The Big Texan and the Steak That Started on a Dare

In nineteen sixty, a man named Bob Lee opened a steak restaurant on Route Sixty Six in Amarillo and called it the Big Texan Steak Ranch. The timing was good, Route Sixty Six was still the main artery through town, and the location caught cross-country travelers at the point where they were tired, hungry, and somewhere deep in the Panhandle with no obvious alternative. Lee served beef from the same ranching economy that had built the city.

One evening, according to the restaurant's account, a group of cowboys from the nearby stockyards came in and held a contest to see who could eat the most steaks in an hour. The winner put away an enormous steak dinner. Lee was impressed. He announced that whoever could do it again in his restaurant would get the meal free.

The challenge is now seventy-two ounces, four and a half pounds of beef, plus the shrimp cocktail, the baked potato, a dinner roll, and a salad, all in sixty minutes. The meal is free if you finish. If you do not finish, it costs seventy-two dollars. In the sixty-six years since Bob Lee made the offer, roughly ninety thousand people have attempted it. Just over ten thousand have succeeded.

The restaurant moved to its current location on an Interstate Forty frontage road in nineteen seventy, when the interstate bypassed the old Route Sixty Six. The yellow barn and the neon cowboy sign went with it. The Big Texan was Route Sixty Six's most flamboyant survivor. It still operates today. The steak is still on the menu. So is the dare.