“Buffets, beloved by many Americans, are rapidly changing their business model to adapt to the virus.”
Sorrow mixed with anger at forces beyond the eater’s control. A quality buffet offering well-cooked edible delights sends waves of pleasure cascading through appreciative hungry bodies and minds. When your gustatory lust can not be sated by your favorite local buffet what is a person to do? What retail food outlet can offer what a quality smorgasbord can give you?
Buffet, smorgasbord, endless vittles trough, whatever label you apply to the all-you-can-eat food place I can not think of any other food-vending outlet that offers what those awesome incredible eating places give us. Gave us?
Has your local buffet remained open?
“Buffet chain Golden Corral announced the closure of its 35 corporate stores due to the impact of the coronavirus and that it has furloughed 2,290 employees.
Some of the more than 450 franchised locations are still operating while others have suspended operations. Where in-restaurant dining is closed, Golden Corral is offering carryout, curbside delivery, and home delivery.”
From the Golden Corral Web Site we read:
“WELCOME BACK
We are excited to bring our teams back to work and re-open our restaurants as soon as it’s appropriate in compliance with state and local mandates. Restaurants are reopening every day, so please continue to check our website for updates on the Golden Corral® near you.
We have developed new service models to comply with variations in state and local guidelines. In addition to our “No Touch” Buffet Service, we are prepared to temporarily provide our guests an enjoyable Golden Corral experience delivered in new ways, including our “WE SERVE YOU” Buffet Service, or our ENDLESS ENTRÉES, where our servers bring our buffet favorites directly to your table with enhanced tableside service..”
Looking at their list of open Golden Corral outlets the two in my small city are open but are using the “cafeteria-style” form of vending food. The Golden Corral site either fails to inform us what “cafeteria-style” entails or I failed to find a definition. The handy Web search engine led me to a site that may explain:
“In the cafeteria-style model, stanchions are set up around the buffet areas and now-common floor markers tell customers where to stand as they line up for their food. Golden Corral staff then serve customers the food they request, eliminating the need for customers to touch utensils.
In the family-style model, servers bring customers “an endless buffet” of selected items to their tables.”
A big thanks to the far-out folks at “Restaurant Business” who give us this informative article; Golden Corral starts reopening, without the buffet
Without heading off to experience the “new improved” buffet I consider the above information. Waiting in line for slow-assed old folks with no damn idea what they want taking nearly seemingly forever to inform the server what they want then relying upon the server to pick out what to you would be the yummy-looking chunk of chicken or fish and you know the lame-assed server will put way too much gravy on your mashed taters after you clearly enunciated and indicated with your body language that you wanted a tiny dollop of gravy but now you have a plate awash with the stuff that envelopes every food on your plate.
Then its time to ladle a plop of potatoes upon your plate. That’s all you want. In olden times a few steps to the buffet, stab the puds with the big spoon-like device and PLOP on your plate they be and you are back at your table with a grin and a lick of the lips as the spuds please your palette. Not now. Nope. Back in line. BAH!!!!!!!!
It would likely be worse if you are forced to sit at the table waiting for the vittle-grabbers to arrive and ascertain your desires, head off to wherever the food is kept, place upon a plate then haul it back to you. They choose the chunks you get. No more picking at the meatloaf log to grab the hunk you crave. The same with EVERY DAMN ITEM!!! You get what others decide is best for you!!! BAH!!!!!! And imagine the wait time. You want a hunk of something. You crave it. It’s over there. Almost close enough to spit upon it but NO!!! You must wait for the slow-ass food grabber who is stuck at the table with the four ancient crones that devote TWENTY DAMN MINUTES to finally convey their damn order to the exasperated food grabber who is beginning to believe that the writers of Logan’s Run had some damn fine ideas.
NO. Maybe my vision of a nightmare experience would not occur but my decades of life experience tell me that my fears may in actuality be worse then imagined and that I could possibly end up imprisoned for defying the overlords demands and stomp to the damn serving are myself and grab the damn food I want NOW and I promise not to sneeze or spit on the food. Would the cops arrive to haul my ass off to the local jail where it is THERE I will contract the Kung Flu and spend my final hours hacking and wheezing in the shack where I expire and my mummified bug-eaten body is found many months later and my expiration will not even rate a column half-inch in the local worthless corporate-owned newspaper full of leftist and Marxist propaganda and there is no story too far-fetched to print as long as it vilifies President Trump. Screw those bastards. I would rather pass on anonymously than have my mostly-good-name besmirched merely by appearing in that worthless propaganda-dispensing newspaper.
Thus I shall just look elsewhere for my vittles. Unlike the glorious days of the past when I regularly visited smorgasbords/buffets my visits became more infrequent until the visit was an annual affair performed when the mood hit me. That mood was today, July, 19, 2020 (damn . . . I never imagined I would live this long!!!). A Web search and the information garnered led to the creation of this blog entry. Now I need to find a substitute for the craving that only the traditional old-fashioned all-you-could-shovel-in buffet could sate.
Damn.
Coronavirus: The slow death of the American all-you-can-eat buffet – BBC News
I Adore Food 