This story was first reported by MUNCHIES Zürich.
One of my most treasured memories took place in an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant in Vienna. It was a rainy afternoon in 2011, my friend and I were very hung over, and it seemed like the idea of a lifetime to spend the afternoon being delivered a constant stream of food via conveyor belt. I managed to put away 32 plates of sushi. A new record! The stack of empty plates in front of me filled me with pride while my stomach pushed the limits of bursting. It took me about three hours to eat, a three hour nap to digest, and it cost me just about 12 Euros (around $14 USD) for the pleasure.
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Seven years later, all-you-can-eat restaurants haven’t gotten much more expensive. The equation usually only works out for the restaurant if they can make up the overhead on filler, or pricey alcoholic drinks. If you’re a teetotaler—or just buzzed enough already from last night’s party—the restaurant owners won’t be thrilled about your presence. Worst case scenario: You get banned for life. Which is what just happened to German triathlete Jaroslav Bobrovski.
The 30-year old Bavarian sports enthusiast allegedly ate almost one hundred little plates’ worth of sushi at Running Sushi in Landshut, Germany. This makes my little record look like a mere appetizer, but who’s really counting, right? (I am.) It also took him just a little over an hour to inhale all that fish, which left him basically no time to drink the amount of booze that might justify that amount of food. The final tab amounted to all of 15.90 Euros (about $19): “I wanted to tip the waiter, but he declined,” Bobrowski said to a local newspaper. Instead, the owner of the restaurant told him to leave, and never come back.
“This guy eats for five people. That’s not normal,” explained the restaurant’s owner. “There’s no food left for our other guests!” Bobrowski, however, didn’t just eat all that food for fun. The former bodybuilder is just trying to maintain his size by intermittent fasting: for twenty hours a day, he doesn’t eat; in the four hours that are left in the day, however, he “eats until I’m full,” as he put it. And that seems to take a huge amount of food. At least one hundred little sushi plates, to be exact. For now, he’ll have to find a different restaurant to fill up at.
No pain, no gain, I guess.
