{"id":12071,"date":"2025-10-23T04:27:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T04:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/12071\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T04:27:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T04:27:19","slug":"competitors-race-to-eat-scorpion-topped-potato-patch-fries-in-inaugural-kennywood-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/12071\/","title":{"rendered":"Competitors race to eat scorpion-topped Potato Patch fries in inaugural Kennywood contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kennywood’s classic Potato Patch fries got a spine-chilling upgrade this weekend. Five brave souls competed to be the fastest to finish fries topped with scorpions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kennywood held its innagural scorpion eating contest<\/a>\u00a0on Saturday night. Darren Partatuzi from Pittsburgh walked away with bragging rights, as well as two season passes and a prize pack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sign-ups were first-come, first-served. When Kennywood asked Partatuzi what made him want to enter the contest, he said, “I saw the sign and thought, why not?”<\/p>\n

\"kdka-scorpion-potato-patch-fries.png<\/p>\n

Kennywood’s classic Potato Patch fries got a spine-chilling upgrade this weekend. Five brave souls competed to be the fastest to finish fries topped with scorpions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Photo: Kennywood)<\/p>\n

The contestants weren’t the only ones eating scorpions. Kennywood said if a Facebook post got 1,500 likes, general manager Ricky Spicuzza would eat a scorpion. He didn’t think it was possible, but after the post got more than 3,300 likes, Spicuzza had to eat his words. The park posted a video of him eating a scorpion, the crunch very audible through a microphone. His review? “Very good.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The scorpions were dried, not alive, though that doesn’t make it much less spine-chilling.<\/p>\n

It’s not the first time Kennywood has held a contest where participants had to eat critters on top of Potato Patch fries. The past two Halloween seasons, the park hosted a\u00a0live mealworm eating competition<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The contest is part of Kennywood’s Phantom Fall Fest. The Halloween-themed festival, which was recently named\u00a0one of the best in the nation by USA Today<\/a>, offers family-friendly fun by day and spooky haunts by night. This year, there’s a new haunt called “Detached,” which takes thrill-seekers through the “terrifying toy store of the Puppet Master.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kennywood’s classic Potato Patch fries got a spine-chilling upgrade this weekend. Five brave souls competed to be the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[732,9486,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-12071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-halloween","tag-kennywood","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}