The Loop

PGA Championship 2019: We tried to eat every single concession at Bethpage Black (and failed admirably)

PGA Championship - Final Round

Stuart Franklin

The dust has finally settled on the 2019 PGA Championship. Brook Koepka won his fourth major, Dustin Johnson came up just short yet again, and we at The Loop are still very, very full. Hang on, let us explain. On Thursday, we trekked to Bethpage Black, but not for the love of golf, like so many around us, but instead to meet up with Andy Lansing, CEO of Levy Restaurants, the company behind every burger and beer at May's new major. Our mission? To join Lansing on one of his patented food pilgrimages, attempting to consume every single concession we possibly could in the span of two glorious hours. Sorry Koepka, but you have nothing on this wire-to-wire performance.

At nearly every event Levy organizes—from the Kentucky Derby to the Grammys—Lansing can be found doing precisely what we saw on Thursday: Consuming up to 5,000 calories worth of food and drink under the banner of quality assurance, and more importantly, hunger. We didn't hit that mythical 5,000-calorie benchmark, but by our rough estimations, we tallied up over 3,000 calories worth of cardiovascular abuse, including everything from classic New York Pastrami to the star of the show, a rich, creamy pimento mac & cheese that might as well have been plucked from the menu of Augusta National.

As legend has it, Lansing wakes up at 3:20 a.m. every morning to hit the gym just so he can crush mid-morning hot dogs sans the guilt (and ketchup), but unfortunately we didn't get the memo. By lunch, we had chewed our way through hot dogs, s'mores, brisket, pulled pork, beef on weck, bloody mary's, and more hot dogs nonetheless, and, perhaps mercifully, Lansing had a plane to catch. In the end, we didn't try everything, but as the afternoon wave went off, we left full, happy, and ready to do it all over again...assuming we remember the Tums, of course.