Back in middle school, my friend Matt was relating a story to me about what happened on a recent family vacation. They were somewhere in the mid-Atlantic coast when they realized that they hadn't eaten all day. The entire family was getting weak and cranky and it was obviously time to locate some sustenance. Unfortunately for their cheapskate father, there was nowhere in that small town to get cheap food. Nope, if he wanted to feed his family, Matt's father was going to have to take them all to the one restaurant in town: the fancy calabash seafood buffet.
Now, a calabash seafood buffet usually doesn't cost an exorbitant amount. It's mostly a bunch of fried seafood and sides. No big deal. Not this calabash seafood buffet, oh no. Mind you this is back in the early 90s, and this buffet was $22 a head, well above what Matt's father was even remotely willing to pay for a meal. But, in the face of full family mutiny, the family paid their money and entered the buffet.
Don't get me wrong, a good calabash seafood place is fantastic. My personal favorite is Crabby Mike's, which I encountered during a road trip through South Carolina.
Anyway, they got into the restaurant and Matt's father instantly started gorging himself on the most expensive items on the buffet. He told his family that he was determined to get his money's worth at any cost. When he noticed that the rest of the family was eating "normal" food, he kept eating even more as he felt he needed to even out the loss he was taking on the other three family members.
In the end, Matt's father felt that the family as a whole had gotten their money's worth, mainly through the food that he personally ate. Unfortunately, he was also so full that his wife had to drive them to the hotel, where he promptly collapsed into bed and moaned about indigestion for the next 12 hours.
I know a lot of people like this. To them, a buffet is some sort of challenge; an "I dare you to eat your money's worth before you get full!" This really doesn't make sense to me. Most of these people don't have an issue eating at normal restaurants, where they are generally unconcerned with whether or not they are getting their money's worth. And even if they are concerned, they're not using the same metrics as they do at a buffet. All food being equal, what a buffet value nut (henceforth called BVN) judges as ten dollars worth of food at a buffet is exponentially more in volume, calories and cost than what they will determine as ten dollars of food at a normal restaurant.
I know this, because I was raised by two of the most heinously obnoxious BVNs in the world: my parents. Actually, that's not entirely honest. Both of my parents are massive cheapskates in general:
- They refused to go to restaurants with nice decor or service, as in their mind you end up paying for the ambience and not the food
- They always order sashimi at sushi places because they don't want to pay inflated prices for rice
- My parents didn't own a big screen TV until 1999. This was due to the fact that my mother refused to buy a TV that had picture-in-picture (note that I said HAD and not DID NOT HAVE). My mother felt PIP was a stupid feature and that she was not going to pay extra for something she was never going to use. Well, the problem was that every television in that era over 30" had PIP as a standard feature. So no TV for them
- Instead of getting me a nice school jacket (you know, the kind with the school name and logo on it and your name embroidered on the pocket) my mother went to a thrift store and found some coach's old jacket made of single-layer backpack nylon with the school name on it. When one of our neighbors pointed out the multiple failure points of this garment, my mother blocked out the rest of what the person said and only heard the line about the name being embroidered on the pocket. She then proceeded to stitch my name in single-thread yellow letters on the pocket. I of course refused to wear the jacket. Weeks later my mother had a bunch of friends over and she was showing them the jacket and bemoaning my refusal to wear it. Ten years later I was chatting with one of the women present at that gathering, and she told me "We all started laughing because we were sure your mother was just kidding. But then we realized she was serious. One of the other women told your mother that even a bum wouldn't want to wear that jacket. Another asked her if she secretly hated her child. Your mother looked very confused by all this. After everyone else left, your mother was still talking about the reaction to the jacket and started preaching about how white people love to waste money. I felt like slapping her, but I just left."
- My mother once let a pot of rice go bad. Instead of throwing it away like a normal person, she dug through the pot and picked out the pieces that to her passed the smell test, then fed them to me. Years later we were at a sushi restaurant and my mother was served spoiled rice. When she went to complain to the waitress, I said, "Uh, if spoiled rice is good enough for me it's good enough for you. Leave the motherfucking waitress alone and eat your spoiled goddamn rice, it's fine, remember?" I then told the waitress that my mother preferred rotten food and thanked her for working hard to fulfill my mother's culinary preference. But I'm not bitter
Our crappy Ohio town had its fair share of buffets, and a brand new one opened up near us. They had a seafood night on Fridays and we went. The buffet was cheap, probably $8 a person, but my parents probably felt that this place was luxuriously priced (Let me note here, we were not poor by any stretch of the imagination. My mother drives a Benz. My apartment could fit into my parents' house four times over). What was really funny about this place was that they had one of those fancy round rotating buffets, where half of the circle faced the dining area and then rotated back into the kitchen to be refilled if necessary. These people actually had the rotation speed up way too high, probably to conserve food. It was going fast enough that you had enough time to take one scoop and barely get the serving utensil back in the bin in time. It was pretty funny.
I had the audacity to come back to the table once with macaroni and cheese on my plate. I thought my father's head was going to explode.
"WHAT THE HECK YOU DOING WHY YOU COME BACK HERE WITH STUPID IDIOT INNARD WHITE STUPID FOOD WE COME HERE EAT SEAFOOD AND PAY GOOD MONEY AND THEN YOU GET JUNK STUPID FOOD THERE SO MUCH SEAFOOD BUT WE GET GOOD VALUE EVEN MOM NOT EAT FISH ONLY EAT CRAB LEG BECAUSE CRAB LEG IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE BUT YOU JUST ACT STUPID GET WHATEVER YOU WANT LIKE YOU MCDONALD NEXT TIME WE JUST LEAVE YOU HOME AND EAT DOG FOOD"
Rearrange all that and repeat for TWO hours at max volume in the middle of a packed restaurant. This happened in the dark age before blogs. Nowadays, unless it causes you physical harm (and sometimes, even if it does) anything crappy can be turned into an entertaining blog post for your friends and family. No such option back then.
It's become a running joke amongst my friends at any restaurant to remark to me not to get macaroni and cheese. I always reply that I won't, that I understand the purpose of seafood night and wouldn't want to upset the group's value proposition.
All that being said, I'm pretty sure that I've discovered a buffet that would satisfy Matt's father and my parents.
But it's not really a buffet.
Eastern Empire serves what they call the Cosmopolitan Oriental Dinner. They hand you a menu of about 50 dishes, from which you can order whatever you want, as many times as you want, for the low low price of 16 dollars. Each dish is actually cooked fresh in the kitchen. It's the best dinner deal in Sacramento.
Cosmo Girlfriend's dog wanted to go, but he was deemed too cute.
And here's Cosmopolitan Girlfriend posing with the menu. Yes, she's really named after this meal.
Potstickers came first. They're actually very good here.
Honey walnut shrimp. Two orders of these and you've already gotten your money's worth for the entire meal.
Cake Sister mocks the chow mein.
The scallops in wine sauce, followed by the scallops in garlic sauce.
Mongolian beef, which came with about 225% the spice level we were expecting. I loved it, but had to douse Cosmo with ice water to keep her from combusting.
Szechuan string beans!
This is what the table looked like 15 minutes in. Proper plate management is key!
Dessert came in the form of a fried donut strawberry thing.
Cake Sister declared this place "Yod's Mother Approved" when she noticed how some of the tables had folding chairs instead of real chairs, confirming that my mother would certainly enjoy this place as we definitely were not paying a decor premium.
It's the best value in town, seriously.
