Big Texan Steak Ranch, The Seventy-Two Ounce Challenge
Texas
R. J. Lee opened the Big Texan on historic Route Sixty-Six in nineteen sixty, and he went on to invent one of the most famous eating challenges in the United States.
After a contest among stockyard cowboys, where the winner ate about four and a half pounds of steak, Lee made it an official offer: finish seventy-two ounces of sirloin along with a shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad, and dinner roll in under one hour and the meal is free. Lee moved the restaurant to its current location on an Interstate Forty frontage road in nineteen seventy. When the Travel Channel's Man versus Food featured the challenge, it became internationally famous.
Thousands of people have attempted it. Most pay the bill.
