What is it about eating contests that has people so intrigued?
“There’s no rules,” Tommy Healy told the Sun. “You can use utensils. You can use feet. Whatever works for you.”
Healy is the emertius champion of Penny’s All American Pancake Eating Contest. It goes down in Pismo Beach at Penny’s All American Café each May to raise money for a local nonprofit organization.
“This is probably our biggest crowd,” said owner Penny Rodriguez. “We started with five entries, and this year we were up to 24.” That first year, Healy swept the field, wolfing down a record 8 1/2 pancakes during the first four minutes.
“The first year it was a small little thing they were putting together. I friggin’ eat like crazy, I’m a fast eater normally, so I was like, ‘Oh, I could win,’” Healy said. He walked away with the champion’s belt, that year’s pot of $100, and a new nickname: “Tommy the Red-Eyed Muncher.”
For this, his explanation was fairly pat: “My eyes were bloodshot red the first time, so [the owner] said, ‘How about the Red-Eyed Muncher?’” After winning repeatedly, the Red-Eyed Muncher became a kind of cause célèbre. Tommy would eventually take the title three more times.
Those wins, and that celebrity, help raise money for local organizations. Penny’s has sponsored the SLO Food Bank and put money toward the fight against ALS in the past. This year, they raised more than $3,500 for Hospice SLO County, which provides end-of-life care free of charge.
“It makes a tremendous difference for us,” Executive Director Kris Kington-Baker said. Hospice SLO provides in-home respite care for individuals and families who have a life-limiting illness. Through a network of trained volunteers, they also provide grief counseling and go into local nursing homes.
Kington-Baker said that she felt inspired by the community turnout for the contest. “We were amazed at how many people first showed up for the event,” she said. “It is obviously something that Penny has been doing for a while. She promotes it on her Facebook, she promotes it through her restaurant, and she had a lot of participants and a lot of spectators for this event.”
The rules of the contest are relatively simple. Participants have four minutes to eat as many pancakes as they can. The pancakes, said owner Penny Rodriguez, are “pretty big”—the size of an 8-inch plate. Contestants can wash down their pancakes with water or chase them with syrup.
There’s a four-minute period afterward to make sure the pancakes stay down. In the event of a dead heat, the winner is decided through a minute-long tiebreaker round. The winner gets $300 and a wrestling-style champion’s belt.
“We really try to do something that’s local. My parents have dealt with hospice so we did the hospice in San Luis,” Rodriguez said. “We try to do something that’s local and do good work. It’s really hard for nonprofit people to make money so I just try to help however I can.”
Kington-Baker said that for her, it’s amazing that Rodriguez brought the offer to Hospice. “She saw the value in this organization, and we are so grateful. The only way we can do that is by people like her and the people who support her event and this organization.”
Most of the money raised comes from the sale of $5 jars of strawberry-jalapeño jelly. Rodriguez wanted something to go with her prized biscuits.
“When you cook the jalapeños, it takes the heat out,” she said, “It’s so good. It’s really good.”
Kington-Baker pushed for an hors d’oeuvres plate during the event, where the jam is served with cream cheese and wheat thins. “It’s just bomb,” she said.
Although Healey hasn’t won the pancake contest for two straight years, fans still bring posters with oversized drawings of bloodshot eyes to show their support. Healy’s strategy is to “dunk them in water and do them all as fast as I can.”
This year, he was beaten by competitor shooting syrup instead of water. Next year, he hopes to “get back to the roots of it all” and reclaim his title.
“I’m going to do it again next year, since someone actually out-ate me,” Healy said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at smcnulty@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 11-18, 2015.