North End Hangover Survival

I’m still laughing (on the inside, occasionally) about the Mad Russian’s advice for surviving vodka overconsumption, and it has me thinking about “hangover cures” and survival strategies.

The days when I kept Ibuprofen on the headboard to prevent me having to make the painful choice between getting out of bed (and thus increasing the pain) or just enduring the pounding in my head are long gone, but I still consider lessons learned from them occasionally. On those one or two occasions a year when I can profit from my hard-won experience, it still stands me in good stead.

My personal magic prophylaxis is a Tim’s tea biscuit and about 2 litres of apple juice before sacking out–this usually prevents me from needing any kind of Jeeves-esque “pick-me-up” concoction in the morning. The apple juice is, of course, science: it counters the dehydration effects of the booze, and restores some electrolytes. The biscuit is likely entirely placebo, but I love the mental image of it “soaking up the booze”–damn those things are dry.

This weekend I was exposed to the North End techniques for surviving over consumption. Surprisingly, this secret does not involve Bash Toulany, or his donairs.

Apparently the local trick is to start with an original kebab-on-a-bun from Rocky’s Filipino BBQ, slathered in the hot sauce that Rocky keeps “behind the counter”. In searching the web for a link to Rocky’s, all I could find was this lovely snippet from a local blog:

Meat On A Stick – Anybody who reads this who has spent a night in downtown Halifax knows what I’m talking about. Just below Pizza Corner, on an inconspicuous little section of sidewalk, lies one of the greatest things known to man or beast, Rocky’s Filipino BBQ (or simply Meat On A Stick Guy). Miscellaneaous, marinated meat (is it pork? beef? chicken? who knows? who cares!) barbequeued on skewers, then served in a bun (or au natural), with a dizzying array of condiments

Then, you apparently need to follow the food with a large strawberry milkshake. The source of the shake is not relevant–a drive-through fast food shake will do–but the shake must, I repeat must, be made with a Sense of Justice.

I haven’t tried this, and I’m not sure it would work on my Upper Canadian (see definition) metabolism, but I do have empirical evidence that it does in fact work to some degree for at least some people.

What’s your local hangover preventative, or cure?

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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.