HOUSTON – In the glow of Connecticut’s NCAA men’s basketball championship, spare a thought for the humble squid, the sea creature whose slippery reputation suffered collateral damage in the Huskies’ rampage to the trophy.
The cephalopod scandal began over the weekend when Jordan Hawkins, a UConn star who suffered an hours-long gastrointestinal episode on his bathroom floor early Friday, put on a heroic performance in Saturday’s semifinal, helping his team win by mostly on an empty stomach.
After that game, Hawkins revealed the ingredients of his last meal before the barfing began: steak, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and calamari.
“I think it was the squid,” Hawkins said at his locker late Saturday, shaking his head. “It had to be. I love calamari too. I don’t think I’ll ever eat that again.”
And so squid became the latest unassuming food to be scapegoated by a sports star.
Go all the way back to 1959, when members of the Oklahoma Sooners football team publicly speculated that a contaminated bowl of fruit salad at a Chicago restaurant was to blame for a roster-wide bout of uncontrollable vomiting before a loss to Northwestern.
Or remember that Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers spent the night before Game 2 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals—a loss to the Sacramento Kings—reminiscing about a bacon cheeseburger at room service. (Bryant, with his typical bravado, told reporters he planned to eat a burger before Game 3.)
And who in Britain could forget the elegantly named ‘Lasagnagate’, when 11 Tottenham Hotspur players – all of whom had enjoyed Italian comfort food from a hotel buffet – fell violently ill in their rooms before losing their last game in 2006 which cost them a place in the Champions League.
“It felt like a fire had been lit in my guts with gasoline being poured over and over again,” Michael Carrick, one of the players, vividly wrote in his autobiography.
Hawkins and UConn, in this regard, fared somewhat better. The upchucking was eventually reduced to a single player, life went on and the Huskies won the championship. Hawkins, an NBA prospect, contributed 16 points in Monday night’s final.
Instead, it was Houston’s restaurant scene and calamari lovers around the world who were left to deal with some minor fallout from the episode.
Hawkins, who spent a day isolated from his teammates, did not name the restaurant where he ate the squid in question. Neither does the team. But a reporter for the Stadium outlet he reported on Twitter that the Huskies had dined as a team Thursday night at Mastro’s Steakhouse, a trendy restaurant in Houston. By Sunday afternoon, that information had been picked up by multiple outlets and circulated on social media, where the original tweet had been viewed more than 700,000 times.
And so on Monday, the restaurant broke its silence to defend itself.
“Throughout Final Four weekend, we sold nearly 100 orders of calamari with zero calls for illness,” a restaurant spokesperson told The New York Times. “The basketball team had dinner with us Thursday afternoon and had 13 orders of calamari.”
“How did a person get food poisoning if 13 orders were on the check?” the spokesman added, producing copies of the receipts as evidence.
Food poisoning, in general, is already a bit of a problematic concept, said Cedric Dark, an emergency physician and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. The thing is, the phrase has become a catch-all term used for all sorts of stomach problems, ranging from bacterial and viral infections to indigestion.
According to an old chestnut repeated in both gastroenterology and food service, pinpointing the source of digestive distress is more difficult than the average person realizes, since symptoms can begin several hours after ingesting something reasonably bland. or even several days later.
“Does it have to be the squid?” Dark said. “How do we know it wasn’t the steak?”
The sports world in general can be a nasty place and foods from all over the world are constantly blamed for the personal hardships of athletes.
For example, the long-running narrative surrounding Michael Jordan’s “flu game” — Game 5 of the 1998 NBA Finals — underwent a culinary overhaul in 2020 when the former Chicago Bulls star claimed his digestive distress was caused by a suspicious pizza delivered to him. room the night before the game.
In 2021, American runner Shelby Houlihan tested positive for nandrolone, a banned steroid, and blamed it on an unusual pork burrito she said she ordered from a Mexican food truck.
A different (equally delicious) pork dish was incorporated in 2010, when Chinese judo champion Tong Wen tested positive for clenbuterol, another banned substance, and was stripped of her world title.
“She trained in Europe for a while and was tired of European food,” Tong’s coach Wu Weifeng said at the time, “so we gave her a lot of pork chops when she came home.”
Food, this way, is always an easy target. And restaurateurs in particular are used to people jumping to medical conclusions about the things they ate.
“They always blame the oyster, they never blame the Crown Royal,” said Jim Gossen, the president of the Gulf Seafood Foundation (and “the dean of seafood in town,” according to The Houston Chronicle), who has opened several restaurants in the career. “Isn’t that the truth?”
But the Squid have had no shortage of defenders this week.
John Bordieri, the executive chef at Iggy’s Boardwalk in Warwick, RI, said squid is one of the easiest proteins to handle because it’s easy to tell when it’s spoiled — it goes rancid quickly — and because it’s so simple to cook. .
Bordieri, who rose to internet fame in 2020 by solemnly holding up a plate of fried calamari to the camera during the Democratic National Convention, has a quirky but foolproof method for frying calamari to perfection.
“You throw the squid in the toaster, it sounds like a crowd clapping,” Bordieri said. “And when the crowd stops clapping, that’s when you pull the squid up. It sounds funny, but it works.”
Fried calamari first took off as a culinary trend in the United States in the 1970s. Today, calamari maintains a technical role on many restaurant menus—as a vehicle for a punchy sauce, perhaps, or as a supporting character in some sort of seafood medley.
But imagine a life without squid. No more salt and pepper calamari from your favorite Cantonese restaurant. Many ceviches would lose their texture. And say hello to ika sushi.
Hawkins’ claim that he may never eat calamari again was therefore particularly troubling to viewers in Rhode Island, where fried calamari was named the state’s “official appetizer” in 2014.
“To drop calamari forever would be very tragic, especially for Mr. Hawkins, because he would be losing one of his all-time, all-time favorite appetizers,” said Brianna Hughes, vice president of operations at Town Dock. , a leading squid wholesaler based in Narragansett, RI
The fried calamari at Mastro’s, which costs $21, is served with a peppery zigzag, pink aioli and a spicy sauce that is pleasantly reminiscent of the packaged duck sauce from a Chinese-American takeout joint. Chunks of onion punctuate the Asian atmosphere.
On Sunday, a Mastro employee politely disputed the idea that the restaurant may have caused the illness, citing its strict safety protocols. The employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak officially about Mastro’s, said restaurants in general were more likely to raise suspicions when they had some vested interest against athlete customers.
The employee said the Boston Red Sox had dined at the restaurant a few years ago when they were playing the Houston Astros in the playoffs. They left, of course, as happy, healthy customers — even if the waiters and kitchen staff were all home team fans.
“Now, if they wanted to drink, we certainly didn’t stop them,” the employee said.
There was understandably no booze in the Huskies’ proof, although there were 21 lemonades and seven Shirley Temples.
If members of the Connecticut team held any lingering grudges against the restaurant, they didn’t say so. Instead, they let their stomachs do the talking. And according to Mastro’s spokesperson, they talked a lot.
On Sunday night, the night before the championship game, the Huskies called in a delivery that included eight more orders of fried calamari.
