New competition on Netflix | The hot dog eating war is in full swing

(New York) Netflix announced on Wednesday a new hot dog eating competition between two American and Japanese champions, after the shock exclusion suffered by the first from a very old competition in New York.

The streaming giant published a cartoon on X that shows a large hot dog held in both hands and touts an eating contest between Californian Joey Chestnut and Japan’s Takeru Kobayashi.

The game ” Unfinished Beef » (“Bisbilles à fin”) – “beef” means “meat” and also “bickering” or “quarrel” – will be broadcast live on Netflix on September 2, Labor Day in the United States.

On Tuesday, a conflict broke out in the small community of hot dog eaters.

Joey Chestnut, 1.85 m tall and 104 kg, capable of devouring 76 hot dogs in ten minutes, was de facto excluded from the “Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest” which has been held in New York since 1916 every 4 July, national holiday.

The reason given by the organizer, Major League Eating (MLE)?

Joey Chestnut wants to promote this year a competing brand of plant-based hot dogs, plant-based meat, and with which he has an advertising agreement.

The person concerned declared Tuesday evening on Instagram to be “very disappointed to learn (of his) exclusion by the media after almost 20 years” of competition and clarified that he had “no contract with the MLE or Nathan’s” .

Joey Chestnut has won the competition 16 times and holds the record for victories.

His best opponent is Takeru Kobayashi, but this Japanese champion was also excluded from the Nathan’s competition in 2010 following a disagreement over the exclusivity of a contract.

The MLE competition, more than a century old, refuses to allow its participants to represent brands other than its own, Nathan’s.

Saying she was “devastated”, she denounced Joey Chestnut’s commercial support of hot dogs in the form of plant-based meat substitutes, sold under the Impossible Foods brand.

Before Netflix’s announcement, the MLE still tried to coax the big eater.

“Joey Chestnut is an American hero. We would love nothing more than to have him” in the competition this year, she said.

Every July 4, some 35,000 fans gather in the Coney Island neighborhood, on the Atlantic coast in the south of the New York borough of Brooklyn.

The five biggest eaters share $40,000 and the first wins the “mustard belt” with an extra $10,000.

According to the American press which nicknamed him “Jaw”, Joey Chestnut has pocketed hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in recent years by also devouring 30 Greek sandwiches in ten minutes or 182 wings of chicken in 30 minutes.