The day before Thanksgiving, at 11:30 a.m., four bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Falcon editors walked into Tomi Sushi Buffet.
We were there for an eating contest that pitted two pairs against each other.
On one team: William Norwood, a bright British lad with a high body mass and height, walked in bragging about the amount of sushi and grease he was about to absorb. The second contestant Nicole Lee, an undersized underdog who just passed her driver’s permit test, was preparing to ride from the high of consuming an unmatched number of calories.
On the second team were Isabelle Wang, a young whippersnapper of a junior, instilled with fear of the amount of food she was about to devour. Her partner-in-food was Sarah Thomas, a geriatric senior who had nothing to lose and therefore was willing to sacrifice her bowels the day after.
To equally compare their results of this long journey, Isabelle brought a scale to weigh each of the plates they gathered. After ingesting each platter, they weighed the plate to subtract the weight of the plate from the food we had eaten.
They all set out with their own strategies: William planned to eat fried food and noodles, as they are quite heavy in weight but light digestive-wise. Nicole decided eating slowly and steadily would be best, which proved to be true — at the end of our adventure, she slowly shoveled plates of cantaloupe one by one into her stomach. Isabelle’s strategy was to eat what she craved (sushi) and follow where her stomach guided her. And Sarah couldn’t care less about eating more food; she just wanted an excuse to not be writing her college applications.
Starting off, Isabelle and Sarah visited the sushi section filled with assortments of sashimi, where they found millions of rolls after rolls, some drizzled with thick bright orange sauce and others with squishy white rice wrapped around crunchy, stale fried shrimp.
While the 18 different sushi options seemed overwhelming, Isabelle and Sarah balanced the calories with pickled ginger to make room for more food. However, after they returned with bloated stomachs, shocked that this strategy doesn’t work, they decided to take a walk around the buffet to make more room in their stomachs.
This led to nothing, unfortunately, as the two decided to turn to sweets in hopes of sparking their appetite further. Cantaloupes, pineapples, oranges and an occasional soup dumpling contributed to the second course. Feeling as bloated as a whale, they tapped out with 2,011 grams (4.4 pounds) of food ingested in both of their stomachs.
Nicole and Will then went to pick up their plates, and they got almost identical plates to both Isabelle and Sarah. They had a plate stacked with rolls, with some interesting unnatural colours over the plate.
Both of them then saw a fried food section and scrambled toward it. Like little fatty cartoon pigs, their noses drifted to the dense air smelling of french fries and fried rice. They picked up tempura shrimp and vegetables, as they realized it was heavy and hopefully easy to eat.
Half way through the first plate, Will and Nicole realized they had taken completely the wrong approach by eating sushi, as it was filling and difficult to eat a lot of.
While Will tapped out at just one plate with 952 grams (2.1 pounds) consumed, despite his initial grand boasting that he’d had a huge appetite due to his morning workout. On the other hand, Nicole continued trying little portions of other dishes.
Soup dumplings and chocolate ice cream were well notable dishes found in Tomi Sushi. However, Nicole found the succulent, juicy and crunchy yet tender flesh of the cantaloupe to be a well worthy final opponent. Plate after plate, Nicole kept getting up to stack more of these addictive, rectangle sweets onto her plates until the others had to beg her to stop.
Finally, even with Will’s lack of contributions, Nicole brought her team’s final weight of food to 2,052 grams (4.5 pounds), winning the Tomi sushi buffet competition of 2023.
Sarah later got food poisoning. A fitting end to our journey.
