I Went to A Kentucky Fried Chicken Buffet...

...and it was awesome.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

In the American South, there is a longstanding stereotype that African Americans absolutely love fried chicken. As long-time readers of The Internet Is In America can tell you, however, this is actually more of a regional, rural birth rite than any sort of ethnoracial qualifier. I come from a long line of Appalachian trailer trash with skin whiter than albino mayonnaise, and my goodness, we ate fried chicken every opportunity we could when I was growing up. Fourth of July, Easter, Thanksgiving ... I'm pretty sure we ordered a bucket of original recipe and mashed potatoes for Christmas once. The Colonel was such a staple of my diet during my formative years that, even at the ripe old age of 30, I'm pretty sure at least half of my DNA is comprised of whatever they put in that delicious, delicious brown gravy. 

The thing is, I really don't get an opportunity to slake upon KFC's assorted offerings that often anymore. As far as quick bites, the fast food stalwart doesn't really lend itself well to always-on-the-go junk food (and junk culture) consumers such as myself. The containers are bulky, the food is greasy, it leaves bones all over the place, you have to work with all those damn lids, so on and so forth. It's tasty, to be sure, but at Taco Bell or Burger King, all I have to do is peel back a paper wrapper, chew, and occasionally shat out some turquoise-colored after-meal. The Colonel, by contrast, makes you work a little for your calories, and by golly, I need those precious, squandered minutes to do more important things with my life, like write about Robocop cartoons from the 1980s.

But lo and behold, I recently stumbled across something that made me view KFC in an entirely different light. Before we begin, however, a quick primer on the geography of metro Atlanta is necessary. About 90 percent of the city proper rests in Fulton County, a 1 million person-plus, backwards California-shaped swath that stretches for about 530 square miles from Chattahoochee Hills a half hour south of Atlanta all the way to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains damn near an hour north of the ATL. The county is bifurcated by Atlanta, with the southern portion of the county by and large home to economically-disadvantaged African Americans and the northern portion of the county by and large home to rich white and Asian motherfuckers. 

With a population nearing 100,000 people, Roswell is one of the larger north Atlanta 'burbs, and with an average annual household income stretching well beyond $100K, it's also one of the wealthiest. By and large, it's an utterly unremarkable town, one of those shitty Southern locales that's 90 percent subdivisions and half-filled strip malls, but because they've got a lot of parks and really overpriced downtown restaurants, they tend to think they're a lot better than they really are. Oh, and their mayor is racist as fuck. That probably needs to be mentioned somewhere.

Alas, beyond the ungodly traffic near Georgia 400 and all of the monuments to slave owners, you will find at least one jewel in the proverbial dumpster. Folks, Roswell is home to an all-you-can-eat KFC buffet. 

Conducting subsequent research, I discovered specialty restaurants of the sort - in the same vein as this Chick-fil-A buffet - aren't all that aberrational. In fact, there are quite a few KFC buffets throughout the metro Atlanta area but by golly, this was the first such location my peepers had ever seen. So, what is it actually like to waltz into the place, plop down $8.29 USD and go to town on some biscuits and mashed taters? Well, let's take a photographic journey, why don't we?

First things first, the exterior and interior of the building is rather unremarkable. In fact, if it wasn't for the gigantic metal buffet line, it would be completely indistinguishable from all of the other KFC restaurants out there.  

The set-up was EXTREMELY low-tech. Expecting ceramic plates, a'la Golden Corral? That's elitist bullshit, here at the KFC buffet you have to eat off flimsy plastic trays and honest-to-goodness STYROFOAM plates. And as someone who is well versed in economical household goods, I can almost guarantee you these are the Dollar Tree plate-bowls, too. 

Which brings us to the drink fountain. All in all, it is pretty much what you would expect. In keeping with Yum! Brands tradition, all of the offerings are Pepsi-branded. And perhaps appealing to the region's growing Hispanic audience, the fountain also offered apple-flavored soda, which is definitely NOT something you'd see at most establishments with a high clientele quotient of uppity white folks. 

...unfortunately, I didn't get to try out the delicious-looking apple-cola because the goddamn thing was unplugged. Yes, that's right, they turned off the fountain just in time for the evening rush, so the only thing I could pour down my throat hole was good old fashioned agua.

The buffet itself was broken up into salad offerings, sides and desserts and, of course deep-fried poultry. All in all, it was a rather unremarkable set-up, although the stickers kinda' made up for its abject normalness. 

As far as the veggie offerings go, you had the standard shredded lettuce, onions, coleslaw, carrots and corn. Probably the weirdest thing here was the inclusion of sliced up cranberry jam, which to me, doesn't exactly feel like the kind of thing you want sandwiched in between your original recipe chicken and a gravy soaked biscuit. And speaking of gravy...

Folks, the sides-section is reason enough to visit the restaurant. You get a mountain of mashed potatoes, BOTH kinds of gravy (the smoky, smooth brown sauce and the chunky, milky white variety) and if that wasn't enough, a delicious macaroni jambalaya, too. I'm not sure if it's a KFC diktat or some improvisation from the employees (about half and half Hispanic and African-American), but the beans and rice definitely stood out. The frijoles were embedded with slivers of jalapeño, while the rice had chunks of maize in it, with just a hint of Southwestern seasoning. All in all, it was a downright awesome syncretism of Southeastern soul food and South of the Border home cooking, and it is worth going out of your way to experience. Well, if you live kinda' close by, anyway. 

Eh, and what about the desserts? You are in luck, amigo, because that evening, there was a giant aluminum foil tray filled with peach cobbler, topped by a super-sugary layer of frosting. In an unrelated note, I have no idea why obesity rates in the Southland are so much higher than other parts of the country, either. 

As for the chicken buffet itself? Well, seeing as how I stopped by right when it was closing, the pickings ... to say the least .... were slim. As in, the only thing that was left were the crispy remnants of thighs, legs and breasts patrons gobbled up two hours earlier.  

However, the folks behind the counter were gracious enough to hand me as much fried and grilled chicken from those giant industrial ovens as I wanted. To the franchisers in Roswell, I just want you to know that your crew - as of mid Jan. 2016 - were fucking awesome and everything a fast food crew ought to be. They were prompt, considerate and very friendly, and they didn't even ask any questions when I stuck my camera under the sneeze guard to take up-close photos of the drumsticks. Not all fast food employees deserve $15 an hour, but in my book, the guys and gals at THIS Kentucky Fried Chicken establishment absolutely deserve it. 

You know, there sure are a lot of food snobs out there, especially in the metro Atlanta environs. Just two miles away from this very KFC restaurant there is this thing called Canton Street, which is home to a bunch of ritzy "independent" restaurants that are actually heavily financed by the city's downtown development authority (so much for local governments not picking winners and losers in commerce, no?) All of those crypto-racist, gentrification-and-"walkability"-loving', poor-people-hatin' suburban supremacists can keep their $93 hamburgers and microscopic portions of filet mignon, 'cause I'd much rather kick back, toss down $9 and eat plate after plate of delicious, deep fried chicken with REAL working class Americans. Not only is it a less pretentious and more cost-efficient dining experience, I am damn CONVINCED that the quality of food here is superior to whatever you'd find at those neo-yuppie haunts, anyway. 

So what more can I say? For less than it takes to pick up a DVD, you can slake upon as much macaroni, rice, brown gravy, bean paste and poultry as you want, and it is fantastic. Really, one has to wonder why more restaurants do not offer similar services - I mean, who wouldn't want to visit a Taco Bell buffet? That's right, nobody alive. 

In all seriousness though, visit this place and its kindred. The heart and soul of any small or midsize city isn't in its synthetic,  government-subsidized downtown districts, but in the small franchisees in the pothole-strewn parts of town where the lights don't work half the time. Not only are you subjecting yourself to some extremely decadent comfort food goodness, you are also helping support the true working class and sending a big, fat, hearty "eff you" to the crony capitalist elites. 

I'm still not sure what the famed "seven herbs and spices" are supposed to be, but at this restaurant in the northern 'burbs, I'm pretty sure there's an eighth in every biscuit and drumstick: proletariat pride, and by God, that's something you owe yourself a taste of every now and then. 

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A Chick-Fil-A Breakfast Buffet!?!

Just outside of Atlanta, there's a one-of-a-kind Chick-fil-A restaurant that serves a full breakfast buffet. I went there, and it was every bit as amazing as it sounds.

If you really want to experience the best Georgia has to offer, you really have to get outside of Atlanta. Yeah, yeah, there are some pretty cool sites in A-Town -- drive-ins and superhero-themed pizza places and an entire museum dedicated to soda propaganda among them -- but outside the perimeter is where you will find all of the really, really noteworthy destinations.

For example, in Summerville, there is an outdoor museum dedicated solely to the artwork of Howard Finster, a probably psychopathic pastor whose portfolio consists almost entirely of apocalyptic paintings and sculptures of people with Down Syndrome heads. Similarly, Ashburn is home to the Crime and Punishment Museum, whose exhibits include a replica of electric chairs and authentic KKK apparel. It is adjoined by a local favorite restaurant, named, fittingly enough, the Last Meal Cafe. And under the penumbra of Stone Mountain, you will find Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation headquarters, which is home to a life-size bronzed statute of the beloved rapper/convicted racist.

Nestled in Woodstock is yet another must-stop "what-the?" roadside attraction ... or should I say "event," rather.

This one requires just a bit of a history lesson. You see, Chick-fil-A was not the first restaurant venture undertaken by Truett Cathy. Long before Chick-fil-A was a zygote of an idea, he opened a series of restaurants called the Dwarf House.

I'm not exactly 100 percent, certain but I am fairly sure the concept never made its way out of Georgia. Even now, however, the old buildings dot the outside-the-perimeter landscape, although almost all of them have since been rebranded as "official" Chick-fil-A businesses. Although I recall visiting one of the old-school Dwarf House restaurants as a kid, for the life of me, I can't really remember anything about the menu or even its general ambiance. This being the early 1990s, though, I assure you it was nothing like the modern, sanitary Chick-fil-A experience we all know and love -- I don't recall much about the brand, but I most certainly do recall the restaurants being dirty, dingy and very musty-smelling.

The restaurant in Woodstock is sort of a fusion concept -- basically, it appears to be a fairly new Chick-fil-A restaurant attached to the weathered remnants of an old Dwarf House establishment. I suppose the photographs do a good enough job of describing the general concept, but for the visually-impaired, it's basically just a red-brick facade with a bright red miniature door and something of a medieval cottage motif welded onto a modern-day restaurant space ... or is it the other way around?

The anteroom (that's one 1 percenters call a "lobby," in case you were wondering) is really a site to behold. It's hard to describe, but somehow,they managed to cram a to-scale midget-sized Hobbit house just inside the foyer, complete with min-stained glass windows and an operable door that the wee ones can actually run in and out of. Thankfully, they also put a deadbolt on that sucker, because you just know at some point, some nefarious crook or robber tried to squeeze himself through it during the off hours.

Of course, the entrance also has some of the expected Chick-fil-A signage, but for the most part, it doesn't feel anything at all like the average branded restaurant. I got REALLY excited seeing this castle door mock-up at the double doors, but as it turns out, that's not actually a normal decoration. According to one of the suspiciously well-groomed teenage employees, they put up the display to herald some sort of mother/son function, which, yeah, is just a wee bit on the creepy side.

As for the rest of the restaurant, it is more or less was your standard Chick-fil-A diner, albeit just a teensy bit larger than the average store. I visited the place on an early Saturday morning, and it was quite busy -- apparently, this particular branch also does breakfast buffets on Friday mornings and Thursday evenings, too.

So, after plopping down my $9.49 plus state and local taxes, I hit up the metal queue. If you are not familiar with how buffets work (and judging from just how surprisingly popular my write up on Golden Corral has been in developing countries, I am assuming that's quite a number of you), you pay a flat fee and eat a virtually unlimited amount of foodstuffs, which are constantly being replenished by sweaty chefs at breakneck speeds. So in short ... it's the most American thing that has ever existed, or ever will exist.

Comparatively, there wasn't a whole lot of variety offered this morning. All in all, I counted up nine different foodstuffs in the line-up, which is a pretty thin number, especially compared to competing chains like Shoney's, which generally offer enough all-you-can-eat goods to qualify as a miniature grocery store.

That said, you really can't argue with the quality of the food, though. Pretty much everything on tap was delicious, from the golden-flaky biscuits to the super crispy bacon to little sausage roll thingies. In addition to the home fries and scrambled eggs (the staple of any decent breakfast,) you also get a healthy amount of sides, including grits, chunky gravy and what appears to be apple cobbler. Of course, the big draw, of course, is the endless tray of chicken patties, which is pretty much reason enough to visit this place. No lie, folks: I ate ten of them, and almost throw up on the cashier woman while paying my meal ticket.

To be fair, Chick-fil-A is a pretty contentious business, and I would be telling you a flat out whopper if I said I wasn't just a smidge uncomfortable dining there. For one thing, there were a LOT of people doing scripture readings -- I mean, practice what you feel like practicing and all, but shit, what kind of glances do you think people would give me and my buddies if we decided to have a Koran study at Subway, or a dramatic reading of the Satanic Bible at Taco Bell? Secondly, there were a TON of cops in there. Like, at least three or four squad cars worth, and they were sharing a table with a gaggle of girls who could not have been older than juniors in high school. And also, one of them appeared to be Jewish, as evident by the Hebrew tattoos he had on his arm, which I am pretty sure is against Jewish teachings, now that I think about it. And then, there were the servers, who kept telling me it was "their pleasure" to serve me. Now, I know it's corporate policy and all, but I know you really don't give a hoot if I need a coffee refill -- and by the way, their proprietary brew is kinda' on the crappy side, too.

By their very nature, I think buffets are supposed to be kind of scummy. The waiters are supposed to be distant and despondent, providing you with just the bare minimum amount of interface to facilitate you giving them your credit card. Also, the lighting is supposed to be drab and dreary, to cover up the fact that you're eating food that likely has a bunch of fly eggs and eyelashes embedded in it, and that the utensils are just sorta washed. That kind of runs counterproductive to the entire Chick-fil-A corporate mantra, which is customer service and cleanliness ... the precise two things that buffets attempt to stamp out entirely.

Still, the experience is probably worth a detour if you are ever in the Atlanta area. It's a bit on the pricey side, but as stated before, it's basically your only opportunity to ever drop a dozen Chick-fil-a patties on one ceramic plate and tear into them in public without people thinking you are a feral child or something. And it's also astoundingly, ironically close to a sex toy outlet, which means God really does have a sense or humor (or at least, the planning commission in Woodstock really doesn't care about getting re-elected.)

So, to recap? If you like gluttony, processed poultry and people into Jesus, you'll probably really like this place. And if you're a vegetarian, an atheist, a homosexual, someone who is no longer married to his first wife or an individual ready to storm the offices of the Family Research Council? Well, there is a Del Taco pretty close by, I guess...

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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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