Hamburgueria in SP makes competition for who eats the most snacks; know what the record is

Eating 56 hamburgers in an hour might sound like a mission impossible to many. But that was the amount of sandwiches that a customer devoured at Sliders, a hamburger in São Paulo that has a curious competition to see who can eat the most snacks.

A plaque nailed to the wall of the cafeteria on Rua Major Sertório, in central São Paulo, displays the date of the feat and the name of the current record holder: Ricardo Corbucci. Altogether, he put in almost six kilos of food. He gives about one hamburger a minute.

But calm down, what he ingested was not just any burger. These were the so-called sliders, a type of small snack, weighing around 100 g, that is popular in the United States. Although it’s still new here, the recipe has been around for a hundred years.

The slider was invented in 1921 by White Castle, the oldest fast-food chain in the world, in Kansas. The term was popularized in the 1940s by American sailors, who said that snacks slid down the throat because of their fat and size — “slide” in English means to slip.

But he’s not just a miniburger. What makes it different is the cooking process, which uses the steam released by onions to cook the meat instead of grilling it. “It’s almost a cooked hamburger. That’s why it has a specific flavor. It needs to be made with onions, but it doesn’t taste like it”, explains Bruno Jacob Perina, one of Sliders’ four partners.

In preparation, pieces of the ingredient form a layer under a 50 g meat disc. In contact with the griddle, the water released turns into steam and cooks the meat, melts the cheese on top and moistens the bread. It takes approximately five minutes to prepare and the result is a soft, moist snack that can be eaten in two or three bites.

Sliders emerged among friends and was one of the first to invest in this type of snack in Brazilian lands, in 2018. “We saw that it was a different hamburger in a niche that was already very saturated. There was no specialized place in the country”, says Perina, who is an engineer.

The recipe only takes three ingredients on the bread, but you can get extra items such as pickles, bacon, arugula, tomato and pepperoni. A vegetarian version is made with shiitake and breaded zucchini. The menu lists seven options, with prices between R$8.90 and R$14.90 each.

Due to their size, the sliders are offered in sets of three, five and ten units, which are cheaper for the customer. At first, the public, used to bulky meat discs, was surprised by the smallness of the snacks — the smash burgers, which are thinner, were still gaining space in São Paulo at that time.

“When customers entered the store, we always told the story of the product, so that they understood what they were eating. We insisted on explaining the size and trying to send the quantity”, says Perina.

It was then that the idea of ​​challenging who ate the most sliders came up, as a joke. “One day, we were supposed to be open for four months, a guy walked in and ate eight. It was the first time anyone had done that, so we took a picture with the record and posted it on Instagram.”

It soon went viral and the number increased: 10, 13, 20, and so on. On December 10, 2019, current record holder Ricardo Corbucci ate 56 snacks in one hour. But no wonder: Corbucci is successful on YouTube recording videos in which he eats mountains of all kinds of food in a short time – a habit that doesn’t seem to be very healthy. “After he came, nobody else dared to try to beat the record”, says Perina.

Even so, anyone who wants to face the challenge can try, just arrive at any unit and inform the interest. Whoever exceeds the number pays nothing and still gets a plaque on the wall with their name. But if you can’t, you have to pay the bill. One combined with 50 sliders, for example, costs R$324.50.

The partners even organized a competition inspired by American events when they completed one year of service. They gathered an audience and five people competed to see who ate the most sandwiches in ten minutes. One American, who was visiting the country, ate an impressive 46 and was voted the winner. “In the US, food competition is very widespread, there is a whole preparation beforehand.”

The record remains intact, but the challenge was hampered in part by the pandemic, which caused the burger parlors to be closed for more than a year. The crisis did not, however, prevent the business from expanding across the city and starting to sell frozen sliders, to be heated at home.

Stores were opened in Vila Buarque, Vila Olímpia, Santana, Ipiranga, Vila Leopoldina and Tatuapé — the last two closed. The head office, in Jardins, was closed after the property it occupied was sold to a developer. Today, there are four addresses in operation.

A “sliderometer” was placed on the facade of each unit. The digital panel counts sales in real time, inspired by the format of the tax meter, which displays all the tax collected in the country on a screen installed in a building in downtown São Paulo. This Monday, the 25th, the number was just over 686,000 sliders — and counting.