Nothing Shall Buffet Me

This post is about one of those little curiousities of the universe. This is the end of my first week living in my new apartment in Carthage, IL. Maybe I'll post pictures on here sometime - if I find that people actually read this thing. Anyway, on friday I decided to celebrate my newfound freedom and my financial better-than-I-was-ness by visiting the Sirloin Stockade in Keokuk, IA. There's nothing that I love more than a good buffet (that's not true, girls). The time was about 6:45 p.m. I got up to the counter to ask for an all-access pass to food land, the place inside my brain where milk and honey flow (since in real life I'd rather eat meat and milk and honey are sticky). When I looked up at the menu, I saw that it would cost me $7.49 to eat there. I thought - sure, I can handle that. I'm single and work full time. Ok. Then I look a foot or two to the left on the menu. 1/2 lb. Burger with fries for $6+. If I want the buffet with that, it would cost a total of $7.39. I did a double take. I did a triple-take. My head was wandering back and forth as if I had just sat in a pneumatic chair and spun around for a few hundred laps. It would actually cost me 10 cents less to add a 1/2 lb. Burger with fries to my buffet order than to go without.

I seriously didn't think this could be true, but I asked to make sure. The order-taking professional behind the counter seemed just as confused as I, but finally concluded with rather lacking confidence "I guess they think you'll eat less of the buffet if you order it." Now, I'm not going to pass up on a deal like this, so I order the burger. I found a good spot to sit down and then got up, plate in hand, to the buffet line.

What I saw there made me so glad I was waiting on a 1/2 lb. burger. Nothing but old, crusty overcooked food. Dry meatloaf, crusty food chunks, and pasty mashed potatoes were all that greeted me there. THERE WAS NO FREAKING MACARONI AND CHEESE! What's a BUFFET without the tried-and-true, all-american, buffet-defining presence of macaroni and cheese? That's what makes you decide if one buffet is better than the other. Someone once asked me if I'd been to Ryan's before. I said yes, they have good macaroni and cheese. ALL buffets have macaroni and cheese. There's always some kind of mysterious special-edition combo of noodle and sauce because no other macaroni and cheese in nature exists like buffet mac and cheese and they DIDN'T have ANY. I was furious. I was ready to just eat the burger and leave. But I couldn't do that. That's just what they wanted me to do ("I guess they think you'll eat less of the buffet if you order it....").

Here comes the burger - right after downing a nasty plate of assorted dehydrated foods. It was like an oasis of grease and flavor. A delight in every sense of the word. It would make Hardee's wish they had never called a burger the Six Dollar Burger. It was just so good. Oh, they're fighting dirty now. This burger cost me negative 10 cents, but it's costing me a heap of pride too.

To make a long story end, I ate almost all of the burger but didn't finish it (no way I'm doing that). Next, I ate a good set of dessertish stuff. I had a roll with some sweet whipped butter, some cheesecake, and I was so mad, I didn't have a Sundae. The other immutable universal rule of buffets is that they have to have the makings of Sundaes (except for Chinese buffets). I was so mad about the missing mac and cheese, that I couldn't bring myself to do it. That, and I was stuffed.

If you read this whole post, I'd say you lost a valuable piece of your life that you can never get back.