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Buffet is all-U-canfight-for

I like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet every once in a while.

Not so much for the quantity of food, mind you, but the variety. One can get a little dab of everything that looks interesting and try a replacement for something that looks better than it tastes. Don’t like the peanut-butter beef roast? Get up and get you some of those chitterlings or whatever.

Most of the buffet dinners my associates and I opt for these days are Asian-food buffets. The crowds seem fairly easy to handle. Breeze in, get greeted, seated and the drink order taken. Feast on hot and sour soup. A couple of pieces of crab Rangoon, maybe an egg roll or spring roll. Rice, fried or steamed, with a choice of toppings (shrimp and vegetables, beef and broccoli, sesame chicken, something sweet-and-sour-y). Almond cookies, soft-serve ice cream and/ or a cake square. A fortune cookie or two. Pay and go.

American-food buffets seem to be different. Wait in line. Pass the time people-watching and hope you don’t end up sitting by the Duggar-size family. Pay before eating. Breathe a sigh of relief that the family at the next table has only five hollering children. Get back in line at the various food stations. Get as much as you can so you don’t have to get back up and wait in more lines. Have numerous near-collisions with drink-hauling servers and running children. Realize you do want to grab something else and groan. Repeat. Vow never to come again. Break vow sooner or later.

By the time “later” came for me - the other Saturday - my memories of American-food buffets had grown a bit fuzzy.

My husband and I were invited to what I consider our area’s Disney World of buffets … I’ll call it Buffet World. The food choices are vast and tasty, prices reasonable and, because of that, the lines are about as long and the crowds as thick as at the Magic Kingdom and its other Orlando, Fla., theme parks.

I knew it was serious when I saw security guards. The hostess holding new diners back at a buffet’s version of a velvet rope was reluctant to allow us to find the friend who’d already been seated with his family. Luckily, our friend rescued us.

Here, there is no time to stand and ponder whether or not the cooked baby carrots are tender enough or debate the merits of white meat fried chicken meat versus dark. You must slap something on your plate and move along. Others are waiting.

We sat in one of the party rooms next to a table full of rambunctious children, some of whom tried to gang up on a boy and bestow a whipping upon him - right behind my head. It was his birthday.

Partly afraid I might not get the chance to go back out for more food, I first fixed myself a Doomsday Salad, a mountain of just about everything on the salad bar with a glob of dressing. If I ate it all, I might be so full I wouldn’t want to wander back out into what appeared to have morphed into a scene from the wild, wild West … your fork is your gun.

We had a great time with our friend and his family. Even with the table full of children behind us, we were able to have a conversation without shouting. Had we been in the main room, we would have been justified in using bullhorns or texting with our food-stained phones.

Then came the moment we realized that, yes, we did want to make another trip to the buffet table.

“I’ll hold on to you,” Hubby said playfully as we ventured back out into the fray.

“You might want to,” I told him. “Not sure whether we’ll come back alive.”

I resisted the temptation to commit the sin that one of my family elders used to do at a buffet - discreetly wrap up a large piece of something, stick it in my purse and take it home. Didn’t want to run afoul of the Food Police (the security guards).

As we exchanged final friendlies with our companions, I noted the literal revolving door of the place. People were leaving; just as many new ones were coming. I wondered whether their previous memories of the place were as fuzzy as mine had been. And whether they liked Doomsday Salads.

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Style, Pages 49 on 03/23/2014

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