Restaurant and Food Blog May Archive

Whether you're running for office or selling omelets at 3:30 on a Tuesday morning, you have to pander to your base. If your base eats nachos in the pre-dawn hours on a weekday, the smart restaurateur knows their biggest buyers are stoned, drunk, or some combination thereof.

When I worked at IHOP a million years ago, and it hasn't changed, the inebriated would come in and point to what they wanted from the menu photographs, but unlike Denny's, it wasn't a picture menu, so they ended up pointing to something that didn't even exist. Denny's makes their fortune by dumbing the menu all the way down, and leaving only the most expensive items in pictures.

The fattening of our society is encouraged because it's cheap and tasty. Portions have grown over the years because people keep buying them bigger and bigger. Yes, a "small" is now what used to be a "medium", and it's a "large" in other countries, but it's because people want what they want, and they want a fattening meal.

We come from a very long line of people who survived by eating as much as they could, as fatteningly as they could, and as soon as possible. Fat is hard-wired into our human design, that's all there is to it.

Besides, we're suckers for a bargain, and for just another couple dimes we can make it uncomfortably large. That's still a good deal, right?

Now, I realize that Brian encourages you to be reasonable. However, my view of a buffet style restaurant is something unreasonable and that is "all you can eat". And, I don't mean as the joke goes... after you are served a 1/2 bit site chunk of beef you are told "Well, that's all you can eat".

I mean a buffet is where you can got and really pig out. Where you can eat all the food you can stuff in your body (whether it is good for you or not). You know where you can undo the total of all the dieting you've done in your life, in one sitting. Where the all in all you can eat is a decision made by you!

That is a buffet! Now is Old Country Buffet a Buffet? In reading their website, I get confused. Their words are in Italic, and I've emphasized a few things in bold.

What's the best way to buffet? Any way you want. With nearly 100 tempting items, try what you want when you want. Our buffet is a great place to try new things. [In my mind that means as much as you want]

Now in their FAQ:

I am on a restricted diet that only allows me to eat very small portions. Can you offer a discount? [cheapskates]

A. This question arises occasionally, including from guests that have recently had surgery. It is important to understand that our pricing is based on a reasonably sized "meal," not a specific "quantity of food" or an "unlimited" amount. Individual guests have widely differing perspectives on what they feel is an appropriate meal size. We serve more than 150 million guests per year and each one has unique menu expectations and health requirements. For simplicity sake, we adopted a uniform pricing approach when the company was formed over 20 years ago and this has become a hallmark of our business.

This raises questions in my mind that if you are chowing down your way, anyway, what you want, when you want it, is there some magical limit you hit (since things might not be "unlimited") where the manager comes and tells you it's time to go home; before you've had it you way, completely.

I really don't know the answer and was hoping maybe some of you have had experience and whether the buffet is closed for you after the restaurants tells you you've had enough?

Please let me know.

Oh yeah, if you are from Nogales, Arizona please don't answer because we know from their website you are somehow (though we don't know how) treated differently.

The commercial showed a traditional Italian-American family, and the guys said, "My 'Ma' wanted dinner, so we took her to Olive Garden."

Wait, what? I've got Italians in the family, and I'll tell you straight up those people would lynch me if I took them to a mega-corporate chain for dinner.

Am I the only one offended by this sort of thing?

I hit up Old Country Buffet last month and watched a guy puke himself inside-out at the exit. That's terrifying, what's that all about? He didn't seem sick at all, but like a long-dead goldfish, he gorged himself unto failure and the busboys had to mop up that nasty puddle of human bile.

The smart eater knows better. Pull your head out of your gullet and get back to reality. Every restaurant is "all you can eat", all you have to do is buy your meal and eat it. There's no need to make an ass of yourself, or a sick ass at that. Just recognize reasonable bounds of human limitation, atop that the fact we're all human and our bowels can hold a finite limit, no matter how chubby at that.

At the top there are many great views and some souvineer shops. Behind the shops is a good court with lots of little restaurants. We were too early to eat there, but some where getting ready for the lunch crowds.