A food hangover?!

We all know that weird things can happen to our bodies if we ingest large quantities of something... I've had a few nights of boozing where I've actually drunk myself sober (something that's hard to explain and understand unless you've had it happen, too). I've seen videos of what happens when you down some ipecac. But I've never experienced what happened to me this morning: a food hangover (for lack of a better term).

Going back a bit, I'd like to explain yesterday's activities that led up to said "food hangover"...

For starters yesterday I had my new-hire lunch with the CFO from my new job. Really cool guy, and he took me and a bunch of other new people to Churrascaria Plataforma. For those of you who've never been there, it's a Brazilian steakhouse located near Times Square. The way it works is that you get a coaster that's red on one side and green on the other. Waiters are constantly walking around the restaurant with different cuts of meat (beef, pork, lamb, sausages, chicken, etc.), and if your coaster is green they'll stop and offer you some. They'll then slice off a piece for you right then and there, and you grab it with a pair of tongs they give you. Really good stuff, even if they are Brazilians (just a little Argentine pride, ;-)).

So I have a bunch of meat for lunch, as well as some of the things from their salad bar (the CFO warned us not to go overboard with the salad bar, to leave room for the meat), and I try to control myself (knowing what awaited me that very evening [more on that in a minute]), so I end up throwing in the towel earlier than I normally would. I'm still stuffed, however.

Some explanatory photos:

Back at the office I proceeded to do nothing productive for what was left of the afternoon (we finished lunch around 2:15pm, so we didn't get back until approx. 2:30pm), and planned on meeting up with Liz, Frankie, Mike and Gaetan for dinner later that night. And guess where we were heading? The mecca of all that is beefy: Peter Luger, in Brooklyn.

(As a parenthetical, I lived about two blocks from Luger for a year, but never got sufficiently organized to make a reservation a few weeks in advance.)

When we decided to head to Luger I was surprised that we were able to find an available slot only about two weeks beforehand, even if it was on a Monday night. Now, you may be asking yourselves: "Luis, why on earth did you make a dinner reservation at Luger on the same day that you were having lunch at Plataforma?" Well kiddies, that wasn't the plan. Originally I was supposed to go to Plataforma for lunch on the day that my company was taking us to Atlantic City, but the CFO had to reschedule. When the rescheduling e-mail went out last week I nearly cried when I saw the date: September 19th. We had already made the reservation at Luger, and I wasn't about to change it. So I just braced myself mentally, spiritually, and stomach-ly, for the barrage of meat that 9/19/2005 would entail.

So going back to last night, we get to Luger right on time, and after a 5 minute wait we get seated. At this stage I'd had about a 6-hour break between lunch and dinner, so I was feeling fine and ready to eat again, :-). Despite everything we heard about the service being rude, our waiter was a guy who certainly knew his stuff, and he guided me through the order process. We wanted a typical Luger meal, so we get everything he suggested. There were 5 of us, so we ended up ordering 5 slabs of their bacon (ridiculously good), tomatos & onions (we didn't realize that we needed to add their famous steak sauce to them until we were about halfway through), 3 steak-for-2s (giant porterhouses; two medium-rare and one medium), creamed spinach and fried potatoes. Oh, and we also had Brooklyn Lager (yum!). We somehow managed to leave room for dessert, and split a great sundae and apple strudel amongst the five of us. They even gave us official Peter Luger chocolate coins!

So what was the final damage? $85 a head, which we were all happy to pony up. We had a veritable mountain of food, no one was still hungry, and it was all delicious.

The steak itself was really good, and I think it lived up to the hype pretty well:



However, and I know Liz agrees with me, we both feel that the porterhouse we had at Keen's was not only better, but cheaper. This is not a slight towards Luger at all, since we all really enjoyed the food. Having said that, however, now that we've eaten there once I think in future we'll be sticking to Keen's when we need our steak fix.

Anyway, back to the main point of this post, my so-called "food hangover". First off Liz and I were feeling incredibly full, bloated, etc. when we got home. She'd pre-emptively had some ginger before the meal, and I had one at dinner. I was feeling ok, just stuffed beyond belief. When I woke up this morning, however, I had an absolutely splitting headache. I don't usually get headaches, so it must've been something from last night.It couldn't have been alcohol-induced, since I only had one beer (and they were in McSorley-size mugs, so they weren't particularly large, shall we say). I've never heard of food, of all things, causing a headache, especially since I'm used to eating large quantities of meat from growing up in Argentina.

The only remaining option was that it was food-induced. While its origins remain a mystery, there can be no doubt as to what calamity befell me this morning: I had become a victim of a food hangover! Fortunately I'm feeling a bit better now, and will probably be able to stomach some lunch in a bit!

Luis