Tony McAley and Tim Pinkerton are still alive. They walk around, speak, go to work, and have the use of all their limbs and (allegedly) the full range of human mental faculties.
This, despite the fact that the pair of friends has spent the last 14 months eating slingers at no less than 58 different restaurants, at the rate of about one per week.
That’s a lot to take in.
We’ll let McAley describe the classic slinger, for the uninitiated (read: not from around these parts, are ye?)
“To me it’s always been hash browns on the bottom, then a hamburger patty, or sometimes sausage. Then there are two eggs. We [Tim and I] always get ‘em over easy. Then you cover all that in disgusting chili. Then you top it with cheese and onions,” explained the brave, slinger-inhaling hero. “Some places do it differently, like putting the cheese directly on top of the burger… It’s a trough of garbage. It doesn’t matter. It could be on a gold plate and it would still taste the same.”
McAley doesn’t mince words. He and his gastronaut pal Pinkerton chronicle their slinger misadventures in hilarious prose at the St. Louis Slinger Tour blog. Their odyssey – crisscrossing the metro area each and every week for well over a year in search of a kind of gutter-bound glory, the greatest slinger this burg has ever slung – boggles the mind and can cause vicarious intestinal distress.
First question: for the love of Michael Pollan, why??
“We [Tim and I] have both always had a love for slingers and mentioned to each other what our favorites around town were,” said McAley. “It started as a joke, but we kept talking and talking about it, and we started the tour in March of 2012…We started with a list of 60 restaurants, and I think we’re done. I hope we’re done.”
The pair ended their treacherous slide down the alimentary canal of research with a definitive list of the top 10 slingers in town (more below), published in their blog last week.
Truly, this has not been a path paved in longing dreams of their next repast.
McAley wrote occasionally in the blog of a “depression” that laid him low after consuming subpar slingers. “There were periods where we were eating mediocre or downright bad slinger after slinger, and we weren’t inspired at all to eat another one,” he said. “It felt like a chore. We knew we would finish, but there were some dark days there…People keep asking me what the next food is, but I need a break, I need to let my body breathe. I’ve been in a war for the last 14 months, just shoving this crap down my throat. Maybe now I’ll have some vegetables, maybe go to some workout facility. That’s an idea.”
(A visceral cartoon drawn by a friend of the boys pretty much sums up their tour.)
McAley discovered early on that for him, finishing a slinger was just too dangerous. “Of the 58, I’ve probably only finished 10,” he said. “When I first started I would jam it all in and feel like a human waste pile. I learned pretty quickly it was not worth it. Tim, however, can put it away. It’s always impressive to watch him eat the whole thing.”
Let’s be honest. Many of us wind up ordering a slinger because we are wasted, it’s 2 a.m., we’re at an all-night diner, and we just want a great big sponge of foodstuffs to soak up some of that toxic sea inside our bellies.
McAley and Pinkerton ate each of these slingers sober – all 58 of them. “If we’d been drunk,” said the former, “every single slinger we ate would be ranked number one.”
Instead, their sober rankings yielded a carefully considered winner (below). The guys agreed that the slinger at downtown's Chili Mac's Diner “is over-the-top great,” said McAley. “It’s huge. I’ve finished it, which says a lot, because it’s not an easy one to finish. The chili is exceptional, and one of the key things is it has two burgers, and they put cheese directly onto the burgers, which really helps.”
“The ambience is awesome,” he added. “The entire staff is five or six older women that love you. They call you ‘hun.’”
“I loved this place before we even started the tour,” wrote McAley in the blog, “and to see it rise to #1 makes me feel like a proud father after my dumb ass kid won some meaningless award.”
On Friday, August 2, the Slinger Tour guys will be presenting the Chili Mac’s staff with that very meaningless award, a trophy they commissioned, said McAley.
“The trophy is not overwhelmingly impressive,” he added. “It says ‘St. Louis Slinger Tour’ and has their name on it and says ‘Number One’ and has an American flag. It’s a pretty cheap trophy, but I think it’s pretty cool. I have this scene in my head that we go there, present it to them, eat a slinger, and as soon as we leave they throw it in the trash.”
The guys’ pick for Number Two is, believe it or not, Copia" (below left). “This place oozes class from only offering their slinger during lunch. There's an accommodating wait staff, and only cloth towels in the bathroom. Whoa,” gushed McAley in the blog.
Number Three is The Mud House (above right); the boys loved their vegetarian slinger with black bean chili and roasted potatoes. But "if you don't add the [optional] bacon,” wrote McAley, “you're a jackass."
Number Four is the West End Grill & Pub (left), with a slinger featuring biscuits, sausage, eggs, chorizo gravy, and breakfast potatoes with corn.
Other quivering mounds of grease that earned high marks include the slinger meat pie at the Silver Ballroom, a gravy (as opposed to chili) slinger at Rooster, and the “Irish Slinger” (mashed potatoes, cabbage, corned beef, horseradish sauce, fried eggs, bacon, Harp beer cheese sauce, and scallions) at O'Shay's Pub.
The intrepid slinger-ers really covered all the bases. They downed vegetarian slingers at the Crow's Nest and Local Harvest Cafe, “slinger burgers” at Sub Zero Vodka Bar and Baileys' Range, a slinger omelet at Goody Goody Diner, and a custom-made deep-dish slinger pizza at Lemmons. They even accepted an invitation from a guy named Josh Booth, whose version (below) would have placed in the top 10 had he owned an actual restaurant, but as it was, he was "just some asshole with a house and a kitchen."
Their bizarre mishaps included a slinger with a “mystery meatball” inside. Extra meat is usually a bonus, but this rattled the dudes. “That was definitely not on the menu,” McAley said.
And so the duo not only named their top 10, but a few of their not-so-faves, in a category they loving called the "Hall of Shit."
More than a year after embarking on this quixotic quest, McAley and Pinkerton have set down their forks. They need a break from fake skillets and sad strips of unmelted American cheese.
But, says McAley, the great response to the blog is making him wonder if maybe he should dedicate another year of his life to eating another sort of fat-bomb indigenous to these parts.
“A buddy of mine recommended St. Paul Sandwiches,” he said.
UPDATE, August 2, 2013, 3 p.m.: Tim and Tony did award its "#1 Best Slinger" trophy on Friday morning. Tony just sent us the image below, and this note: "We just got back from giving Chili Mac's their trophy and had a celebratory slinger. And I ate the whole thing." Pictured, left to right: Tim Pinkerton, Chili Mac's owner Kris Schneidewind, Tony McAley (Yeah, we were wondering what these dudes looked like, too.)
