inspiration for anything that I do, but he's definitely a big reason while I, why I'm at this point, just because I would say like 400 of the 863 food challenge wins I have now, the restaurants don't even exist anymore. And a lot of the restaurants that do quit their challenges. So there's not nearly as many food challenges available as there was back when food challenges were popular. I wonder why that is. Uh, well, people are just so, uh, there's just so much confusing information on nutrition. There's just so many people with weight management problems, uh, struggling to do all that. And then, um, I mean, if restaurants don't think that the, there's just less people doing food challenges, it's not like the in cool trendy thing anymore. And if it's not a proven system of, of working and things like that, of, of an easy source of marketing and income and stuff like that, restaurants aren't really going to take the risk. Okay. Is there, I mean, the opportunity is definitely there, uh, especially if the challenges are smaller, but as far as big, big challenges, there's not that many of us still going around. And, uh, even the ones that are, there are some, but they don't really have that much social media. And so, I mean, restaurants, they of course want everybody to attempt, but there's not many people like me going around with big social media followings, uh, helping to do the rest, the restaurant challenges and stuff like that.

24:10I think there's maybe as far as YouTube eaters do food challenges, uh, I would say there's like maybe 15 to 20. Wow. Um, definitely not enough to create any kind of movement where restaurants all over or wanting to do food challenges. Okay. It makes updating the, keeping the foodchallenges.com database pretty easy, but that's not a good thing. That's so fascinating, man. That's just so fascinating. I'm so, um, I think it's so cool what you do. All right. So let's have, let's drive people to YouTube. Let's have people go to your Facebook page, like him, follow him. This is Randy Santel and, um, I feel like I could talk to you for hours. I really appreciate you coming on the show today and I wish you nothing but the best of luck. Where are you headed next? Uh, well, I'm in today. I'm in Nashville again at Juicy Seafood, uh, doing a big giant seafood challenge. And then I head to Knoxville and then Pigeon Forge, Chattanooga and a couple other cities around Eastern Tennessee. And then I'll head into Virginia and North Carolina. Then we'll go to South Carolina, Georgia, maybe the Florida Panhandle and then, uh, Mississippi, Alabama.

25:31Uh, I reversed those Alabama, Mississippi, New Orleans, and then we'll head into Texas. So, and then after that, Arizona and then Colorado, and then I'll probably head home for a little bit. That'll be probably in November. I can bet. Yeah. A lot of biking to do coming up these next few months. Yeah. I mean, do you hold all the food down? I mean, do you ever finish it and like get out of there? And like, I mean, do you, do you, uh, yeah, I pretty much hold them all down. There's only very few times. And those few times are their huge challenges. Like last night, it was huge. I had a miserable evening, uh, all night last night, just late in my hotel bed, but yeah, no, I keep it down whenever I can. There's only few times when the body says, Hey, nobody, you're not doing this. Wow. So, I mean, I always just tell people, Hey, I'm in the zero cavities club and I'm not looking to have esophageal problems. So I keep it all down. I love it. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Anything that you would like to say to the people in Nashville, anybody that has any questions about food challenges, if you've ever thought about maybe training for one and doing one, there's quite a few around Nashville and just get on food challenges.com. And I've got over a hundred articles on there helping people understand everything they need to do to our slogan is win before you begin.

26:51I love it. Randy Santel, thank you so much for joining us today on Nashville Restaurant Radio. Hey, thank you. I appreciate you having me.