Famous Last Words of the Family Dining Experience

I have been with my husband for 13 years, two kids, three dogs, eight cars, and two houses. In that time I have learned there are some things you can change and some things you just have to learn to live with. For example, three cars into our relationship I got him to abandon his brand loyalty and get something with four doors and an engine that isn't about to fall out or blow up every time you pull out of the driveway. Obsessing for three weeks over which CD player is the best one to buy, never going to change, and never going to be the $30 Mega Schlock special.

The one thing that continues to evolve is our taste in food and restaurants. When we were first together it was a three times a week pasta special, one of them even contained hamburger. Then we moved out of the apartment and into our first house and we started having boiled chicken once a week and a take out night on Friday. Chinese, subs, pizza, and burgers were a sign that we had arrived. Then our second child and second dog came along and we moved up to casual dining at East Side Mario's. I don't think there are even any more of them in existence. Now we were treating ourselves to the once in a great while trip to The Olive Garden or if we were really feeling giddy The Red Lobster. We were big time!

That's when the shake up happened. Restaurants suddenly started basing their entire menu on the Ponderosa Principal. Ponderosa had a three million item salad bar you could make unlimited trips to while you were eating your cafeteria style steak delight. They realized the cash potential in offering the salad and ice cream bar at a reasonable price without the entrée and a dining style previously unprecedented shot off for the stratosphere. Pretty soon all of our casual dining establishments went to salad bars that ran the perimeter of the room or and all you can eat soup, salad, and bread option on the menu. What a value! How could you go wrong? So what if nothing was spectacular tasting? Who cared if the nacho cheese came in a ten-gallon can instead of being a block of melted cheddar? So soup and salad are not the tastiest things on the menu, does it really matter when you can gorge yourself to the point of suffocation?

Where did we get this mentality? When did we decide it was okay to give up quality for quantity? Since when is it satisfying to eat a whole bunch of stuff you don't really like instead of eating a decent amount of something you truly enjoy and desire? Sadly, and much to the chagrin of many a wife and girlfriend, men seem to be infinitely more charmed by this scenario.

As if we weren't brainwashed enough there was a new idea on the horizon that would plunge us all into the abyss of mediocre dining experiences. The day every chef in the states dreaded dawned in the parking lot of the local shopping center, the rumors were true, there was a restaurant called THE BUFFET (cue dramatic music)! A shaft of light broke through the clouds and shined down on a salad bar, an ice cream bar, a carving station, a bank of chaffing dishes filled to the brim with fried dried out bits of unidentifiable protein, and a line of potato and rice based fillers. Oh boy!

This blossomed into Country Buffets Incorporated, City Buffets Nationwide, Town and Country Buffets United, and the kicker of them all, THE CHINESE BUFFET! Two words that should never be in the same sentence: Chinese and buffet. Chinese as in from China and buffet from the French referring to a sideboard or piece of furniture where food is laid out in a self serve manner. Nowhere have I been able to find a description of buffet that says, massive quantities of low quality over cooked dried out non-regionalized food for copious consumption. Somehow, and I'm not saying how, I'm not blaming it on the fragile state of excess the American mind lives in, we have distorted the definition of buffet. Again I am not blaming it on a society where anyone, even the president, can arbitrarily change the definition of a word to re-purpose it to justify deviant behavior.

My husband has a penchant for buffets. They have a carving station with ham and roast beef at the place in Warwick; in Worcester you can get oven-baked ham, in Johnston there are three kinds of chicken… It's endless. He knows where they are and what they have and he always knows someone who has eaten there and given it a rave review. Of course we just have to try it! With each new opening and each friendly push to join the grazing group of buffet bouncers there was a resounding cry of encouragement… How bad can it be? Let me tell you how bad it can be. If I have to choke down one more mouthful of celery tasting stuffing I may have to divorce him. I apologize in advance to those of you who love the buffet, or own the buffet, or work at the buffet, or conceptualized your own buffet but I have yet to go to a single one where the food has made me want to visit again. A little hint, yes celery salt is a great seasoning but it is not the only seasoning and it doesn't need to be on absolutely everything you make. If it is so dry it disintegrates in your hand or you have to hammer the fork into it to pick it up you shouldn't serve it. If the potatoes and rice are being chiseled out of the chaffing dish in neat little squares you should use them to tile your floor because they are probably no longer digestible. Imagine in the year 3506 the archeological dig pulls you out and there in your stomach a square of crystallized mashed potatoes, and several amber like nuggets (could be fish, could be chicken)… The lead archeologist taps his voice recording device, "and here we must have a king buried, his abdomen filled with precious stones."

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse there was a sudden glut of Chinese buffets in the area. They have sushi, and crab legs, and muscles, oh my! Again there are rave reviews from all factions of the friendship circle and we just have to go. We just can't get enough of the buffet. I was so close. I had made my stand, "No more restaurants with the word buffet as part of the title." I had stuck to it for almost a year when the badgering wore me down.

Yes, I know you are clutching your stomach in sympathetic agony. I feel your face scrunching up with the tangy thought of too much celery salt and your mouth thick with the paste of frying lard. I understand your desire to belch without even having to partake of the repast about to ruin my weekend.

How bad can it be? Why dread it before I get there? My father-in-law said it was the best buffet he'd ever gone to…okay now I'm scared and maybe by the time this is done I'll be scarred too. Forty miles and three choruses of how bad can it be later we arrived. The parking lot is pretty full for three in the afternoon. How bad can it be?

Sushi, six pieces, under warming lamps, crunchy rice, fish slices curling at the edges, utterly delectable on so many levels! In a large canister with a ladle barely poking out of the primordial ooze…oh sorry wanton soup…scrumptious! Some barely brown rice with crispy bits that could have been meat or vegetables piled a foot off the warming tray along side another with fourteen or fifteen mushy spaghetti noodles and ten dented peas enticed you to the third station. Station four found those perennial Chinese favorites steaming up the sneeze guard, chicken fingers, doughnuts, and be still my beating heart, the coup de gras, the penultimate of ultimate Asian inspired finger food, the bacon wrapped hot dog! I could just die and go to heaven!

Are you kidding me? Bacon wrapped hot dogs! Who would have known bacon and hot dogs originated in China? I had no idea the Chinese were responsible for such a core piece of American culture. Color me embarrassed.

While I was reeling with this newly acquired knowledge my son slapped me in the face with yet another famous but little known Chinese secret. They invented pepperoni pizza! Imagine the generosity involved! If I invented pasta primavera (spaghetti with peas) and pizza I certainly wouldn't have let Italy claim it as their own.

And when I didn't think there could be anything more shocking my son asked for help with dessert. I'm thinking they've put the fortune cookies out of reach since they are probably hot from the oven so off I go to lend a hand, abandoning my own shrimp tail drowning in duck sauce. We approach a large freezer with sliding tops and there in lie six vats of various ice creams! Ice cream is a Chinese invention too! Is there nothing these people can't do? Six vats of ice cream plus one scoop equals six melting kaleidoscopes of color and a promise to take the boy to the local creamery when we get home.

This is my solemn vow, I am stating it here for all to read and to remind myself in the future, never ever again will I go to a restaurant with the word buffet in the name. If I go back on my word may I get a tapeworm and lose 75 pounds before they figure out what it is. As God as my witness I will never eat lousy buffet again!