It was six o'clock on a Sunday evening, three hours down and four remaining in our long drive home from the Mardi Gras Parade in Burlington, VT to Geneseo, NY. Broke, tired and hungry, we were not quite ready to succumb to the dismal quality of Mickey D's and pressed onward by mandate of a higher calling. Applebee's, TGI Friday's, Friendly's, all reasonably priced establishments of respectably higher quality. In the midst of discussing which one we should stop at we came across a Golden Corral. While The Golden Corral may sound like somewhere Abraham might have sacrificed his best ram in the Old Testament, it is actually an all you can eat BBQ and grill franchise. We had never seen one before but I personally had always found their commercials to be generic, failed imitations of the adds of their competitors. However, they must have done something right because the second we stumbled across it excitement washed over us like a Mardi Gras crowd catching a glimpse of the first float. We knew where we were eating that evening.
Hastily parking the car, we shuffled in amongst the flood of anxious Sunday night diners. We stood at the end of a long line leading up to the cash register where you were granted entry to the buffet. We'd never seen anything like this. The electricity in the air spoke more of a highly anticipated playoff game than the waiting lounge of a T.G.I. Friday's. Shocked by the droves of outwardly excited dinners, we chatted apprehensively about what it must be like inside. A rather corpulent woman behind Harrison, Gavin and I overheard that it was our fist time and chimed in about how excited she was for us as if we were children experiencing our first Christmas. During the wait we got in our fair share of people watching and quickly realized the extent to which we stood out, what with our lack of obesity and tattoos. After much anticipation we finally made it to the front of the line. Cost of admission is ten dollars, the exact amount of cash I had left, this place is a godsend. All rung up and ready for the dinning experience of a lifetime, we were handed our trays and unleashed upon the Golden Corral.
We were met by a spread of steak cooked any way you could want it and chicken prepared in every manner imaginable, not to mention a myriad of fish and shrimp. Plates heaving, we settled into our designated table and got down to business. The steak was a little tough, thats alright there's still chicken. Eh, the chicken's greasier than expected. How many years has this seafood been frozen and where does the breading end and fish begin? Well it is all you can eat for ten dollars and thats still a great deal, we settled, and continued plowing through the spread. We made numerous rounds to and from the buffet acquiring an army of plates yielding dishes with only one or two bites taken out of each. After what only felt like five or ten minutes we began to slow down, and I don't just mean rate of consumption. A grogginess we had never experienced before was suddenly cast upon us. Feeling more under the influence of cough syrup than tryptophan, our conversations began to space out more and more with each bite. We sat there surveying our surroundings in silence. Our once delectable, yet frugal oasis was quickly fading into a temple of gluttony before our eyes. "Where the hell are we?" I asked. After a few moments of numb silence my friend Harrison simply replied "We're in a college dinning hall." Looking around us we all burst out in uncontrollable fits of laughter realizing we had just paid ten dollars for five dollar meals in order to subsidize the 25 dollar meal of the 300 lb. woman behind us in line. Woozy and downtrodden, we returned to the car to spend the next four hours thinking about how many years of our lives we had just taken off. As we got settled and buckled our seat belts we looked at the clock. We had just lost a full hour in the wormhole of American gluttony that is The Golden Corral.
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