Brandon King drives fast -- 180-miles-per-hour fast on the race track.

Mr. King talks fast -- 160-words-per-minute fast, the syllables popping from his mouth like grease sputtering from the grill.

And Mr. King cooks fast -- $3,000-an-hour fast, the food flowing from the kitchen of Jerome Bettis Grille 36.

At 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday night at Bettis' new North Shore restaurant, 25 checks are lined up on the counter in front of Mr. King. The executive chef mows down the orders -- shouting grilling directions, piling on fries, twirling tongs -- with the ferocity of Jerome lining up for a fourth-and-inches touchdown.

"Fried Itaaalian. Hot saaausage," bellows Mr. King to 14 people manning the grills, stoves and fryer.

Mr. King has short-cropped blonde hair, a pug nose and a slight paunch that pokes out of his psychedelic chef's getup. He rotates his 50-pants chef wardrobe from cheetah to leopard to chile peppers to zebra to Steelers.

No boring black-and-white checks for a man who used to spend weekends careening around a dirt track in a winged car as part of the World of Outlaws race car circuit.

The 30-year-old Columbus native no longer races cars, something he did until he was 23. But he gets the same kind of adrenaline rush while serving up comfort food -- heaping plates of macaroni and cheese, steaks and ribs so big they could pass for cuts of brontosaurus, slabs of carrot cake.

He learned this kind of Southern-style cooking from his grandmother, and fine-tuned the menu after talking to Gladys Bettis, Jerome's mom.

Befitting a restaurant named after a onetime 255-pound pro athlete, the restaurant doesn't scrimp on food, and customers are lapping up Bus-sized 36-ounce steaks. Even the dinner salads are humongous.

"These people in this town eat. They eat, eat eat eat, EAT. They don't eat like this in Columbus," Mr. King says. "Not even close.

"They are asking for soup, salad, appetizer, main course and dessert. We average five carrot cakes a day. That is like 100 pieces on a busy day. That is a pound and a half of carrot cake going out to a table of two. That is two people splitting it, not four people. We sell 30 to 40 36-ounce steaks a week. We sell 30 to 60 fried meat loaf sandwiches a day."

It seems fitting that Mr. King is manning the kitchen of a former Steeler because he grew up in Columbus not a Browns or Bengals fan, but a Steelers fan.

"My Grandma had 50-yard-line Steeler seats for 15 years. I inherited them when she passed away, but then I sold them because I could not afford them."

He likes working with Mr. Bettis, who is both "big and big hearted" and eats off the menu. But unlike his customers, Mr. King is not star-struck by Mr. Bettis, who lives in Atlanta but comes to Pittsburgh a few times a month. He has cooked for a lot of celebrities, some of them high-maintenance eaters.

Mr. King is the executive chef of Celebrity Ventures, a Fort Lauderdale company that develops custom restaurants for Hall of Fame athletes.

Mr. King is called on to help open new restaurants because he is creative with food and his personality is so electric, said Howard Shiller, partner at Celebrity Ventures Inc. "He keeps the whole staff in high-energy mode. The servers are out there rocking and rolling. The line cooks are jamming out the food. He is setting the tone."

Yes, he has a temper, but "it doesn't rear its head too often," Mr. Shiller said.

Once Mr. King got a job washing dishes at Bob Evans at age 14, the son of a Big Lots executive caught the cooking bug. He has a staggering 32 new restaurants under his belt, including Eddie George's Grille 27 in Columbus as well as Dave and Buster's and Mitchell's restaurants in the Waterfront.

That breakneck pace may explain this rather curious chef stat: he has broken six cell phones -- dropping some in soup tureens -- before purchasing a "700 indestructible Nextel phone."

"It's waterproof, shockproof and throwproof -- and chef proof."

His television alter-ego is Bobby Flay, both because of his Southern style of cooking and his street-smart cockiness. "He is as arrogant as I am in the kitchen."

On a recent summer day, Mr. King is on his indestructible phone, raising his voice at a supplier who has not returned his calls soon enough. He's upset because his restaurant buys $15,000 to $30,000 a week worth of food from this supplier, and he needs a refrigerated truck outside and he needs it now.

"I am Mr. $30,000," he says in his best don't-mess-with-me voice. "Why doesn't someone answer their phone? I do not want to talk to someone's voice mail."

Then later, when he gets a real person on the phone, Mr. King barks: "If someone tells you 'no,' you call me back and I will call them and tell them to say 'yes.' "

He explains, "As you can see, the answer is always 'yes.' You don't let obstacles stand in your way." In this equation, he is the customer and the customer is always right. Likewise, he says, the customers in his restaurant are always right. "You can't deal with right or wrong. They want what they want. You gotta give it to them."

Which is why on a recent evening, when a customer sends a steak back to the kitchen twice, his staff cooks it some more even though they know it is as well-done as you can get without turning it into leather. On the third attempt, the customer is satisfied and can go back to eating his steak -- presumably while watching one of more than 50 flat-screen TVs, all labeled by game -- in this upscale sports bar.

No one is watching TV in the pressure cooker of a kitchen during the chaos of dinner rush. With two yellow pencils behind his right ear, Mr. King is the conductor, tasting sauces, examining food, yelling out orders to people sweating in 110-degree heat on the line as they grill salmon, steaks and ribs and man the fryer. "Come on guys, keep your head up," he yells ebulliently. "It's going to get stupid."

His staff jokes that a favorite Brandon-ism is "On my list of 10 things to do, yours is No. 9."

"I get agitated easily about small things" Mr. King says. "Big things are easy to solve. Small things are hard to solve. If someone calls in seven items on the check when there is only supposed to be six, in the middle of the rush, that bothers me."

But Shannon Plue, a bartender, says Mr. King is usually calm and only raises his voice in the heat of kitchen craziness. "If he snaps at you at the heat of the moment, he makes it right," Mr. Plue says. "He knows if he made a mistake, he hunts you down later and makes it right."

Mr. King says an assistant just resigned because he could not handle the volume of business by the kitchen -- $3,000 an hour (and another $1,000 an hour in food and beverage), or about 700 dinners on a Friday or Saturday night.

Running a big restaurant kitchen takes nerve -- the same as stepping into a race car. You can't drive 180 mph if you are afraid of crashing.

"If you are scared, don't do it," Mr. King says. "That is the way I run my kitchen. If you are scared, don't get in."