Metro

Wiener take all!

His is truly the biggest mouth in New York.

Today, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut seeks to win his fourth consecutive title at the 95th annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island. He set a world record at last year’s competition, eating 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

“It’s pretty safe once I get it down,” said Chestnut, 26. “It’s uncomfortable for two, three hours. But as it settles farther in me, it’ll start digesting pretty quickly.”

Chestnut’s fiercest rival for the past three years has been Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi of Japan, who won the Nathan’s title six years in a row before Chestnut’s upset in 2007.

Kobayashi also lost to Chestnut at the Fourth of July spectacular in 2008 and 2009 and has said he will not compete this year due to contractual issues with Major League Eating, which organizes the event.

Chestnut isn’t buying it.

“I don’t trust him,” Chestnut said. “This is not too different from his ploy three years ago — he said he had a hurt jaw and might not compete.”

But Kobayashi showed up. “He ate 63 hot dogs — more than he ever had before,” said Chestnut. “So, I’m fully expecting him to come here and compete to a new level.”

Although Chestnut was a relative amateur when he entered the Nathan’s contest in 2006, he said he knew he could beat Kobayashi once he figured out his strategy.

“He was brainwashing everybody,” said Chestnut. “He told everybody he had a special stomach. He said, ‘Oh, my stomach sits lower than yours, so I can eat more.’ And everybody believed it!”

Over the years, Chestnut has developed his own training regimen. For a major competition, such as today’s, he’ll fast for three days before the competition, drinking only water and milk to “stretch out” the muscles surrounding his stomach.

Chestnut, a 6-foot, 218-pound California native who works as a construction engineer, has only gotten sick from competitive eating once. That was during a Vienna sausage-eating contest in North Carolina.

“They had the gelatinous little nasty ones, the ones that come in a can,” he said. “That’s when I figured out I needed to practice with the food.”

Chestnut currently competes about six months out of the year, earning $150,000 annually from competitive eating alone.

His favorite off-duty meals include steak with mashed potatoes, his mother’s lasagna, pizza, chicken wings and burritos. He runs to keep the weight off, and said that aside from heartburn, he suffers no ill effects from his second career.

maureen.callahan@nypost.com