Knee Deep at the Grilled Cheese Invitational

Last weekend we, at Hot Knives, became official “Fucking Grilled Cheese Champions.” No, that’s our actual title, and we have trophies to prove it. Good thing too, cuz if not for these gleaming little bronze men holding glue-gunned, plastic sandwiches, the whole night would be a forgotten blur of butter burns and beer aches.
Once a year, the same freaks that bring you the Burning Man festival don the weirdo costumes that they don’t mind getting oozing dairy all over, and host one of the more bizarre food events held in L.A.: the annual Grilled Cheese Invitational. This year it went down at a sprawling art space complex where 60 competitors lined up at outside cooking stations and grilled away while hundreds of freak show judges milled about the mandatory bonfire.
Part culinary competition, part fashion disaster and part rave potluck, the tournament was a blast, if a little much. The Hot Knives crew–while prepping fastidiously in bandito bandanas and slugging bottles of Imperial Stout–found itself, quite uncommonly, feeling like toned-down squares in a sea of weirdos. Between the “Cheese-leaders” and the guy who went by “The Mayor of Cheese,” we actually decided that some of these people may have had an unnatural obsession with cheese, which, coming from us, is scary.
While we were knocking out our sandwiches for the second heat, a woman behind us actually turned to the crowd and asked if she should “put some milk on it,” at which point she tugged out a post-birth breast and squirted mother’s milk all over her “weed ghee butter” melt to the cheers of the audience, including her husband and toddler. Needless to say, we felt more than a little out-done.
Besides the peep show moments and spastic performances, worthy competitors were few and far between; a surprising number of those competing pledged allegiance to Velveeta and Wonder Bread. A few notable exceptions were a pita-panini filled with pesto and buffalo mozzarella, an Australian pineapple and soy bacon melt grilled in a contraption that looked like what they brand livestock with, and a sandwich that was hung on a 20-foot pole and exploded with periodic bursts of immense blow torch flames.
Nevertheless, in their ultimate wisdom, the judges that tasted each sandwich handed Hot Knives trophies in two categories.