Whom among us staying in a hotel hasn’t retreated to our rooms, thrown on one of those fancy fluffy bathrobes, and ordered copious amounts of room service, just because? Now, the W Hotel in D.C. has debuted an enormous menu for making mukbang videos with all that food.
Mukbang is the YouTube vlogger genre of … well, eating a ton of food on camera. The trend originated in South Korea, where top stars have made as much as $10,000 a month on the videos, and have caught on with YouTubers in the U.S. These gorgers feast on everything from mountains of fast-food breakfast sandwiches to delicately stacked dessert pastries.
At the W Hotel, the special Sip and Slurp menu is a sort of DIY mukbang kit, with a stand for your cell phone and plug-in microphone included. And of course there’s the food: The Aloha Y’all pizza comes topped with ham, pineapple, and mozzarella; there’s also a 1/2 pound burger topped with raclette; another cheeseburger with two patties and grilled onions; a charcuterie board; surf-and-turf (which appears to come with a goblet of melted butter); and an extra large order truffle fries. Whew! Oh wait, there’s also dessert: a whole cherry pie with vanilla ice cream, and a carrot cake tower.
The menu, announced this week, is available from noon to 9 p.m. each day, for $295. (W confirmed this price, which has elsewhere been incorrectly reported as $285.) But as the fine print on the menu notes, the delivery charge, service charge, administrative fee, and D.C. sales tax are added, bringing the actual cost up to $391.45.
The publicity-grabbing announcement from the downtown hotel follows a $51 million renovation unveiled last month (it includes a cozy new bar with an extensive beer program, and a fine dining restaurant claiming its menu items are cooked on the city’s largest wood-burning stove.) The hotel, which originally opened in 1918 as the Hotel Washington, now finds itself competing with a number of boutique hotels, including The Line and Eaton DC, that are tempting guests by reaching out to the community.
In case you’re one of the millions of people who likely won’t be calling to order the Sip and Slurp menu, the hotel released a video demonstrating the offerings starring Queer Eye “food and wine expert” Antoni Porowski. It appears to just be an excuse for Porowski to compliment all the hotel’s food. “Ginger mayo? Who are you, W?” he cries after biting into a fry about halfway through the video. “This is delicious!” Later, while hoisting the carrot cake aloft, he practically reads aloud a press release subject line: “There’s a new cake in town and it’s the carrot cake at W Hotel in Washington D.C. and probably other locations.”
As Jezebel put it when they covered the video, “How Many Seconds of Antoni Porowski’s SponCon Mukbang Can You Get Through?”
Porowski, whose personality can be described as “GIFs moms send,” has lent his star power to D.C. happenings before. The onetime personal chef was featured at Brightest Young Things’ Bentzen Ball comedy festival last year (for a brunch, of course). And earlier this year, he and his Queer Eye co-stars descended on Capitol Hill for a photoshoot with Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez after helming a panel at the Library of Congress. They also took cherry blossom photos, because they’re human beings with Instagram accounts.
Lori McCue