The Big Texan, Seventy-Two Ounces and an Hour to Prove It

The seventy-two ounce steak challenge was not invented by a marketing department. It was invented by competitive cowboys on a Friday night.

R.J. Lee opened the Big Texan Steak Ranch on Route Sixty-Six in Amarillo in nineteen sixty. He hung a sixty-foot neon cowboy over the door and started serving generous cuts to everyone who came through, including the ranch hands and stockyard workers who drifted in from the nearby cattle operations. Lee noticed that those men had a habit of trying to outeat each other. He pushed some tables together, charged them five dollars apiece, and said whoever ate the most steak in one hour won the pot.

One night, a cowboy put away seventy-two ounces of steak along with all the fixings. Lee decided then and there to formalize the wager: anyone who could eat a four-and-a-half-pound steak, along with a shrimp cocktail, salad, baked potato, and roll, all within one hour, would eat for free. Anyone who failed paid the full price.

The challenge became the restaurant's identity. When Interstate Forty was built through Amarillo in the late nineteen sixties, Lee did not fight it. In nineteen seventy, he moved the entire operation, including the sixty-foot cowboy, relocated by helicopter, to a frontage road alongside the new highway. The restaurant reached a larger audience than Route Sixty-Six had ever delivered.

The numbers since are staggering by any measure. Since the challenge was first formalized, more than ninety thousand individuals have attempted it. Only about eleven percent have succeeded. The fastest finisher in recorded history completed the meal in four minutes and eighteen seconds in twenty fifteen.

The Big Texan is spectacle and theater and a genuinely good steakhouse, all at once. The cowboy still watches the highway. The clock still runs.