Despite my reservations about the sanitary conditions of all-you-can-eat buffets, it’s on our family bucket list, a rite of passage my children have yet to experience.
My kids have never eaten at an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s on my bucket list of things to do with them before they leave the nest and venture out into the real world in a few years. An American rite-of-passage: the all-you-can-eat buffet. The big ticket items on some family’s bucket list include the grandiose. Things like:
- Go to Disney World
- Take a cross-country road trip across the continental U.S.
- Visit Yosemite or Yellowstone National Park
- Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and peer into the vast expanse of sedimentary rock below and as far as the eye can see, pouring one out in your mind remembering Thelma & Louise’s last stand while Harvey Keitel watches on helplessly
The top of my family bucket list: take my kids to an all-you-can-eat buffet and let them gorge themselves to sleep.
There’s an all-you-can-eat buffet about three miles from our house. We pass by it every few days on our way to and from other places my kids have visited in their lifetimes. It’s called the Wood Grill Buffet. For the first ten years of their lives, every time we’d drive by the Wood Grill Buffet off 29 they’d ask to stop and eat there.
Allison would give me a look that said DEFLECT DEFLECT! and quickly catching on, I would relay that we’d already missed the turn.
Then I would relay a tale as old as time itself once relayed to me in my youth from my Papa Hamlett, a sage from an earlier, perhaps less nutty period in humanity: “Instead of a flat fee,” my grandpa once said of all-you-can-eat buffets, “They should weigh you on a scale when you enter and then weigh you again when you leave, and charge accordingly.”
All-you-can-eat-buffets hit differently when I was a kid. Perhaps it was the naïveté of not yet comprehending E. coli and Salmonella
When I was a kid, I thought all-you-can-eat buffets were the greatest invention since bubble gum candy cigarettes. Old Country Buffet was one we went to. Ground Round was another. Candlers Mountain Road in Lynchburg. Candlers Station.
Endless food, no matter your preferred taste. Do you like ribs? Check. Italian? Check. Traditional American cuisine? Check. And if you ate every morsel of your entree, select any dessert of your choosing. Want a second dessert? Go hog wild young man. You earned it. It was like Morrison’s Cafeteria on steroids.
Morrison’s, of course, wasn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet. But it carried a similar vibe.
Anyone remember Morrison’s in River Ridge Mall where you’d enter, they’d hand you a plastic tray and you were off to the races of culinary delight? I always got the chocolate pudding or green Jell-O with whipped cream on top as my dessert. I may be overlooking one or two visits, but I’m fairly certain my family ate at Morrison’s Cafeteria every single time we went to the mall in Lynchburg. Did other places to eat even exist? Yes. Did we eat there? No.
Are all-you-can-eat buffets even sanitary?
Now that I’m older, all-you-can-eat buffets wig me out. Are they even sanitary, and how can that be so? The thought of hundreds of people hovering above a buffet of food and breathing as they fill their plates puts me on edge. I’m not a germaphobe. I don’t carry around a small bottle of hand sanitizer everywhere I go. But the idea of buffets in adulthood brings out a deep evolutionary wiring within me that thinks eating at a trough with hundreds of other strangers entering, leaving, and then more entering hour-by-hour isn’t the wisest idea.
Talk about harboring bacteria.
Plus, I’m a guy. I can’t speak for the women out there and their bathroom hygiene, but I will tell you straight up that most guys do not wash their hands in public bathrooms. They just don’t. I’m not exaggerating the situation. They go number one or number two and walk straight out after the flush. A solid seven out of ten do their business and bounce. No water. No soap. They’re in. They’re out.
I don’t care what they claim in a survey. They’re lying. It’s seven out of ten. A solid seventy percent. Ask your husband or brother what they think the number is. If they say something different than seven out of ten, then they’re part of the doesn’t wash hands in public bathroom crew.
I always wash my hands in a public restroom. My son knows it’s mandatory for him to wash his hands, too. We abide by the “For Employees” sign, even though we’re just passing through. So I think about things like this when it comes to eating in public, and all-you-can-eat buffets are no exception. They are definitely not the exception.
But to strike this off my bucket list, I may have to swallow the fear. May have to swallow some fried chicken, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and mashed potatoes too. And some butter rolls. Can’t forget the butter rolls. Considering that Cracker Barrel, granted: not an all-you-can-eat-buffet, which my mom once took my kids to on a visit home, is one of my daughter’s favorite places to eat, and the fact that my kids think of Cracker Barrel as a “fancy restaurant,” means it’s only a matter of time now before we cross off “eat at an all-you-can-eat buffet” from our bucket list.
To whet their appetite, we may start small. For whatever reason, we’ve never even taken our kids to an Applebee’s. I know it’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet, but it’s a baby step in the wrong right direction. There’s one in Charlottesville, on Pantops. Pantops is more a place we pass through than stop at nowadays.
They’ve been to a TGI Fridays. I miss TGI Fridays. We used to have one near Target back when our kids were young. I doubt they even remember visiting. Hard to beat their Crispy Green Bean Fries in my humble opinion. I wonder if Wood Grill has crispy green bean fries.
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