I pulled up to Concord’s new nanobrewery, Area 23, not knowing what to expect. All I had heard was that I could get half a pound of bacon for five bucks and that they had a good selection of local craft beer on tap.
They had me at the bacon.
Now I’m not one of those bacon junkies who would die without bacon. I appreciate it, I occasionally like it on a burger or I’ll have a couple of pieces if it looks decent in the dining hall at my school, but I’m not the guy wacky stuff like chocolate-covered bacon or bacon bandages are made for. I’m neutral on bacon, and really no more than that. (I know that face you’re making, I get that a lot.) However, in the interest of Insider science, I made it my mission almost as soon as I heard about it to tackle the five-buck, half-pound mound.
The parking lot was nearly empty, the building and entrance unmarked as I pulled into my parking spot. (I was told later that this is due to a lack of advertising and signage yet, but they’re on their way.) My parents, who were meeting me there, gave me an “are you sure about this?” look as I pulled in, referring to the quiet state of the outside of the restaurant, but really what they should have been referencing was the amount of bacon I was about to attempt to consume in one sitting.
We walked in and the place immediately had an aura. At that point, the bar had been open just over a week, a redesigned old warehouse in the Smokestack Center across the street from the prison on North State Street.
Maybe a dozen people were inside the restaurant, mostly seated at the bar, a few people seated at a hightop table facing the bar. There were three seats at the far left side of the bar that we grabbed, a seat that about an hour later would be much more difficult to get out of than it had been to get in.
I ordered myself a Champlain Orchards Cidery hard cider to start with (should have gone with a gallon of water in retrospect) as my parents mulled over the menu, which features a little bit of everything you could possibly imagine in the bar snacks realm. Although not an extensive menu, it offers some persity; you can get a falafel, you can get an apple. Yes, just an apple. If I hadn’t been so determined to down the half-pound mound, I would have ordered the apple, just so I could tell the story that yes, I have casually eaten an apple in a bar. Next time.
The time they spent choosing what they wanted gave me time to mentally prepare myself for the task ahead of me. I felt like an NFL kicker being frozen, as the visiting coach, my mom, called her last timeout to ask what was in the Bubba Jong Il calzone. As I proudly ordered my half-pound of bacon, my dad asked if that was really all I was getting, and I already knew that that would be way more than I would be able to handle.
It didn’t take the food long to come out, no more than ten minutes probably, but my parents kept reminding me what I was about to be doing, making it seem like an eternity. The bartender got in on it, and not long after I heard the cook yelling “It’s more than half a pound!” from the kitchen.
Bring it.
I didn’t know exactly what half a pound of bacon looked like until it came out, and when it did, daunting was the first thing that came to mind. A mound of fried, greasy high blood pressure sitting in a paper bowl is really the best way to describe it. With nothing else left to do but eat it, off I went.
In retrospect, pacing myself would have been the smarter option. I finished more than half of it in the first five minutes after getting it and immediately knew I wouldn’t want to keep this pace. I was in good shape in that I was more than half way done, but boy could I feel it. I decided to take a minute or two and challenged my dad to a game of darts. Four of my first five throws were triple-twenties. I had to attribute that to my stellar pre-game meal. I kept poking away at the bacon as I played darts but soon realized that standing would not be something I could sustain.
“You don’t look as good as when we came in,” said my mom after I had to call it quits on the game of darts. The mound had dwindled pretty significantly, only about a quarter of what I started with remained in the bowl. What was left was pretty much submerged in a hefty layer of grease. I fished around slowly through the bacon, one small piece at a time. I thought of those guys you see pounding hot dogs on the Fourth of July – 30, 40, 50, 60 hot dogs in 12 minutes. God bless them.
By the time I had finished (about half an hour after the bacon came off the grill), I felt like I had gained 10 pounds, not just half a pound. I could feel it in my eyes, something I wasn’t sure anyone had ever experienced from eating bacon. After pounding a glass of water and being offered a bite of a falafel (my mom thought she was so funny; I passed on her oh-so-generous offer), I was about ready to get home, lie on my bed in the fetal position and not move until the morning. “You good to drive home?” asked the bartender. Barely.
Within an hour of getting home, I was eating ice cream straight out of the container.
Preceded by an apple.
And a peach.
My metabolism will catch up to me one day.
