Dec. 16: The buffet people
As a rule, I don't like buffets. I'm of the opinion that food should
be served fresh. Buffet food is not fresh. Who knows how long it's been
sitting under those heat lamps? Is there anything more depressing than
biting into a forkful of lukewarm scrambled eggs? I didn't think so.
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I used to work at a hotel that had a buffet. The restaurant manager was an idiot. After learning that I was a writer, she tasked me with finding adjectives to describe every item in the hotel's breakfast buffet. I came up with "delicious French toast." I think I also came up with "fresh eggs." Most of my adjectives were rejected as "not imaginative enough" so the manager went ahead and came up with adjectives of her own.
The sausage was "farm sausage." I always hated that. When I think of it today, I imagine speaking those words like I'm singing a nursery rhyme to children. "And then the prince and princess ate a big plate of farm sausage and everyone lived happily ever after."
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Here is why I hated "farm sausage" so much. IT WASN'T FARM SAUSAGE!!! It was FACTORY sausage. The animals that made up the sausage (along with the dirt and grit and shit that were invariably scraped off the abbatoir floor) were decidedly NOT raised on farms. They were raised in intensive livestock barns, spent their lives in tiny cages, and were then slaughtered for their meat. Farm sausage comes from places like this:
The hotel sausages came from the grocery store. They were No Name brand sausage, meaning they were probably sausages that had been rejected by The Awesome Sausage Company and other trusted retailers of dead animal parts. In other words, real life farm sausage could be found in the hotel buffet as easily as Jew wearing a skullcap and singing Hatikivah could be found in a mosque in Mecca during Ramadan.
I voiced my concerns to the buffet manager and she told me to shut up and she also used the Lord's name in vain when she told me to shut up and later she was fired and now I think she has a small home-based business where she cleans people's homes (using FARM detergent.)
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All buffets are bad.
When I say that all buffets are bad, I mean that they are bad when you compare them to fresh food. I have eaten from buffets before and I probably will again, but that doesn't mean I no longer think buffets are bad. I still think buffets are bad but I don't think they're terrible. A kick in the balls is terrible. 50 Shades of Grey is terrible. Letting a sumo wrestler do diarrhea on my head is terrible. I would not pay $8.99 for any of these things. I probably would pay $8.99 for a Chinese buffet, which tells me it is somewhere between fantastic and terrible.
This may be confusing so I should probably set a standard of what I consider to be fantastic and terrible experiences. Think of a scale between one and 100. A hundred is the best thing that could possibly happen and one is the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Here are some examples of ones:
- When Liberals are in power
- Let it go from Frozen
- Being stuck in the back seat of a car between two overweight people who are sleeping really deeply and you have to pee really really really really bad.
- Saturday Night Live during the mid 1980s
- When you really want grape soda and you get V8
- Anything with the word Kardashian in it
- Profuse amounts of smegma
- When you throw your underwear at the wall and it sticks,
Here are some examples of 100:
- Sitting in a jacuzzi with Jill Hennessy and Amanda Marshall while you watch the Calgary Flames win the Stanley Cup and then you go to a Prince concert and you get invited backstage to perform magic tricks for Prince and everyone drinks Dr. Pepper and then Amanda Marshall gives you a backrub. (This is the only example of a 100 I can think of.)
So we have established that 100 is stellar awesome and 1 makes you wish you never lived. I guess that makes 50 an average experience - something that's not great but not awful either. Some examples:
- Going to work everyday
- James Bond movies that star Roger Moore
- Granny Smith apples
- Tim Hortons commercials
- Any comic strip that is not Peanuts, Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes
- Checking your mailbox and finding it empty
- Bar bands that do Rolling Stone covers
- Girls whose hair does not go past their shoulders but at least comes down past their ears
- Yogurt
Having said that, buffets usually run between 40 and 55 (23 if it gives you the runs.) 55 is a truly exceptional buffet. However, a buffet can never be more than a 55 because no one ever says: "THAT BUFFET WAS ONE OF THE BEST EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE! I CAN DIE NOW!" (Exception: John Pinette.)
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In Calgary, there's a buffet called Treasures of China. It used to be a pretty good restaurant but its name was stupid. That's because Treasures of China served more than just Chinese food. I was there once and they had stuff from Japan, Vietnam AND Mongolia. This is probably okay because most white people are too stupid to tell the difference (my friend, Steve, is a magician at Japanese Village and one of the waitresses there told me that the manager will only hire Asians because white people don't know the difference anyway. The hostess was Vietnamese. One of the cooks was Chinese. Dumb white people just see the almond-shaped eyes and say AHA! JAPANESE!)
But back to Treasures of China, which is now a place I probably won't go anymore. It has one-and-a-half stars on yelp. Here is a review from a guy named Mike M: "Make's my bowel's cry out for better times. Why do I insist on torturing myself, I am a glutton for punishment. Perhaps in a past life I threw a baby from a cliff in some sort of sacrificial ceremony and now I am cursed in this life with the inability to make good decisions for myself. Treasures of China is the proof of life after death, which is ironic since every time I eat here I feel one step closer to the grave."
This is funnier than almost anything I have ever written on Rotating Pineapple (except the one about awful presents, which is probably the funniest thing in the world.)
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The person who gave me this title is named Jay. Jay is Filipino and that means that he can probably tell a whole bunch of stupid white people that he is Chinese and they will believe him. (True story: When I first met Jay, I was told he was Filipino and I had never heard that term before and I thought his actual name was Philip Eno and so I called him Philip for about four months and poor Jay thought I was the world's biggest idiot.)
Jay is the owner/proprietor of a place called Eats of Asia and/or The Aimless Cook. He is one of those people who enjoys cooking more than life itself. He has never cooked me a meal and when I am in Calgary in early January, I hope to rectify this.
-
I used to work at a hotel that had a buffet. The restaurant manager was an idiot. After learning that I was a writer, she tasked me with finding adjectives to describe every item in the hotel's breakfast buffet. I came up with "delicious French toast." I think I also came up with "fresh eggs." Most of my adjectives were rejected as "not imaginative enough" so the manager went ahead and came up with adjectives of her own.
The sausage was "farm sausage." I always hated that. When I think of it today, I imagine speaking those words like I'm singing a nursery rhyme to children. "And then the prince and princess ate a big plate of farm sausage and everyone lived happily ever after."
-
Here is why I hated "farm sausage" so much. IT WASN'T FARM SAUSAGE!!! It was FACTORY sausage. The animals that made up the sausage (along with the dirt and grit and shit that were invariably scraped off the abbatoir floor) were decidedly NOT raised on farms. They were raised in intensive livestock barns, spent their lives in tiny cages, and were then slaughtered for their meat. Farm sausage comes from places like this:
The hotel sausages came from the grocery store. They were No Name brand sausage, meaning they were probably sausages that had been rejected by The Awesome Sausage Company and other trusted retailers of dead animal parts. In other words, real life farm sausage could be found in the hotel buffet as easily as Jew wearing a skullcap and singing Hatikivah could be found in a mosque in Mecca during Ramadan.
I voiced my concerns to the buffet manager and she told me to shut up and she also used the Lord's name in vain when she told me to shut up and later she was fired and now I think she has a small home-based business where she cleans people's homes (using FARM detergent.)
-
All buffets are bad.
When I say that all buffets are bad, I mean that they are bad when you compare them to fresh food. I have eaten from buffets before and I probably will again, but that doesn't mean I no longer think buffets are bad. I still think buffets are bad but I don't think they're terrible. A kick in the balls is terrible. 50 Shades of Grey is terrible. Letting a sumo wrestler do diarrhea on my head is terrible. I would not pay $8.99 for any of these things. I probably would pay $8.99 for a Chinese buffet, which tells me it is somewhere between fantastic and terrible.
This may be confusing so I should probably set a standard of what I consider to be fantastic and terrible experiences. Think of a scale between one and 100. A hundred is the best thing that could possibly happen and one is the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Here are some examples of ones:
- When Liberals are in power
- Let it go from Frozen
- Being stuck in the back seat of a car between two overweight people who are sleeping really deeply and you have to pee really really really really bad.
- Saturday Night Live during the mid 1980s
- When you really want grape soda and you get V8
- Anything with the word Kardashian in it
- Profuse amounts of smegma
- When you throw your underwear at the wall and it sticks,
Here are some examples of 100:
- Sitting in a jacuzzi with Jill Hennessy and Amanda Marshall while you watch the Calgary Flames win the Stanley Cup and then you go to a Prince concert and you get invited backstage to perform magic tricks for Prince and everyone drinks Dr. Pepper and then Amanda Marshall gives you a backrub. (This is the only example of a 100 I can think of.)
So we have established that 100 is stellar awesome and 1 makes you wish you never lived. I guess that makes 50 an average experience - something that's not great but not awful either. Some examples:
- Going to work everyday
- James Bond movies that star Roger Moore
- Granny Smith apples
- Tim Hortons commercials
- Any comic strip that is not Peanuts, Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes
- Checking your mailbox and finding it empty
- Bar bands that do Rolling Stone covers
- Girls whose hair does not go past their shoulders but at least comes down past their ears
- Yogurt
Having said that, buffets usually run between 40 and 55 (23 if it gives you the runs.) 55 is a truly exceptional buffet. However, a buffet can never be more than a 55 because no one ever says: "THAT BUFFET WAS ONE OF THE BEST EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE! I CAN DIE NOW!" (Exception: John Pinette.)
-
In Calgary, there's a buffet called Treasures of China. It used to be a pretty good restaurant but its name was stupid. That's because Treasures of China served more than just Chinese food. I was there once and they had stuff from Japan, Vietnam AND Mongolia. This is probably okay because most white people are too stupid to tell the difference (my friend, Steve, is a magician at Japanese Village and one of the waitresses there told me that the manager will only hire Asians because white people don't know the difference anyway. The hostess was Vietnamese. One of the cooks was Chinese. Dumb white people just see the almond-shaped eyes and say AHA! JAPANESE!)
But back to Treasures of China, which is now a place I probably won't go anymore. It has one-and-a-half stars on yelp. Here is a review from a guy named Mike M: "Make's my bowel's cry out for better times. Why do I insist on torturing myself, I am a glutton for punishment. Perhaps in a past life I threw a baby from a cliff in some sort of sacrificial ceremony and now I am cursed in this life with the inability to make good decisions for myself. Treasures of China is the proof of life after death, which is ironic since every time I eat here I feel one step closer to the grave."
This is funnier than almost anything I have ever written on Rotating Pineapple (except the one about awful presents, which is probably the funniest thing in the world.)
-
The person who gave me this title is named Jay. Jay is Filipino and that means that he can probably tell a whole bunch of stupid white people that he is Chinese and they will believe him. (True story: When I first met Jay, I was told he was Filipino and I had never heard that term before and I thought his actual name was Philip Eno and so I called him Philip for about four months and poor Jay thought I was the world's biggest idiot.)
Jay is the owner/proprietor of a place called Eats of Asia and/or The Aimless Cook. He is one of those people who enjoys cooking more than life itself. He has never cooked me a meal and when I am in Calgary in early January, I hope to rectify this.
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