This Japanese Restaurant Will Give You $455 If You Can Finish Its 8-Pound Pasta Bowl

All over the world, restaurateurs are coming up with increasingly enormous dishes and daring their customers to eat them. For a lot of these challenges, the goal is to break even. If you can finish the whole 72-ounce steak or four-pound burger in one sitting, it's free, and maybe you'll get your picture on the wall, too. But one Japanese restaurant has such faith in its enormous pasta bowl that it is offering $455 to anybody who can eat it within 30 minutes.

According to Sora News 24's Casey Baseel, the aptly named Stamina Taro Next restaurant chain has a restaurant in Tokyo that is offering a wild new eating challenge in the form of the "Meaty Mega-Sized Stamina Taro Napolitan Spaghetti." It's a 4.4-pound bowl of spaghetti topped with a hamburger patty that weighs just over a pound on its own. Then that is topped with four thick strips of bacon, and somehow they manage to stack at least four pork cutlets on top of it as though it were some kind of giant, fried Jenga tower.

The whole thing weighs 8.15 pounds, and anybody who can manage to eat it in 30 minutes or less will get it for free, and will also get a 50,000-yen (roughly $455) gift certificate.

Fifty thousand yen is a big payoff for eating a lot of pasta, but it's not exactly a cheap bet. Anybody who does not finish the bowl in 30 minutes will still have to pay for it, and it costs 10,000 yen, or around $98. The cost of the bowl comes out to around $12 per pound of food, which is not inexpensive, considering that the Olive Garden in the U.S. is currently selling a pizza bowl full of cheese and topped with 10 meatballs for $8.99 as part of its lunch menu.

Still, $98 is a small price to pay for a chance at the glory of knowing you defeated a big bowl of pasta in single combat. Anyone who wants to take that bet can try it at the Stamina Taro Next location in Tokyo's Takadanobaba neighborhood, where the promotion will be running until March 14. For more oversized restaurant news, check out the 10 biggest food stories of 2017.