Testing the Limits of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers

The restaurant chain TGI Friday’s unveiled a promotion called “Endless Appestizers,” in which you pay $10 and eat as many appetizers as you want (at participating locations only). Caity Weaver at Gawker decided to push the envelope and see if the restaurant could live up to that claim. She had incentives: her boss promised a week off if she could keep it up until 1AM, and a colleague offered cash for the mozzarella sticks she ate over 30. It was not easy. You can only select one kind of appetizer for the promotion, so she selected mozzarella sticks, and quickly regretted that decision.

1:40 p.m. Even if I ate 1000 sticks, TGI Friday's Endless Apps would be a bad deal, because they taste worse than eating nothing at all. TGI Friday's should pay me $10 to clear out as many of these mozzarella sticks for them as I can. TGI Friday's End This App(s).

1:42 p.m. Gabby catches me guzzling water like Joey Chestnut to get my hastily chewed mozzarella sticks down. "Haha!" she laughs from a couple tables away. "I'm coming to check on you!" While the water trick makes me feel like I'm about to throw up every time I swallow a bite of mozzarella stick, it does help to mask the taste. For this reason, I consider it superior to eating the mozzarella sticks normally.

1:45 p.m. I ask Gabby if she's had the mozzarella sticks, and what does she think of them? She tells me "They're good." Gabby and I are not yet good enough friends that we can be honest with one another.

And that’s with 11 hours to go! Weaver tries to adjust by eating the dreaded mozzarella sticks as slowly as possible, but boredom becomes problem. Her notes become weird.

9:23 p.m. I keep thinking I hear people say "Caity." I write down in my notebook that I am "definitely hallucinating."

I put my head near the table to write more and the scent of old marinara and burnt rubber fills my nostrils. I sit back up.

Will Weaver make it to 1AM? Will she receive her rewards? How many mozzarella sticks can one person really eat? Read the entire story at Gawker. -via Neetzan Zimmerman

PS: The endless appetizers promotion is $10 per person, so a group is not supposed to share an order.

(Image credit: Tara Jacoby)