Buffet Review — Atlantic Buffet (Marietta, Ga.)

What's more American than eating a plate of burritos, sushi, pizza, chicken tenders and ice cream at the same time, anyway?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I believe it was Tocqueville who once said America’s inherent greatness could be found within its churches.

Well, if that fruity Froth were alive today and exploring modern America, surely he’d change his answer to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I mean, is there anything that demonstrates the sheer exceptionalism of the American experience more than being able to eat a virtually endless amount of food while being surrounded by an assortment of really, really fat people of all races and ethnicities?

I’m utterly obsessed with buffets as both a caloric and sociological institution, and thankfully, living in the metro Atlanta area means I’m privy to about a billion of them, ranging from national franchise emporiums of gluttony to bottomless breakfast bars owned by former WCW World Heavyweight ‘rasslin champeens.

Each and every one of them has a certain character and charm all its own, but really, the smorgasbord of foodstuffs is only half the consumer experience. The other side of the equation is the ambiance of the experience, that totally bizarre (and patently American) sensation of eating until you’re about to puke while surrounded by perfect strangers who are also eating until they’re about to puke. Really, going to a buffet in the Deep South is about as close to visiting the Martian bar from Total Recall as any of us are gonna’ get. Sure, we all come for the buckets of fried cheese sticks, butterfly shrimp and brown gravy, but it’s being able to binge and purge while surrounded by people who look like extras from a Frank Henenlotter movie that truly makes the American buffet-going experience such a wonderful rite.

Well, The Atlantic Buffet Sushi and Grill in Marietta represents pretty much everything I love about the local buffet scene and then some.

You’ve got the multiculturalism (drug-addicted white women who weigh 78 pounds breaking bread with 4’8 tall Mexican men, while 300-pound black women from the Caribbean cackle loudly over macaroni and cheese while lanky Cambodian immigrants give them the stank-eye.) Then there’s the deliciously grimy backdrop (it’s situated in a strip mall parking lot that’s half vacant properties and half wandering street urchins named Marley begging you for a loosey.) And, of course, you can’t forget the robust menu (which, as you will soon see, runs the gamut from egg rolls to pizza to enchiladas to ice cream, just like the place was Juwanna Mann’s refrigerator in Friday the 13th Part V.)

But words won’t do us too much good here. Rather, let’s let the photographic evidence speak for its goddamn self, why don’t we?

Before we get into the menu at Atlantic Buffet, I suppose it's only fitting that we'd first examine its aesthetics. The building itself takes up a pretty hefty amount of strip mall space,  maybe about 20,000-30,000 square feet altogether. For a metro-Atlanta buffet in a pretty scummy part of town, it was actually astonishingly clean ... especially considering I stopped by on a weekday afternoon, when you'd expect the crew to be half-assing it like motherfuckers.

As I was saying, the restaurant was way cleaner than anticipated. You couldn't eat off the floors or anything like that, but it was nonetheless nice to walk into the buffet knowing I probably wouldn't get salmonella from simply touching one of their forks. Still, it did have a pretty weird smell to it ...

...which I would attribute to the water fountain located smackdab in the middle of the lobby. You know how fountains at the shopping mall kinda' smell like a mixture of Purex and copper? Well, that is precisely what this one smelled like, too. Granted, you'd have to be pretty close to it to whiff said offending odor, but you have to consider these guys nothing short of ballsy to put an adornment that close to the condiment section.

As far as the architecture, it had a weird seafood restaurant vibe to it, with just a few hints here and there of an Asian influence (i.e., that giant fucking Chinese star behind the cash register.) But then again, with all those jugs of vinegar and paprika laying around everywhere, it also had just a mild country buffet atmosphere going on, too, which — considering the shifting demographics of the metro Atlanta region — can't help but seem just a smidge symbolic.

The furniture is exactly what you would think it would be. Heavily used, slightly tattered, with chipped wooden tables and pleather chairs no doubt caving in from many a buffet eater's suddenly engorged asshole. Still, the floors were a lot cleaner than I'd expect, and however scrubbed off the tables last did a pretty good job ... there were no signs of vomit or discarded wasabi sauce anywhere in my dining area.

Don't even ask what was in the giant hand sanitizer bottle on the left. I didn't check, and I didn't want to check, but I can promise you it wasn't hand sanitizer. Along those same lines, I can only imagine the plebs who walk in and just assume the BBQ and honey mustard pumps are for ketchup and regular mustard and wind up jamming their mozzarella sticks in the "wrong" condiment. I bet they really feel bad about themselves afterwards, huh?

Interestingly enough, only the bottom rack of the pizza containment unit contained pizza (if I remember correctly, it was sausage ... so random, I know.) The things on top were garlic rolls, underneath those were those spinach things you get at Greek restaurants and below that was a different kind of garlic bread ... this one, a little less cooked than the ones on top. Needless to say; these things weren't exactly my favorite selections at the buffet.

Even around 3 p.m. the good stuff was starting to get picked clean. I can't remember what kind of fish they were serving, but apparently it was pretty popular with the locals, since that shit just couldn't stay in stock. As a general rule I don't eat oysters even from ritzy restaurants, so naturally, I didn't even bother with the half-shelled offerings here. Oh, and if you're wondering what's on the plate? It's either a chicken dumpling or a prop from that old David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ. I'll let you decide for yourself which is which.

See, I wasn't bullshitting you about that stuff going fast. These patrons were literally leaving nothing but water behind, which sorta begs the question ... why isn't anyone touching their mac and cheese, exactly?

On the left we have some sort of seafood crabcake/salmon clusterfuck and on the right ... uh, a pot roast, I want to say? I'm not really a big fan of either dishes, so I opted to skip the taste test here ... but not before taking some photographic evidence of the culinary crime scene.

Nothing says "modern America" like burritos at an Asian buffet in a neighborhood that's 80 percent black. What's even more surprising, though? Those things were actually surprisingly decent ... and way more flavorful than anything you'd get at Del Taco, for damn sure.

Now we're getting to the good stuff. Greasy asparagus, Mongolian beef, sesame chicken ... all legitimately yummy Chinese or Japanese or whatever fucking country it's supposed to come from. No jokes here — this fare is simply too delicious to make fun of, so let's keep chugging along, why don't we?

The red stuff is a thick, gooey, chili sauce. The yellow stuff that looks suspiciously like a bucket of piss? Well, that's actually something even grosser ... liquefied butter. I literally gained ten pounds and heart disease just smelling this stuff right here.

From left: cheese quesadillas, greasy zucchini and sauteed mushrooms. I'm not sure which country has that kind of cuisine, but hot fuck, do I want to visit it someday.

All these are raw ingredients reserved for the hibachi chefs. Alas, they're also out in the open and easily accessible to any and all wandering buffet customers ... perhaps you can see where there might be some lawsuit-inducing confusion here. Strangely enough, this seems to be a common practice in Asian buffets throughout Atlanta and its hinterlands; in fact, I don't think I've ever been to a thematic buffet that didn't have the raw ingredient buckets placed absurdly close to the normal buffet fodder.

Speaking of raw food, here's the sushi bar. Long story short, all of this stuff is fucking tremendous and if you have taste buds, you'll probably love it. Hey ... it might be worth the stomach cancer.

This is what I like to call the nominal dessert section. I mean, who the fuck considers gelatin and grapes and cut up bananas with grape shit smeared on them desserts? Thankfully, the good shit was right around the corner ...

... that's an entire fridge of single-wrapped brownies and red velvet cake, kids. I'm not going to tell you precisely how many of those things I had, but I can promise you this: it was more than 17.

But that wasn't the extent of their sweet stuff, though. They also had a cavalcade of cookies (which really isn't that uncommon), but this was the first time I've ever been to a buffet that not only served rice crispy treats, but several different variations. Of course, they didn't have the General Mills Monster Cereals Gangbang Special, but then again, it wasn't Halloweentime when I ate there, either.

As for the ice cream, it was your usual assortment. You had vanilla, rocky road, chocolate and cookies and creme. The stuff was really hard, though, and the scoop was way too small to spoon anything out efficiently without getting your hands in the congealed dairy treat. And no, I have no clue what kind of brands they were, so don't even bother asking.

Whatever it was, though, the ice cream was pretty solid. After cramming down God knows how many milligrams of sodium and downing about three cups of instant coffee during the affair (that's a good trick for frequent buffet patrons — not only does the java curb your appetite a little, it also prevents you from filling up your belly with other liquids, thus allowing you to scientifically cram more food in there) I was in dire need of something cold and sugary. You think I'm joking, but according to my FitBit my heart was hitting about 129 beats per minute just trying to process the maddening surfeit of food I just ate, and even in the middle of freaking winter I was sweating like a whore in church. So, yeah, asides and shit; I really liked the cookies and creme ice cream and you probably will, too.

Let's take a closer look at my own individual dishes, why don't we? The sushi bar is the best place to start, naturally, and as you can no doubt see for yourself, these guys have a TON of variety. The fried thingies with the boom-boom sauce on it was my favorite, but the little wanton packet filled with shredded fish wasn't bad either; that, and I goddamn loved their red pepper paste ... that stuff is just plain exquisite.

And here's a closer look at those aforementioned pork dumplings and Greek spinach buns. They may not look very appetizing in photograph form, but I really enjoyed both offerings, considering they presented two totally diametric gustatory experiences; one was greasy and chewy, the other was flaky and buttery. That's a hell of a combination, really — maybe not "buddy cop movie" duo good, but quite good nonetheless.

Outside of the burrito and cheese-stuffed shrooms, I have no idea what the hell any of this stuff is supposed to be. I think there's some shrimp and chicken fingers in there, though. That orange and yellow thing in the middle, though, could be anything ... and I do mean anything.

Grilled (read: oily as fuck) asparagus buried under more shrimp, Mongolian beef and sesame chicken. If your stomach doesn't start rumbling just looking at this, congratulations on being a.) a vegetarian, b.) a pussy or c.) come to think of it, there's not really much of a difference between a.) and b.), actually.

And we wrap up our whirlwind tour of the buffet's cuisine with the usual subjects; coconut shrimp, crab rangoon and an egg roll. Not that you really need me to tell you this, but this stuff really sticks to your ribs, and I literally gained five pounds over the course of one 60-minute eatin' (I weighed myself before and after, so that is mathematically indisputable, motherfucker.) Even better, I only spent about $8.99 on the whole meal, which is a steal, really, considering I easily ate at least that much in cheese quesadillas alone.

Oh, one last thing. They didn't have a game room with any coin-ops, but they did have a whole bunch of gumball toy dispensers, all of which looked basic as shit. I mean, the NFL stickers are kinda' cool, I guess, but who in the fuck wants a temporary tattoo of a pizza? Ditto for those crappy bouncy balls on the bottom left corner. Heads up, parents: if your kid is entertained by that stuff for more then two minutes, he officially has autism.

I'm not sure what the buffet owner's name is, but the guy behind the waving golden cat was a pretty nice chap who didn't give one fuck that I was taking pictures of everything like some sort of health inspector/paparazzi for burritos. In fact, I was so enchanted and enamored by my experience at The Atlantic Buffet that I even left them a huge tip of exactly $2.12, which is probably the most I've left at any restaurant so far in 2018. Hey, you folks deserve that change, and then some.

Interestingly enough, they also have a sister restaurant called — what else? — Pacific Buffet, which is about ten miles away in Kennesaw. That one I've been to many times in my youth, and while it's a bit ritzier buffet, I still think I prefer The Atlantic. For one thing, it's considerably larger and the menu has more nuance, but really, it's the atmosphere of the place that drew me in. It just feels like some sort of urban sprawl utopia, a place that could be either 20 years into the future or 20 years behind the times. Yes, it's a great place to eat General T'so chicken until your stomach begins to rupture, but it's an even better place to people watch. The animal kingdom has the watering hole, but in the land of man, we've got the line for more mayonnaise. And hers, indeed, is a sight to behold.

It didn't take too long to find The Atlantic's Yelp page, and their Facebook page is right here if you are curious. If you're ever in the 'burbs of Atlanta, I'd wholeheartedly recommend giving these guys a try. It's totally unpretentious, no-frills, straight-to-the-point, gimmick-free, kinda'-grimy-but-not-too-grimy buffet dining in its purest essence, and I'd love to dine there at least once a week, if I could. 

Except, you know, if I did that I'd probably weigh 400 pounds and die at age 38. Which kinda' begs the question; if these people literally live off this shit, how come you NEVER see fat people working at an Asian buffet? Methinks there's something major going on there that ought to be investigated. I mean, seriously ...

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I Tried BurgerFi's Beyond Meat Burger

Plus some stuff about The Brain That Wouldn't Die and the original The Night of the Living Dead, for some reason. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By and large, I don't like writing about my personal experiences for this blog. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's those cult of personality types who always make everything they write about revolve around themselves. Instead of writing about a specific subject or a specific event or a specific thing, they just blabber on and on about how damned dandy they, themselves, are and how great it is to be them and experience all the bullshit they experience. They're not writing to inform, or enlighten, or even entertain, they're writing or vlogging because, somehow, someway, it placates their enormous ego and ceaseless need for public affirmation. No matter what these kinds of people produce, the content has the same purpose: to make the blogger or writer or video maker feel an inflated sense of self-purpose and convince others that, if absolutely nothing else, their particular life experiences are WAY better and more noteworthy than the life experiences of their readers and viewers.

IF I'm going to write about my own exploits and sojourns, the objective experience has to be front and center. The article can't be here's me doing and saying all this shit while I'm at this place, it has to be look at all this shit at this place I was at recently. What was experienced is substantially more important than the person who experienced said events or happenings. That's a key characteristic that so much Internet content lacks, and without it, what a person writes or produces just doesn't have any historical weight. If you're going to take the time and the effort to extol your doings, you at least owe it to yourself and the grand collective to give us something that resembles an impartial, objective, factual explanation or description of whatever you're Instagramming or blogging about or putting on YouTube.

Which brings us to BurgerFi's Beyond Meat Burger. I never sat out to review it. In fact, up until the moment I saw the in-restaurant advertisement for it, I had no idea it even existed. By now, we all know how I converted from vegetarianism to not vegetarianism, and you better believe I have the extra 50 pounds to prove it. But that's an altogether different story for a different day and time, dear readers: what we've got to talk about today is a little place called Kennesaw, Ga.

I used to live there for awhile. It's not a bad place, all things considered. But I hadn't been through the downtown area in years - five, perhaps six - and when I got there (more on why I was returning in just a bit) I was gobsmacked by what I saw. Back then, the downtown area was downright rustic. You had a laundromat, a gas station, a pharmacy, this one restaurant space that was always going out of business and a KKK memorabilia store (and nope, I am not making that last one up, neither.) Well, today, there's a gigantic, massive senior living complex behind, in front of, and surrounding the little town I used to know, and it's probably only a matter of time until the whole thing gets razed for a Whole Foods and Menchie's Frozen Yogurt. Of course, there's not a whole lot of redevelopment that can be done in the area, since there's a CSX train track running right down the middle of it, and last time I checked, homeowners ain't too keen on blaring whistles at 2 in the morning and cargo containers of toxic waste flying off the railway into their living rooms. So I guess you could say residential development in Kennesaw probably ain't gonna' be on the table, but let's get real - if the powers that are in Kennesaw (including its crossdressing current mayor) had the legal ability, they'd have already leveled the whole goddamn thing and put up some sort of behemoth "mixed use" complex and given it a 50-year tax abatement. (Also, I just remembered: their second to last mayor got busted for sexual exploitation of a minor and is doing six consecutive 20-year-sentences in the slammer, and the city's still giving him pension money. Just a little sliver of local culture I figured you folks would enjoy being privy to.)

But ... asides. You see, the whole reason my and my gal we're there that night was because the city was putting on an outdoor spooky movie series all month long. You see, throughout October, every Friday night they were showing a separate double feature of semi-public domain movies, like Godzilla vs. Megalon and Roger Corman's original Little Shop of Horrors. Well, that night, they were showing The Brain That Wouldn't Die and the '68 version of The Night of the Living Dead back-to-back, and that's pretty much the closest we're probably gonna' get to the resurrection of Drive-Invasion these days, so of course we made it an official date night.

Now, before the movie started, we decided to hit up the nearby BurgerFi. For those of you not in the know, BurgerFi is one of those fly-by-night slightly more upscale burger joints like Freddy's and Five Guys and Smashburger that prides itself on selling real hamburgers and not the frozen-ass, microwaveable McDonald's shit. Their menu is also pretty kooky - I had never been to that precise location before, but I do recall hitting up the BurgerFi at the CNN Center and chowing down on this thing called the Conflicted Burger, which was a big ass double-decker sandwich with both a veggie patty and a real beef patty inside it. And if you think that's an unorthodox selection, wait 'til you get a load of their All Day Breakfast Burger, which comes with both a fried egg and a hearty squeezin' of maple syrup.

Technically, this is a co-branded product, since Beyond Meat is the third party beef supplier and you can buy their vegan patties at most grocery stores, anyhow. Even now, though, I struggle to see the difference between their burger and most of the other vegetarian, plant-based hamburger alternatives out there. Interestingly, the burger itself ain't 100 percent vegan, since it comes with American cheese and mayonnaise, but they do offer it in lettuce wrap form if you really want to drive home the whole "veggie" point.

Now, to the non-vegetarians out there, this may not be much to write home about. But as a survivor of the vegetarian lifestyle myself, I can tell you point blank that stuff like this is a real rarity. Sure, a lot of the hipper burger chains offer a default veggie burger, regardless, but you never really get one that could be considered on par with a normal burger. What I mean by that is, well, the veggie burger patties are always noticeably smaller than the REAL hamburger patties they sell. Like at Burger King, that little pansy-ass veggie patty is barely half the width of a real Whopper burger, and I've been to some places where the circumference of the veggie patties were even smaller than that. So all that to say, finding a big veggie burger that's actually as filling as a real burger at a fast food place is about as uncommon as finding a Skittle in a bag of M&Ms.

Just in terms of overall girth, the burger - which was a little under $8 with a soda and fries - is pretty dadgum heavy. There's a lot of stuff on top of the burger, as evident by the photo above. You've got your standard clam-shell covering of lettuce, a nice, gooey cheese square three relatively crisp pickle slices, and whatever you call the coalesced substance that forms when mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise all swirl together (is "kustardonnaise" too on the nose?) The bun itself, however, was pretty unremarkble, despite having the name of the franchise literally branded upon it. Which, naturally, really makes me want my own personalized branding iron. Do you think there's some company out there that does custom designs? Because I'd love to stamp all my grilled cheese sandwiches with the old Sega Dreamcast logo, or possibly flame seer a few swastikas into my next batch of King's Hawaiian sweet rolls.

And as for the burger itself? Eh, it was good, but like every other veggie burger out there, it just lacks the proper texture and mouthfeel. When you eat a real burger, there's a little bit of a rubbery feeling to it, with the granules of meat giving each individual bite a certain level of chewiness. Really, when you eat a hamburger what your tongue is tasting is the little pockets in between the beef where there isn't any beef. You know, because all burgers are basically just a bunch of individual particles of ground chuck clumped together and all. Well, the structural problem with veggie burgers is that you don't get that empty space between each bite. The thing doesn't fall apart when you bite into it like a real burger, because the whole damn thing is basically one long, continuous piece of protein. You might get some chewiness, but you never get maximum chewiness. The patties are never plump and juicy, they're always crispy and a little difficult to tear apart. The exterior, fried skin seems to want to pull off before you can sink your teeth into the plant meat, and while it might be a pretty decent gustatory experience overall, your taste buds just know it ain't the same experience.

So, long story short, the Beyond Meat Burger is pretty much the same as every other veggie burger patty out there. Which is weird as hell to me, since it isn't that hard to make a halfway decent faux-meatloaf dish out of vegetarian beef crumbles. With enough time, effort and molecular deftness, I'm sure Morningstar or Wise Foods or the people who make the Celebration Roast could give us a vegetarian patty that feels like a real hamburger, but the problem is they're all too busy trying to dream one up that tastes like a real hamburger. So yes, it is a good and very flavorful little hamburger imitator, but alas, it isn't exactly a flavor you haven't already eaten a million billion times before. And if that were the only takeaway from my visit to BurgerFi, I probably wouldn't have even bothered writing about it. Thankfully, I also stumbled across something else that I figured was worth a quick write-up ...

These Coca-Cola Freestyle machines are pretty much everywhere these days, and for me they're always worth tinkering with because so many restaurants get their own proprietary, brand-exclusive Franken-flavors. For example, Moe's has its own peach-flavored Mountain Dew imitator, while I've seen more than one movie theater offering some in-house exclusive L-T-O Coke flavors around Christmas time. Well, as it turns out, BurgerFi not only gets its own exclusive flavor mix-in from the House of Coke, they get their own exclusive soda brand, which, rather appropriately, is called FiLIME Fusion, and comes in both a regular and diet incarnation.

I guess the best way to describe the drink is a SUPER lime iteration of Sprite, but really, it's much more than that. If Sierra Mist and Mountain Dew had an illegitimate cola child, I'm pretty sure FiLIME Fusion is what it would taste like. The soda is much thicker than sprite, not just in terms of carbonation but also mouthfeel. I'm not quite sure what they put in the magical green elixir, but you can definitely taste the syrup tingling on your tongue. Of course, the thing that REALLY puts the LTO beverage over the top as its hue. This is easily the greenest cola I've ever seen, with a bright lime tone that makes the piss yellow Mountain Dew tincture we all know and love look downright jaundiced by comparison. I mean, this stuff looks eerily similar to the zombie-making juice from Re-Animator, which alone makes it a Halloween delicacy almost going out of your way to experience. And needless to say - it makes for some mighty fine refreshment during a back-to-back bill of pioneering, black and white horror movies from the 1960s.

Now, you motherfuckers know I miss me some Drive-Invasion, and if it's Halloween-time I'm going to take outdoor horror movie-watching anyway I can get it - especially when it's a rare opportunity to screen an unheralded genre mini-classic like The Brain That Wouldn't Die in public for free. The thing is, there's just one little catch with the set-up these guys were working with. Remember earlier, when I told you the downtown area is situated right in the middle of a busy train track? Well, take a wild guess what kept happening during the movie. I guess you could say the blaring train whistles gave the experience a little bit of atmosphere, but it's not ambiance when the shit keeps happening every 25 minutes for five minutes at a time - it's just plain annoying, that's what. 

Still, for those of you who've never seen this flick, it's probably worth going out of your way to witness. For a movie that came out in 1962 (although it was completed in 1959), it's pretty graphic. Not only does the whole movie revolve around a severed head going fucking insane while her husband runs around date raping go-go-girls so he can steal their torsos and make his wife "complete" again, it's also one of the earliest movies in U.S. cinema history to feature an extended arm ripping sequence. And we're not talking some pussy-ass arm ripping, neither; we're talking a nearly five minute sequence where a scientist gets his arm yanked off by a retard Bigfoot monster in the closet and he literally runs around the house bleeding everywhere for five minutes before he finally buys the farm. Of course, most people remember this best for being on MST3K, but I still say it's a hell of a little movie in its own right. Give it a try if you haven't - it's one of those underappreciated gems that definitely deserves more reverence than it gets.

And that's our segue to the second feature of our double bill, the all-time immortal Night of the Living Dead from 1968. Like all other non-retards on the planet, I strongly prefer Dawn of the Dead to this one, but all things factored into the equation, I still consider this one of the 100 best American horror movies ever made. Looking back on it (and this is the first time I've watched the movie in about four years), it's amazing just how much of the movie is described and not seen. Probably half of the movie is dedicated to either scenes of characters talking about the near death they escaped getting to the farmhouse (in particular, the black dude's opus about plowing through a whole bunch of flaming zombie motherfuckers in his truck) or non-diegetic scenes of people wholly unrelated to the rest of the character drama filling in the story plot holes on television. Things don't get really cuckoo crazy until maybe the last 20 minutes of the movie, and before that the whole thing is pretty much carried by people simply talking about all the shit that's trying to kill them. Now that's how you do shit on a budget; had Romero had a higher budget, the whole thing would've been mostly by-the-books, come-on-guys-let's-dodge-all-the-monsters tomfoolery, but because the money wasn't there, he had to focus on a truly character (and dialogue) driven horror story. Well, that, and some really gross out stuff at the end where you see zombie daughters stab their mamas to death with garden trowels and fat, nekkid undead dudes ripping out victims' guts and chewing on them like saltwater taffy. That's a good way to make your movie stand out, too, I suppose.

Really, the movie remains important for two things: number one, the cinematography (and I don't think anybody's gonna' dispute the greatness of George A. Romeros's black and white camerawork and deft editing) and more contentiously, its supposed racial commentary. For whatever reason, people STILL think Romero was trying to make some sort of anti-racist commentary by making the lead male character a black dude, but people forget that Duane Jones' character wasn't even meant to be a black guy - he just so happened to be the best actor that showed up the casting call and that was it. And really, there's nothing in the script that even hints at the notion of racial animosity. I.E., nobody calls Duane a "nigger" or refers to him as "boy" or commits as much as a, sigh, microaggression against him for being African-American. Indeed, the topic of race is virtually a non-factor in the movie altogether, and it isn't until the very, very end of the movie - where Duane's body is tossed upon a funeral pyre - that even the teeniest, tiniest reference (intentional or not) to lynching or white supremacy rears its head. It wouldn't be an issue, really, except for the fact today, the great unlearned learned only celebrate the movie for its perceived racial forward thinking, when it should be revered as a clever, well-structured horror pioneer that ingeniously worked around its financial limitations through great dialogue and way-ahead-of-its-time narrative devices.

So, all that to say, I reckon I enjoyed my little night out in Kennesaw - or, what's left of the Kennesaw I remember, anyway (which was largely devoid of cheerleaders taking a knee for Instagram likes and the opportunity to virtue signal nationwide, uh, social equality or something.) I ate a just kinda alright if not overpriced veggie burger, I chugged a bright neon green experimental soda, and I had the luxury and privilege of getting to watch two old-ass, public domain horror movies under the stars and freezing my ass off, the way God, Allah and Al Davis all wanted us to.

It was a good night, ya'll. Not a great one, of course, but one that was better than average. And in this day and age, I'll take as many of those kinds of nights as the good lord will allow me ... and be damn thankful for 'em, too. 

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I Went To An All-You-Can Eat Buffet Owned By Scott Steiner

Holla' if you hear me ... I'm about to puke scrambled eggs all over Big Poppa Pump's parking lot. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

It's not everyday that you learn that a former WCW world heavyweight pro-wrestling champion opened up a buffet restaurant in your neck of the woods. But sometimes, fortune, she doth smile upon you. 

Living in the northern environs right above Atlanta, I noticed a few months ago that there appeared to be a brand new, totally remodeled Shoney's restaurant around exit 277 off Interstate 75. Now, this is interesting, because there was a long-abandoned Shoney's just sitting there for months and months. That someone - anyone - would invest the financial resources in literally bulldozing the eatery to build a whole new eatery on top of it seems just about the weirdest thing anyone could do with the property that the Acworth, Ga. zoning commission would've authorized.

Well, much to my surprise, I recently learned that someone was none other than WCW stalwart Scott Steiner, who spent 80 percent of his career playing some guy with a mullet before discovering ster...I mean, developing a new muscle-building-intensive training regiment...and becoming this beefed up dude with blond hair that wore a chain mail headdress for no discernible reason whatsoever and once tried to kayfabe rape Vince McMahon's daughter on live television. Oh, and when I say he "bulldozed the property," I goddamn mean exactly what I say ... he was indeed the person responsible for using diesel-fueled, mechanical death to pound the old buffet restaurant into rubble. 

So, a couple of months back, the all new Big Poppa Pump Shoney's opened its doors, complete with a grand opening spectacle in which the man himself - as well as a host of other pro 'rasslin has-beens like Jeff Jarrett and Kevin Nash - showed up to the rechristen the franchise. After driving by the thing for the better part of a year, my curiosity finally got the better of me, and I decided to try out this newfangled buffet place, to see if it really was worthy of, ahem, a title shot. 

All right, so I am going to assume that about half of the people reading this already know what Shoney's is, and really have no need for any background info. Alas, I also expect those of you from locales without a big Shoney's presence to have a lot of questions, so to catch those out of the loop up to speed, basically, the restaurant is a sit-down buffet "assemble-your-own-heart-attack" chain, not unlike something like Golden Corral. Granted, the buffet itself - while the main attraction - is a bit downplayed for more festive menu fare. So yeah, you can go in there and savage the buffet line like a neanderthal if you want, but if you want a big meaty steak or a huge honking hamburger, you can also sit there and politely wait for someone to carry out your made-to-order meal like a normal human being. But hey, where's the fun in such a banal dining experience?

Before you get into the exterior of what will forever be known as "The Scott Steiner Shoney's," I reckon you first have to describe its surroundings. It's in a really bad place, traffic-wise, since there is no real outlet accessible for motorists coming southbound or northbound from the interstate. Indeed, once you take the I-75 off-ramp, you have to drive quite a bit down Highway 92 before you can find a decent U-turn spot so you can actually enter the parking lot. It's wedged in between a Waffle House and a Hardee's, with a huge hunting store right across the road. There's some economic development stuff going on behind it (hotels? warehouses? office complexes?) but for the time being, it's mostly just dust and debris in the background. As for the patrons, it was your usual mix of weather-beaten Vietnam vets, late-evening church people and scruffy day laborers. Literally everyone in the building - my tongue-ring-sporting waitress included - dipped out at least once while I was there to get their Marlboro fix in between gnashing down plates of scrambled egg and grits. 

As soon as you walk in, you are bombarded by all of the expected "'Merica" iconography, right down to the giant-assed American flag with the corporate restaurant logo emblazoned upon it next to the cooks' 10 foot-by-6-foot cubby hole in front of the buffet line. There are a ton of plasma screen TVs all over the place, and a full bar, complete with a giant jug of what appears to be bagels floating in a translucent blue fluid. I honestly have no idea what  that's supposed to be, so if anyone out there can fill me in, please, do send an email. The general layout of the place was a little weird. You had a "U" shaped row of booths flanking the perimeter of the dining area, but there was this long row of standalone tables stacked side-by-side creating this buffer between the diners and the buffet trays, with these (comparatively) narrow choke points on the sides that pretty much put your ass in the face of somebody downing a key lime pie every time you get up for a new plate. And, as anyone who has ever been to a buffet in the Deep South can tell you, considering the awe-inspiring girth of many restaurant regulars, at some point you just KNOW some lard-ass has gotten stuck in between tables here. 

As soon as I was seated, the very first thing Miss Tongue Ring said to me was "do you wanna' try any pancakes tonight?" Keep in mind, this is before she asked me what I wanted to order as a main entree, and even before she asked me what I wanted to drink. Meanwhile, the old dude behind me - whose wife, presumably, didn't give a shit - kept calling her "honey," because yeah, in old Dixie, there's a fine line (and sometimes, none at all) between old fashioned camaraderie and blatant sexism.

Unbeknownst to me, the evening I showed up was apparently breakfast night, which is totally cool with me because I'm never really out and about eating stuff until at least 6 p.m., anyway. The buffet line itself was a good 15 feet, with your standard salad bar on the far left end, some chilled desserts (mostly, a bunch of pudding and iced cantaloupe slices) and two mystery soups I didn't have the time/available stomach space to sample. The main breakfast itinerary took up three full sections, which are broken down, Noah's ark style, in the paragraphs below.

First up, we have our heavy proteins. You've got your standard scrambled eggs (enhanced by a heaping helping of nacho cheese), sausage links, grits, chopped up home fries, sauteed mushrooms, chicken-fried steak (a Southern cuisine staple, for those of you not in the know) and the prerequisite made-from-scratch biscuit, which could be slathered in either your basic creamy milk gravy or a more savory one containing chunks of crumbled up sausage. So, yeah, not a bad little offering at all right here. 

Round two was a little more diverse. You've got your breaded and deep fried chicken tenders and maple-soaked bacon to meet your protein needs, but everything else is decisively starchier. For one thing, the section included a large bucket of Spanish rice, which I've never really considered a "breakfast-type" of food, but whatever. Annex to that an entirely different kind of grits (it was way mushier than the kind I tried earlier) and a confectioner's sugar-drenched fried French toast thingy and you definitely had all the makings for a carb-induced headache. 

But the dessert section is where things get really out of hand. Here, there's not even an attempt to justify the inherent unhealthiness of what's on the docket; you've got sugar-encrusted fruit jam-crepes, super-duper-sugary apple cobbler, a sponge-cake drenched in molasses and a gigantic, sugar-coated fried triangle that I'm pretty sure is type 2 diabetes distilled into its purest organic form. Of course, Shoney's tried to make you feel a little better by including some sliced up pineapple in the tray, but it's a ... pun, somewhat intended ... fruitless effort. If you're even sniffing around stuff like this, it's pretty much a given that you don't give a fuck no more about having all of your appendages, and no puny little slice of Adventure Island power-up is going to convince you to change your obese ways, neither.

Ultimately, I was able to put down five plates before my endocrine system started shutting down. In hindsight, it doesn't seem like that much food, but that's probably because there was a (relatively) smaller amount of individual foods being offered. When you go to an Asian buffet where they've got out 30 different types of macaroni and 94 exquisitely made sushi rolls, yeah, you tend to rationalize eating an insane amount of food, but when there are just a dozen or so things you kept devouring, it's easy to see how your brain might try and fool you into thinking you aren't as big of a glutton as you actually are. Still, I was utterly fucked up for two days afterwards, completely sick to my stomach and having to drink water like a half-starved camel for 48 hours afterwards. Regardless, the all-breakfast induced food high was probably worth it - for just $8.99, I'm pretty damn sure I ate at least $40 worth of sausage alone, and really, there's no way to go to bed feeling bad about that, for sure. 

The one thing that really struck me about the visit was the complete and utter lack of any kind of Scott Steiner iconography anywhere. I mean, I didn't expect Scott himself to waltz on out and give somebody a Steiner Screwdriver for leaving behind a shitty tip or Frankensteiner the barmaid for being too slow or cut a promo about how he wants to kill Hulk Hogan again next to the ranch dressing dipper, but one would expect to see at least a photo of the franchise operator somewhere. Indeed, unless you really had your ear on the ground when it comes to ex-professional 'rassler entrepreneurial endeavors, there's no way you would have suspected a former WCW champ owned the place. 

As a pure dining experience, I think it is safe to say I have experienced way better at other buffets. It would've been nice to have tried their proper dinner buffet (and, pending I am in the area for some abstruse reason, I may indeed do just that), but the breakfast slate, overall, was rather unremarkable. Now, don't get too mad at me, Mr. Big Bad Booty Daddy, "unremarkable" doesn't mean "terrible," it just means "good in all the expected ways." It was yummy, it was filling and I feel that I certainly got my nine dollars and some odd change out of the meal. Still, in a glutted buffet market, you really have to up the ante and trot out an experience that separates you from the herd. All of the stuff Shoney's was hocking, I could get at any Howard Johnson breakfast buffet line in America. I mean, you couldn't have ran with the pro wrestling theme and given us Rick Steiner waffles, or Sid Vicious's extra crispy whole pork patties? Hell, not only would I patronize an old school WCW-themed buffet on a weekly basis, I'd probably buy a house within ten miles of it just to be on the safe side. 

Still, I've got no real complaints about my Scott Steiner Shoney's encounter. Granted, the stuff I remember most wasn't the food - never really a good sign if you are a fledgling franchise - but the really small things, like how my water came out with the lime juice already sprinkled in it, or the dude in the bright green shirt who kept asking me 900 times if I liked the home fries, and the fact that the forks that came with my napkin were easily the biggest fucking eating utensils a restaurant has ever supplied me. That, and it was pretty hard not to be distracted by that weird, mechanical "beeping" that kept emanating from the chef's cubby hole.

But then again, for all we know, that could've just been the cooks trying to pump themselves up by blasting their owner's old theme music at full volume...

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My First Trip to Golden Corral!

Or, how a routine buffet stop turned into the most revealing socioeconomic experience of my life…

“Hey Jimbo, we’re all heading out to Golden Corral tonight, wanna’ join us?”

The above inquiry I’ve heard no less than 966 times over the last six months. When 98 percent of your daily contacts are cash-strapped media studies majors, I guess it’s sorta’ understandable why the local buffet is such a popular haunt among my acquaintances. The thing I couldn’t understand, however, is why that particular eatery had earned such a vaunted place in their hearts.

In a two mile radius, I think I live next to no less than a dozen restaurants that have at least part-time all you can eat buffet menus. That said, no one’s ever invited me to go eat out with them at that one seafood place next to Wal-Mart or the vegetarian-friendly soup-and-salad super-store right off the Interstate. It was always Golden Corral…breakfast, lunch, dinner, it made no difference. This place, for whatever reason, was the designated place for my geographical cohorts to get their fat on. Needless to say, that piqued my curiosity quite a bit.

But first; a quasi-political sidestep, which I promise while make contextual sense in about two or three paragraphs.

Back in my university days, I recall watching this frustratingly difficult to now-locate documentary on YouTube about a kid living in South Korea that was a refugee from one of Kim Jong-Il’s most hellish concentration camps. His family, his girlfriend, his neighbors, all of his friends…killed right before his very eyes. The North Korean regime stripped him of his political rights, his religious convictions and the very people he loved. But even after all of that was taken away from him, that’s not what prompted him to flee from the gulag -- an escape that almost assuredly would have cost him his life. No, this refugee decided to risk his very life because he was half-starved to death, and some dude in prison told him that there was food to the south. That was it. Political freedom, social rights, religion, even the love of friends and family - that’s not worth tempting virtually guaranteed existential catastrophe, but for this guy, being able to eat shrimp and noodles was. Not a lot of Americans can understand that. It’s a shame, too, because when you look at history -- from the Paleolithic era to right friggin’ now -- hunger has been the foremost driver for all of humanity. If there’s a social movement/epidemic going on somewhere, it’s almost certainly routed in starvation, somehow -- from the Arab uprisings of two years ago to increases in rural criminality right here in the U.S. of A.

I know a lot about food insecurity, because I lived in a perpetual state of it for about three years. With an aggregate income of about $11,000 for a better part of the last five years (of which an easy $9,000 went DIRECTLY to college tuition prices), I had to learn to live off infinitesimal food supplies. On a good weekday, I may have consumed about a third of the calories an actual human being needed to intake, and things got so financially dire for me at one point that I decided to save money by simply not eating at all for three days a week. Once college and the massive financial hemorrhaging associated with it came to an end, I was finally able to engage in eating habits that somewhat considered normal human patterns of consumption again, and in the three months after I earned my bachelor’s degree, I put on about 25 extra pounds.

So, all of that to say, I KNOW what hunger really feels like. Or at the very least, I KNOW what it feels like a whole lot better than most folks in these United States.

Now, that brings us back to Golden Corral, don’t it?

Architecturally, there’s not much to write about. If you’ve seen one steakhouse, you’ve pretty much seem them all. As soon as you walk in, there’s this huge queue, where people snake through the line like cows being ushered through a slaughterhouse. The processing here is rather quick, and completely impersonal. You throw down your 15 bucks, and they give you your first soda right at the cash register. After a guard waves you off, you get to pick your place to munch and crunch, and a god-goddamn, is the interior of the place simply massive.

There’s no wonder why my friends are always going on and on about hanging out there for hours. Simply put, the place has so many nooks, crannies, and cranooks that a human being could feasibly hide out there for half a day without anyone being able to find him. If you’re wondering why it took almost a decade for the FBI to find Eric Rudolph, it’s probably because he was hanging out at the local Golden Corral the entire time.

FACT: 98 percent of armed forces members enlist just so they can get reduced buffet prices. 

I thought my college buds were joking when they said they gathered there for 12 hours at a time, but trust me, it’s a feat that’s more than feasible. Last I checked, there’s no protocol in place that would kick you out after a set time limit, so you could very much stroll in there at eight on a Saturday morning, stuff your face until the menu shifts over at noon and the continue your all day glut-a-thon until the evening truckload of food gets there around 4 PM.

I visited the local Golden Corral at a time I thought would be fairly uncrowned - a Monday, at about 5 PM. And holy shit, was I wrong and then some. Even then, the place was just PACKED with human beings of EVERY single ethnicity and body type imaginable. Egyptians, Afro-Caribbeans, Hmongs, Guatemalans, you name it, they were there. I even saw an entire family…I shit you not, an entire family, for real…of albinos, wedged between your stereotypical NASCAR-loving Red-State Pure-D whiter-than-mayonnaise family of rat-tailed “trash” and a suspiciously Tyler Perry-esque family of seemingly richer-than-the-norm middle class Afro-Americans. It was if every single socioeconomically-repressed  peoples in America had been huddled under one roof. If there’s ever a true social democratic uprising in America, it’s almost 100 percent guaranteed to eminent from a Golden Corral somewhere in the country.

To be honest with you, the place felt more like a Nazi concentration camp than a family restaurant. For one thing, most of the infrastructure was cold metal; forget “friendly” looking tiles or other decorum, when it comes to Corralling, you’re dealing almost exclusively with steel, aluminum, or some other reflective service that would probably hurt like hell if someone slammed you face first into it.

I suppose the absolute best way to describe Golden Corral would be a “post-apocalyptic” food hole. I’m not sure if it’s a socialist negative utopia - the world’s largest, most diverse soup kitchen, ostensibly - or some sort of hyper-capitalistic nightmare made flesh. Watching waiters coordinate their moves like SWAT team members, I’m more inclined to the latter as opposed to the former. Forget service with a smile; at the Corral, you’re getting service with a firm boot up your guacamole and chili-engorged ass.

Suck on that, Huddle House Vidalia Onion Sauce!

When you’ve been in the buffet game as long as I have, you know when you’re dealing with a serious bidder and a low-rent, smorgasbord wannabe. Seeing as how they had their own proprietary steak house on tap, I knew right then and there that I was dealing with the illest and the realest at the Corral.

What happens when New Orleans, Beijing, Tuscany and Guadalajara fuse food cultures.

I recall having a conversation with my girlfriend recently, on why exactly buffet diners in our hometown seem to be the only kinds of restaurants that can stay in business for more than a few weeks at a time. At Golden Corral, that little enigma solved itself right before my very eyes; in today’s Sequestered, post(?)-recession society, what we want out of an eatin’ experience is one part Roman orgy, and one part “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.” You give some girl wearing too much eye shadow twenty American dollars, you grab your always-vibrantly-colored ceramic plate, and you proceed to jam at least 13 different ethnic foods down your throat hole over the course of ten minutes. It’s a nightmare/dream-land where you CAN have pizza, egg rolls, burritos and Cajun battered shrimp impaled on ONE fork, and nobody in the building thinks anything peculiar about it. There could probably be a dude puke-eating his food like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” at the Corral, and I doubt anyone would take note of it.

I guess you folks want a walking tour, no? Well, I guess we could start with the salad bar, because it’s the most genteel (and not surprisingly, least occupied) food station in the restaurant.

I suppose there’s not too much to discuss here. You have a picture of the world’s largest mound of iceberg lettuce, a few cubby holes filled with spinach leafs, some uncooked mushrooms, and a few slivers of fruit -- blueberries, mangos, cantaloupes, etc. -- occupying the split side of the armament. Everything is either metallic or plastic-tong shaped; as side weaponry, you can load your salad with pepperonis and sugar-cured ham, because let’s face it -- too many antioxidants in one meal, and you could wind up in a body bag, Johnny.

If you are into grains and stuff, there was a rather small assortment of breaded stuff available -- mostly, some truly Italian-sounding junk, like buttered Garlic rolls and cheese knots. For whatever reason, these food items are extremely well-protected, buffered by at thick sheet of acrylic glass that means it’s kinda’ impossible for most people to yank a biscuit or two out of the control panels. I guess you just gotta’ protect those bread sticks, sometimes.

Hot pecan sauce goes with everything, apparently. EVERYTHING.

The dessert section -- which I didn’t partake of, because I enjoy having two legs -- was sheer, diabetic phantasmagoria. It’s pretty rare to encounter cotton candy machines at a buffet restaurant, but the Corral, clearly, ain’t your everyday mega-food-stuffin’ locale. You also had your usual stuff at arms’ length -- ice cream, cookies, sugary baked goods, etc. Nothing too fancy, really, until you stumble upon THIS behemoth…

No, that isn’t Lord Stanley’s Cup in pudding form; it’s actually a gigantic hot chocolate fondue fountain. You know those afore-mentioned baked goods I was talking about a paragraph ago? Well, here, you can hand your cookies over on a ka-bob, and one of the bakery-people will poke it into the geyser of cocoa, and you can have an instant-flash-congealed choco-stick right then and there. I gained thirty pounds just looking at this contraption, honestly.

At a certain point in my pit stop, I realized that I may have been living in some sort of dystopian, political-sci-fi fan-fiction story. There I was, standing in line, with about three dozen morbidly obese people, all anxiously clutching their periwinkle plates, with a dead-eyed stare that you usually only encounter in photographs of shell-shocked World War I veterans. I look to my side, and some dude is just sitting there, reading a Clive Cussler book, while a gaggle of Middle-Eastern children in Guadalajara Chivas youth soccer jerseys ran around him, playing tag. And as before? Nobody in the building seems to be smiling. Not even a smug smirk or a faint twinkle. Buffets, apparently, are serious business, and there is no patience for jokesters of any delineation here. For a minute there, I had to keep pinching myself, just to make sure what was happening before my very eyes was real, and not just some disjointed recollections of watching “Rollerball” and “Soylent Green” back-to-back when I was 13.

This sight here was probably my favorite vision from the entire trip. You see, there’s actually two or three guys hanging out inside this metal and bullet-proof glass aviary, constantly re-stocking the food terminals with fries and meatloaf. Inside, a hairy-armed dude in a pink shirt, with an FFA headset on, barked orders through a thick Athenian brogue while helming literally a HUNDRED steaks on this massive, industrial grill, like he was a DJ spinning records or something.

I kept wondering if there was something akin to a Dewey Decimal system going on here, but I don’t think I could really pinpoint a thorough arrangement of systemized foodstuffs. On one side of the aviary, you had some sorta’ Italian stuff like pizza and ravioli which was stuffed side-by-side with a ton of fish and fried mollusks. Once you ambled past the steak container, you were greeted by a collection of super-greasy fries, onion rings and popcorn shrimp. From there, it seemed to transition to a “soul food” kind of itinerary (mashed potatoes, fried green stuff, etc.) before culminating with the taco bar.

The taco bar -- not that I have any traceable inclinations toward burritos and pseudo-authentic Tex-Mex or anything -- was probably my favorite thing about the entire trip. You had tortillas, shells, nacho cheese, fried rice, corn chips, several different kinds of beans and even some throwing-star shaped quesadillas, if you needed ‘em. I’ve always secretly fantasized about owning my own all-you-can-eat Taco Bar, so this sight was a mini-vision of paradise to me.

So, back to that North Korean refugee I mentioned about three years ago, when this article originally began. As I sat there in a state of sublime food satiation -- you know, that feeling you get when you are literally in a food-induced stupor, with your intestines so overloaded with fried gunk that you can only communicate in utterances that sound like Frankenstein noises -- I realized that, holy shit, this is EXACTLY what this dude was willing to get killed for. In a world where about one-sixth of the planet is in some phase of starvation, I live in a social system where even the poorest people in the country can still partake of food-overdoses on a semi-regular basis; if you’re wondering why America is the greatest empire in history, that’s it. Forget your constitutional safeguards and laissez faire economics, the fact that people in this nation can be both impoverished AND obese at the same time is a feat never accomplished by any peoples in history, and in my humble opinion, our greatest contribution to humanity as a whole. Thanks to hyper-food production and mass-urban commercialization, there will never, EVER have to be a hungry, tired or poor mass contingency in the U.S. -- just really tired, really poor people, that are even more tired and more poor because they just spent half their paycheck on an all-you-can-absorb-into-your-colon-lining mashed potato feast.

Introducing my OWN take on the Taco Bell Loaded Griller! Warning: Requires Pepto-Bismol Immediately After Consuming. 

I think my first trip to the Corral lasted for about three hours. Around the two hour mark, you go into this altered state of existence where all of the surrounding noises and lights coalesce with the food chemicals being oxygenated in your blood stream, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say the ultimate result is a temporary coma. After awhile, time stops, and all you can do is stare vacantly at the ocean of people stumbling to and fro while holding their plates and mugs filled with various food and beverage bric-a-brac. Your spirit seems to momentarily leave your body, while your liver goes into quadruple overtime to process all of the salsa, jumbo shrimp and refried beans assailing your lower extremities like the intestinal version of Pearl Harbor. All of a sudden, you’ll swear you begin to hear Twisted Sister’s “Burn in Hell” start playing, and all you can think about then is finding the nearest abyss with a diameter wide enough for you to cram your head into and start vomiting. If you don’t feel like you’re about to give birth to a metal pineapple after your stay at GC, I think they owe you a free meal next time around.

At the Corral, even the vending machines are considerably overweight...

The exit anteroom is pretty low key, but then again, all you can probably think about after stuffing your stomach with all seven continents’ worth of comestibles is finding a cool place to lay down for awhile…not whether or not you can win a stuffed animal via claw machine. Some of the capsule toy dispensers were sorta’ peculiar; there was one that offered patrons Spongebob-themed Nintendo DS screen wiping cloths, which has to be a new cottage industry if there ever was one. I think there may have been a gumball machine or two as well, but let’s get real; after leaving the Corral, you don’t want to think about chewing anything for at least six or seven days afterward.

...and that's JUST the appetizer!

Leaving Golden Corral was sort of like escaping from a Black Hole, or flying a plane safely out of the Bermuda triangle. You just as feel as if you’ve survived some sort of supernatural phenomenon that you probably shouldn’t have, not so much a dude that just had a meal as you are someone that survived driving into the Grand Canyon in a forklift. To be honest, I’m not really sure if I enjoyed the experience, in the traditional sense of the term; yeah, I may have left the place cradling my belly like an eighth month pregnant walrus, and it left me in a good post-food stupor, but I don’t think anything I ate was really “good” using any sort of qualitative measurement. If you want a LOT of food, however, and you really want to see what the neighborhood proletariat class actually looks like, and you don’t mind waiting in line for corn bread like some sort of Ukrainian prisoner in the 1940s, then a visit to the nearest Golden Corral is an absolute necessity.

Just don’t be surprised if you do not emerge from the place a good two or three days after entering it, though…

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