Food Fight at the Golden Corral

The Golden Corral is a buffet restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, where my brother lives with his family.  Out of curiosity, I googled the ranking of Kentucky to see where it fell among the fattest states in the nation: it's #6.  So, as you can imagine, buffets are very popular there.  My brother (who grew up with me in NJ) will never see himself as a Kentuckian- he will always find them entertaining for the wrong reasons, at least the stereotypical ones.

So, according to him (and his wife, a Louisville native!) our visit last week wouldn't be complete without a trip to the tackiest buffet in all the land, The Golden Corral.  My sister-in-law talked me into it by telling me that I would never see more fat people, mullets and tattoos gathered under one roof.  I was sold.  We went on our last night there- saving the best for last.

I am not a regular patron of buffets- I find the food to be disappointing, and the people to be disgusting, as least a good number of them.  The last one I went to at Foxwoods Casino in CT was bad enough- I actually saw people reaching into the bins of food and eating directly out of them, with their hands.  I don't know why the idea of unlimited average food is so appealing to people- I guess because it's cheap.  I do remember loving buffets when I was a kid- my brother has seven of the little critters, so, besides having the chance to observe a some Louisville culture, I got caught up in the excitement of being at a buffet with a bunch of greedy kids.

It started out quite civilly- the kids went to the different ethnic and American food stations and helped themselves to reasonably decent choices. (I even saw some grayish green beans on a niece's plate!)  Dessert was the bribe: "No dessert, kids, till you've had something good to eat for dinner!"  It's hard to monitor what so many kids have eaten, so when they were about 3/4 done with their pizza and fried chicken and ham and chinese food, my brother said it was time for dessert.

That's when things began to fall apart.  At one point, I heard him mutter, "This is anarchy," when 2 of his boys returned to the table with a humungous cotton candy in one hand, and a giant, lopsided soft-serve ice cream cone in the other. (The 2 year old was audibly snorting as he gobbled up his cotton candy- I remarked to my brother that he sounded a little like a wildebeest devouring a lion.)  Around this time, the local color seemed to dramatically increase it's presence- there were glorious mullets to be seen, some grey and flowing down men's backs,  large, scantily clad women sporting all sorts of tattoos in all the wrong places, and over-eating going on everywhere you looked.  Our favorite patron was the short, extremely round young woman who was observed dousing her mountain of macaroni and cheese with a flood of melted velveeta from the cheese pump dispenser squirter.

In the meantime, the kids had discovered the chocolate fountain. I think they thought that the point was to just stick your mouth directly beneath the flowing chocolate.  They were covered with the stuff.  When it was time to go, a 4 year old nephew was lying on the floor next to the table, covered with chocolate, like he was a victim at a crime scene.

Here are a couple of pictures, that don't do the whole experience nearly enough justice.  But you get the idea.  I left the place with a bad stomach-ache, not from the horrible food, but from laughing.

4 year old Luke, whipped into a chocolate frenzy.