Buffets

Americans are obsessed with buffets. Immigrants living in America have too become infatuated with the "all you can eat" concept of the buffet. A ton of food at a reasonable price. What else can one ask for?

Buffets can be categorized by food type or meal spicificity like how you might find breakfast buffets, seafood buffets or pizza and pasta buffets. Then there are the ethnicity based buffets, like Indian, Thai, Italian or the kings of them all, the Chinese buffet. Buffets can also be just general full menu spreads, serving anything from soups and salads, to pot roast or fried chicken and naturally several types of desserts. There are of course wedding and Casino buffets too, but there's just only so much one can write about buffets.

Most buffet restaurants seem to cater to a slightly lower income crowd who might also not be as knowledgable on proper dietary guidelines as taught in primary school. They can be a fun place to go people watch although sort of mean-spirited.

One such chain of general purpose buffets is called The Golden Corral. It's a place I visit with some of my colleagues from work maybe 4 times a year. The three most common consumer archetypes at an establishment of this type would be:

1. The obese elderly or mentally challenged day care/nursing home tour group
2. The 30-50 something male laborer/painter/construction guy
3. The starry-eyed Latin American or Eastern European immigrant

Not as common would be the group I take, which consists of 3-6 well dressed and fairly fit designers, using napkins and forks AND knives. I had never been to such a place before 3 years ago, which was something that I was proud of. I was always sort of grossed out by buffets and particularly the fact that they all had that glass "sneeze guard" over all the food, which means that people must really sneeze and that guard couldn't possibly deflect all of the sneeze particles. Well, one regretful visit led to a return and then several more followed.

Since then it has become a sort of tradition that we take all the newbies to the "GC" as we call it, to sort of break them in and test their will and eating prowess. Today was one of those such days. Our newest designer is a fit young lad who suitably had never been to the GC. We built up the experience for him before hand, and as we arrived, paid, grabbed our stack of clean plates and sat at our table, he knew we had only told him the good parts. Ed our server came by just to ask us if we wanted a basket of rolls and to let us know that if we needed anything to ask him, "my name's Ed, just ask for anything".

My mates and I grabbed our "round 1" plates and headed for the buffet. Newbie was bringing up the rear and crossed paths with Ed again. He says to Ed, "yeah, I need to follow the veterans to see how this is done". To which Ed responds "If it ain't nailed down, you can eat it".

Well put Ed, well put indeed.

Indian Food

I really like Indian food. I live very near my favorite Indian restaurant, Ambar India, and carry out food from there on average once a week. I suppose most of what we get there would be considered southern Indian, but to me it's all just the same, delicious.

Ironically, I have not always liked Indian food and in fact once so detested the smell of curry wafting out of the ventilation stacks of the 5 other Indian restaurants near me that I would cross the street dodging curry fumes like they were Tsetse flies.

I like the fact that no matter what your mood, occasion or time of day, Indian food can satisfy your needs. Always there, always ready to please. It's pretty much always consistent in its taste and preparation. Sure it differs quite a bit from one area of the world to the next, but again, still delicious. It's almost as universal as pizza.

It's this overall reliability in the food though that puzzles me. Not so much in the food really, but in the proprietors of MY Indian restaurant. I have been a faithful diner at Ambar for around 7 years. Since I moved 1/2 mile away 6 years ago, I would say that my wife and I on average have carried out food from there at least once a week. I call it in, I give my name (I enunciate very clearly so they can understand what I'm saying), I leave my telephone number, they tell me it'll be 15-20 minutes or so and I hang up. After about 15 minutes I drive up (yes, a bit lazy I know), park across the street illegally and run in. This is where the mystery strikes me every time. I walk up to the counter and the all look at me like I'm from another planet. I tell them "yes, hi, um I'm here to pick up an order for Chase". They look at me, then look on the tags of the several bags of food carefully lined up on the counter searching for my name. Eventually they find it, I pay and I leave.

This is what kills me! No matter how many times I go there and no matter how many pleasantries I try to exchange with the proprietors, for some reason they never, EVER remember me?!? What's up with that?