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He claims he was just stopping in to maybe be filmed by the Travel Channel cameras and have some chicken shawarma with his family. But after the annual, ten-minute garlic-eating contest at Saleem's was over, the floor was littered with sticky garlic peels and Mark Hellige had eaten 16 heads of roasted garlic and broken a 26-year-old record to win the title of “Garlic King, 2012.”
We hepped you here when we told you the Travel Channel would be at Saleem's West this past Saturday, filming for an episode of the “Food Paradise” TV show to be called “Garlic Paradise.” The festivities included one-night menu specials, garlic-infused booze, belly dancers, and the stomach-churning roasted-garlic-eating contest that separates polite society from the shunned and pungent.
“We knew the Travel Channel was going to be there,” explained Hellige, 38, a licensed clinical social worker for the Department of Veterans Affairs. “We decided to go for dinner, and I had no intention of entering the contest at all, but there was an open seat, and my wife said, 'You can do it!' As soon as I took the seat, I realized I had no intention of losing. I decided that if I was gonna stink for days, I was gonna win.”
It turned out that he was correct on both counts.
Hellige did not even need the whole ten minutes to destroy 16 heads of garlic, besting the previous record of 15, set by a Wash. U. student in 1986. The second place eater stopped at 13, and Hellige soon realized he could slow down and cruise into the finish.
The champ, who said he had never previously participated in an eating contest, claimed that he “could have eaten at least 20 [heads]” if necessary to win.
After the contest, he did not consume the shawarma that he'd originally planned on eating.
“I did not eat before the contest, and afterward I had one little piece of falafel and one little piece of pita bread, and that's all I could handle,” he said. Hellige had won the contest, including a prize of Saleem's gift certificate, but the odyssey was just beginning.
“My friends and wife and daughter were ecstatic when I won,” he said, “but they didn't know they were gonna have to smell me for days... I was not allowed to sleep in my own bed for two nights. My wife made me sleep in the basement on the couch. Today [Monday], my coworkers asked me to go home early from work.”
But did he?
“No,” he said. “I made them smell me.”
“For the first 36 hours,” he added, “I could actually smell myself, and even now, two days later, my family tells me I still smell.”
Keep reading Relish for a tip on when to watch the “Garlic Paradise” episode featuring Hellige and Saleem's on the Travel Channel in the fall.
In the meantime, Hellige said, his body continues to process-away the 16 heads of garlic he inhaled in less than 10 minutes, but the aroma lingers, along with the title conferred on him by the Lebanese restaurant.
“They are now calling me 'The Garlic King,'” he said. (Congratulations, but even the guy below endured less humiliation.)
