My dad loved a buffet, or, as we used to call them growing up in Minnesota, a smorgasbord. These giant, mind-blowing restaurant spreads were still something of a novelty for a Midwestern kid in the 1960s, even if the basic concept wasn’t that far removed from those familiar church basement potluck suppers and extended family gatherings where everybody brought dishes to share. Still, dining out was a special experience in our family, and as kids we marveled at the sheer excess, variety, and freedom of choice afforded by the all-you-can-eat buffet. We looked forward to our infrequent trips to the Twin Cities, when we would often be treated to a local smorgasbord. There was something so exotic and decadent about these meals, which were almost ridiculously copious in comparison with the more modest and even spartan fare we were accustomed to at home. The basic components of the Midwestern buffet haven’t changed much in thirty years: a selection of meats, tubs of congealing condiments, mystery casseroles, and the kinds of frothy and fluorescent fruit salads that might plausibly be classified as plebian exotica.
My father never did get tired of buffets, but for the rest of us, I think, our enjoyment of the experience was forever ruined the day my brother threw up in the serving line at the old Jolly Troll Smorgasbord in Golden Valley. There were plenty of painless potlucks and trips through even the most unappetizing of buffet lines in the years that followed my brother’s humiliation; but at some point I acquired a profound fear of anything suggestive of a buffet. For a number of years now, the gag reflex has been my helpless reaction to such mass assembly-line productions of food prepared by an army of strangers and displayed like exhibits in a criminal trial. Even a stolen glance at the mounded plates of my table neighbors can summon a wave of nausea.
I am not exaggerating, nor am I being a snob. My misery is very real. And I know from unscientific research and purely anecdotal experience that I am not alone. I’m going to make the brazen and perhaps crazy assumption that there are thousands, if not millions, of others out there who share my pain, although, as far as I’m aware, this affliction—let’s call it Buffet Syndrome—has never been properly diagnosed or understood.
Perhaps this fear is psychosomatic, a manifestation of my soul sickness with general American sprawl and our culture of conspicuous consumption. For what, really, is an all-you-can-eat buffet but a sort of culinary strip mall, an arcade of debased appetites, and a microcosm of the culture’s infatuation with the gargantuan?
Like so many other things that repulse me, buffets are a personal fascination. I am eager to understand why it is that something that obviously gives pleasure to so many other Americans causes me such distress. It would be easy enough to see in my revulsion some instinctive class reaction. Buffets, after all, seem like solidly proletarian feeding grounds. But those are my people; I come from that world, and I’m an otherwise entirely undiscriminating eater. I’m almost as uncomfortable dining in a fine restaurant as I am standing in a buffet line—although my discomfort there is a product of class, fueled almost entirely by feelings of being an interloper. And certainly the displays of gluttony you occasionally see in, say, the Four Seasons are every bit as offensive as the scrums that can occur at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Whatever its origins, I resolved to conquer this fear of the buffet, and to tackle the problem by adopting the G. Gordon Liddy approach. Liddy, you may recall, tried to overcome a childhood fear of rats by capturing one, and cooking and eating it. My own strategy would not be quite so drastic. I would dine at the Old Country Buffet.
It took quite a long time to actually carry through this decision, however. I procrastinated for many months, then spent several more weeks trying to talk myself into driving to an Old Country Buffet near my home. I also lobbied my wife, numerous friends, acquaintances, and food experts to accompany me, with no success. Even the prospect of a free dinner, not to mention the additional “all-you-can-eat” enticement, wasn’t enough to persuade even my most undiscriminating friends. I would, I realized with growing trepidation, have to go it alone.
“Certainly it is now unfashionable to overeat in public,” M.F.K. Fisher observed in An Alphabet for Gourmets. “It is safe to say, I think, that never again in our civilization will gluttony be condoned, much less socially accepted, as it was at the height of Roman decadence, when a vomitorium was as necessary a part of any well-appointed home as a powder room is today, and throat ticklers were as common as our Kleenex.”
Fisher was writing those words in the wake of the privations brought about as a result of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and one can only wonder what she would make of gluttony’s triumphant comeback in America.
These days, of course, the buffet is a staple feature of many tourist towns, cruise ships, and restaurants, from those offering standard cafeteria-style cooking to neighborhood and strip-mall establishments serving up luncheon troughs of all manner of ethnic fare. For those averse to the steam tables with their crusted and curdled offerings, the lumpen grotesqueries of the serving line, and the small comfort of the sneeze guard, these ubiquitous monuments to American appetite and excess are an unavoidable horror. God help any of them who might venture to this country’s playgrounds of the lowest common denominator—Las Vegas, Branson, the Wisconsin Dells. In such places it’s appallingly clear that the buffet is the prototypical intersection of natural human gluttony and American vulgarity.
I don’t much enjoy the experience of watching other people eat, yet I’m nonetheless a helpless voyeur in restaurants. People are so vulnerable when they’re shoveling food into their faces, so exposed; eating is raw psychology in one of its purest forms, and it can make for a shocking, even bruising spectacle. Perhaps, however, I’m projecting. After watching people eat for so many years I’ve become a self-conscious eater myself, uncomfortable dining in a room full of strangers. The buffet, of course, ups the ante all around. Its atavistic, herds-and-hordes approach elevates eating to the level of a Darwinian competition and a grotesque spectator sport. As a dining experience, a buffet can be social to the point of bacchanalian (large, loud groups) and yet also almost heartbreakingly lonely (solitary diners alone with their hunger). There are additional aggravations: the forced camaraderie of the serving line, the ogling and probing of the selections, the shared utensils and hands of strangers shoveling divots in the vats of mashed potatoes and creamed corn.
Then, of course, there are the old mysteries, the sense in which the buffet, as a throwback to those church basement potlucks and family gatherings, is an archive of food memories and appetites: mounds of pastel fluff, gelatin cubes the color of ox blood, some frenzied-looking concoction of raisins and shredded carrots, casseroles concealed beneath a crust of what appears to be baked sawdust and laminated cheese, and meatballs that look as if they have been boiled in formaldehyde. And finally, there are the participants (there seems to be no other word for the buffet habitué): the true gluttons who gracelessly negotiate the aisles with impossibly loaded plates; the timid spinsters with their tiny portions of cottage cheese and fruit salad; the feral children making ugly collages on their plates.
Naturally, this whole phenomenon terrifies most nutritionists. In a culture where rampant obesity and all manner of unchecked appetites war constantly with the mixed messages from the health and beauty industries and the harsh, guilt-tripping realities of global starvation, the all-you-can-eat ethos is a powerful and malleable metaphor for American
immodesty, disproportion, solipsism, and insecurity. When you’re on deck in a buffet line, staring down the lineup of food stretching away before you, do you feel a sense of weakness or power? What, really, does “all you can eat” mean to you? While on the one hand those words are a generous invitation of sorts, there’s also no doubt that the phrase poses an open challenge for many. It also stokes the average American’s fierce desire to get the biggest possible bang for their buck. For some people, the basic convenience and economy of the buffet make it an easy and affordable dining choice, particularly for senior citizens and families with children. For others, it represents a grim expedition of pure endurance eating, a sort of unofficial arena for culinary gladiators.
There certainly seem to be a number of biblical injunctions against the various sins and indiscretions that might be committed at the buffet. Gluttony is, after all, a deadly sin, the violation of which, according to Dante, carries a harsher punishment in the afterlife than unchecked sexual appetites. It is also, as Francine Prose has noted, the only sin whose effects are prominently written on the body. And a buffet can be a terrible temptation to even the most restrained of omnivores. I don’t doubt that it is possible to violate all seven of the deadly sins at, say, one of those free (and free-for-all) steam-table spreads laid out at company holiday parties or media events or casinos. It could be that the feat has already been accomplished, perhaps on countless occasions. I have often enough witnessed the riot of appetite, the cutthroat competition in the serving line, the heaping plates of mismatched food, the anger over missed opportunities, and the post-buffet torpor. I have seen sated buffet vultures splayed at tables amid the ruins of their repast, looking for all the world like bleary-eyed Yanomamo tribesmen in a stupor brought on by the snorting of powerful jungle hallucinogens.
In March 2004, there was a much-publicized buffet melee at a senior citizens’ home in Winter Haven, Florida. An eighty-six-year-old resident took umbrage at another man’s handling of salad bar offerings with his fingers. Words were exchanged, punches were thrown, someone was eventually bitten, and three seniors were taken to a hospital for treatment. I’m sure it was only the advanced age of the combatants that elevated this otherwise surely not uncommon story to the status of national news. I imagine that it’s only a matter of time until the phrase “buffet melee” becomes a staple of the American vernacular, and trips as comfortably from the tongue as “road rage.”
Some people credit a man named Herb McDonald with creating America’s first all-you-can-eat buffet. This was in Las Vegas in the late 1940s, and McDonald, a legendary publicist and civic booster, introduced his innovation at El Rancho, the first hotel on the Vegas Strip. El Rancho’s One Dollar Chuckwagon Midnight Buffet, or the Buckaroo Chuck as it came to be known, was immensely popular and widely imitated. It promised “every possible variety of hot and cold entrees to appease the howling coyote in your innards in the late night-predawn hours … everything you can eat, and you’ll want it all.” There are those who would challenge Herb McDonald’s claim as America’s pioneer buffeteer, however, giving the honor instead to Norman Asing, who was the proprietor of the first Chinese restaurant in the country, Macao and Woosung. That establishment opened in 1849 in California. Almost one hundred years before the El Rancho launched its Buckaroo Chuck, Asing is said to have offered his customers an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, also for a buck a pop.
Today, the undisputed king of the all-you-can-eat concept is Buffets Inc., the Eagan-based behemoth that operates 376 restaurants in thirty-seven states, including 176 Old Country Buffets. Roe Hatlen and C. Dennis Scott, veterans of the buffet business, founded the company in 1983, and it is now the thirteenth largest restaurant chain in America.
The original Old Country Buffet, the company’s flagship restaurant, is still located in Richfield, in the middle of a warren of typical suburban development. I eventually summoned the courage to venture out to Richfield on a Thursday night. The parking lot was packed, which served only to increase my anxiety. Inside the restaurant, I discovered that the cashier’s station is situated at the end of a long hallway, which is separated from the dining area by a sort of retaining wall. One gains admission to Old Country Buffet by paying the cashier in advance (an adult dinner costs $9.57) and receiving a ticket, after which you pretty much have the run of the place.
I took a small booth along a divider in the middle of the room, and immediately assumed what I felt was the appropriately abject posture for someone who dines alone at an all-you-can-eat buffet. A giant bee was wandering the dining room, dispensing balloons to children. This, it turned out, was O-C-Bee, the company mascot, and it was family night at Old Country Buffet. A woman was painting children’s faces and applying temporary tattoos—dragons, tigers, that sort of thing—to tiny hands and arms. I was struck by the astonishing diversity of the clientele; in fact, I’ve never encountered such a broad cross section of melting-pot demographics anyplace in Minnesota. Virtually every ethnic group in the Twin Cities was represented, often by large, double-digit gatherings that spilled across random clusters of tables.
There were also couples of all ages, most prominently seniors, and small parties of younger men, as well as a surprising number of solo diners like me. These were mostly male, and many of them gave off a distinct Travis Bickel vibe. One guy who was seated at a table adjacent to mine wore camouflage pants and an oversized vinyl parka with a fur-lined hood, and when one of the restaurant employees stopped by to gather up some of his empty plates, I heard him remark, “The pain takes all my energy.”
Surely for many of the immigrants and seniors, the excesses of Old Country Buffet are all the more impressive given shared memories of privations endured and whatever conflated version of the American Dream they might have once harbored. It’s sort of a modern version of Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty that provided a vision of abundance and leisure for exhausted, overworked peasants in the Middle Ages. In Cockaigne, every day was a festival of idleness and satiety, with mountains of cheese, cooked geese falling from the sky, and roasted pigs wandering the village begging to be eaten.
The décor at Old Country Buffet is deliberately low-key, down-home Americana, with lots of wood veneer, muted colors, and Norman Rockwell prints on the walls. The large dining room is broken up by low, unobtrusive partitions that allow smaller parties to have a modicum of privacy. Even on a crowded night the din of the place was as muted as the color scheme.
I had deliberately avoided the serving stations when I came in. I needed to get acclimated, to study the lay of the land and steel myself for my first tentative sortie to the actual buffet.
Thankfully, OCB had a sort of buffet counselor on hand, in the form of Cathy Milota, the Richfield restaurant’s Community Representative. After I got settled in my booth, I noticed her, an attractive and amiable older woman who was working the room, chatting up the patrons at their tables. It was apparent that many of them were on familiar terms with Milota, and it didn’t take her long to zoom in on the novice in her midst.
It turns out that every Old Country Buffet has its own Community Representative, whose job is to serve as an educational and marketing goodwill ambassador for the restaurant. It was plenty clear that Milota is good at her job and relishes the opportunity to provide support and guidance to even the most buffet-phobic of customers. Though she spends much of her time actually out in the community, s
hepherding the company’s literacy programs and spreading the OCB gospel, family nights are Milota’s baby, and it is she who handles the face painting (and the face-to-face table interactions) on Thursdays.
Milota and service manager Leslie Lozano took turns sitting at my table, attempting to ease my fears and correct my apparently common misconceptions regarding the Old Country Buffet experience. They work hard, they assured me, to provide customers with nutritional information and education on healthy food combinations, and each restaurant strives to provide the broadest possible array of foods so that there will be, as Milota said, “just about anything for anybody, or at least something for everybody.” Lozano was as no-nonsense as Milota was charismatic, and made it clear that she has no qualms about cutting off customers who might get carried away with the whole idea of all-you-can-eat. This is apparently the buffet manager’s version of the bartender’s prerogative, and Lozano clearly intends to run an orderly ship. If she has anything to say about it, there will be no records for endurance eating broken on her watch.
Both of these women struck me as the best sort of non-threatening true believers. Buoyed by their enthusiasm and the seemingly orderly spectacle at the tables around me, I finally felt emboldened to approach the actual buffet.
And there, at the front of the restaurant, is where the true compassionate genius of Old Country Buffet is most in evidence. Rather than simply heaping the various offerings along a seemingly endless serving line (with meat carvers waiting at the end, when the plates of customers are already overloaded), OCB has instituted what it calls a “scatter bar” system. What this essentially means is that on even the busiest nights, patrons are spared the discomfiting jostling-at-the-troughs atmosphere that characterizes so many of the more nightmarish buffets. Instead, there are six stations—two salad bars, a carving board, separate islands for hot entrees and vegetables, and a dessert bar. The claustrophobia of the usual buffet experience is abated by a judicious use of space, and each of the offerings is prepared continuously throughout the day and put out in small, controlled batches to prevent waste and the kind of degradation that can make for enduringly unpleasant associations for the buffet-phobic.
I was most pleased to discover that, despite the crowded dining room, I never found myself in any sort of real line at any of the stations, which allowed me to ogle the food at my leisure. Admittedly, some of the things I saw there gave me pause. The sight of chicken fried steak, for instance, never fails to induce a queasiness that is rooted somewhere in a childhood food trauma, and the tubs of macaroni and cheese and baked beans also put a dent in my already shaky appetite. There was a raisin and marshmallow salad that was frankly terrifying, and several versions of the sort of whipped gelatin creation that gives me the heebie-jeebies.
That said, I was proud of my persistence. I made four halfhearted but relatively pain-free tours of the stations. The salad bar had plenty of tasty offerings, and I made easy work of a plate of fresh fruit. I also enjoyed a small portion of spaghetti with a vegetarian tomato sauce, and a slice of the pork loin from the carving station. Nothing, however, made me quite so happy as the miniature corn dogs. They were so good that I went back for seconds, and could easily envision a future visit during which I would eat nothing else. In fact, had I been able to convince anyone with a sadistic or competitive bent to join me at the OCB, I might easily have been goaded to gorge myself on mini corn dogs to the point of actual sickness.
While that revelation troubled me, it was also a triumph. I don’t imagine I’ll be champing at the bit at any future potluck suppers, or make a habit of patronizing buffet restaurants. But I do believe that it was only my long-cultivated reserve—a resistance I sensed was eroding with each subsequent and emboldening trip to the buffet stations—that ultimately kept the beast in me from running amok.
