Stephen Fung vs. Beth’s Southwestern Exposure 12 Egg Omelet!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That pretty much described my crazy foodie challenges while I enjoyed my time down in California and the Bay Area. The first challenge which was San Francisco’s Pho Garden’s Pho Challenge, a massive bowl of Pho consisting of 2 lbs of meat and 2 lbs of noodles, left me demoralized and quite full for most of the day. However, I fought back and put a big dent into that massive Pho, but it wasn’t enough to clean the bowl (video coming soon).

The very next day, after somehow being able to digest that huge Pho, I went to Iguanas Tacqueria in San Jose where I attempted my challenge against the infamous Burritozilla. It’s a challenge so horrible that Adam Richman walked away from it during his San Jose visit and had World Competitive Eating Champion, and San Jose native, Joey Chestnut take it on instead. I again tried and failed. Sigh.

Some say that that the third time is a charm. Of course, others say that three strikes and you’re out or that terrible things come in threes. Well, I decided to try one last time in Seattle by taking on Beth’s Southwestern Exposure 12 Egg Omelet!

Located in Seattle, Washington, Beth’s Cafe has been serving the area for 55 glorious glutinous years! The portions are big, the place has character, and the customer submitted artwork is interesting. However, I had no time to draw a pretty picture and instead got down to the ugly task of taking down this same challenge that downed our Man vs. Food Hero, Adam Richman.

Do I triumph? Or do I crash and burn for a three straight consecutive loss? Check out the video!

After two failed attempts on two of the planets most infamous and challenging monster food challenges, Beth’s Southwestern Exposure 12 Egg Omelet fell and I can finally say that in the battle of Stephen vs. Food, Stephen WON!

If you want to see the challenge that inspired my latest win, the Pho Garden’s Pho Challenge, stay tuned as I’ll be putting that up over the weekend.

Stephen Fung vs. Iguana’s Burritozilla!

Nestled in this seemingly quiet part of Downtown San Jose is a little Mexican Taqueria known as Iguanas. This place is an easily recognizable landmark in the downtown core and has been feeding the many hungry students that attend the neighboring San Jose State University since 1994. The smiling green iguana is their mascot and is also synonymous with generous portions, fresh ingredients, reasonable prices and some of the best Mexican food in the state.

Behind the smiling iguana is something so horrible that even Man vs. Food’s Adam Richman had to walk away from it. In it’s underbelly is something that weighs nearly 5 lbs and is over 18 inches in length. Ladies and gentleman, this horrible beast is known as Burritozilla!

During my road trip down to the US, I hit some pretty cool eateries. Besides the Pho Garden Pho Challenge (which I will post about later this week), the great Burritozilla was on my hit list of monster food challenges. Did I finish this remarkably gruesome (but extremely tasty) creation? Check out the video to see how it all went down…

What an upset! With only 1/4 of Burritozilla left, I tapped out and let the lizard win. Damn!

However, with the knowledge gained from tackling two of California’s greatest food challenges, I was able to take what I learned and apply it to my challenge against Seattle’s Southwestern Exposure 12 Egg Omelet Challenge. More on that in an upcoming post so stay tuned!

More Burritozilla pictures after the jump…

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Dot Com Pho – The Sort of Cinematic Edition

Dot Com Pho has always been a low budget, low production value weekly mish mash of the dumb things that we do while eating Vietnamese Noodles. While we’ve always talked about doing a proper higher production value podcast or show, the actual effort to make something like that happen just doesn’t seem to register in our somewhat easy going Dot Com Lifestyles. This week at Dot Com Pho, I decided to introduce a new piece of gear that could possibly bring up the quality of the show while still maintaining the genuinely idiotic things we do and say at this weekly gathering.

The JAG35PRO is a 35mm DOF (depth of field) adapter. What this thing does is allow you to take advantage of the high quality lenses used in CANON and NIKON DSLRs. The folks at JAG35 sent me one of their units adapted to a NIKON mount so that I could try it out and give it a review for Futurelooks. As part of my ongoing testing, I decided to debut it at this week’s Dot Com Pho which features the return of Michael Kwan from the middle of absolutely nowhere, John Chow’s joy over the new shirt he got for free, and Ed Lau’s Yoga bumb fetish that we did not know about.

Products featured this week include the Poken Social Media Token, every man’s favourite Yoga Teacher App for the iPhone and of course the JAG35Pro adapter which films this week’s episode, giving it a very high production value look…

While the JAG35Pro provided some pretty stunning results similar to what you would see in a big blockbuster movie, the device is somewhat cumbersome in tight spaces. The 50mm lens was far to long and the fact that I was filming and manually focusing a flipped around picture (due to the JAG35 having no prism) was a challenge to say the least.

Some grading was done using Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Looks, but I have yet to find a good piece of conversion software that will allow me to convert the AVCHD files into an easy to edit format while simultaneously flipping the picture. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 really didn’t like having to turn the picture 180 degrees, and then having to render adjustments on top of that.

Look for a review of the the JAG35Pro at Futurelooks sometimes in the next while!

PS: We’re also giving away a 128GB Patriot USB Flash Memory Drive worth $359 US over at Futurelooks. Check out the contest details here.