(with apologies to Auntie Mame, and that immortal line “Life is a Banquet.”)
I am a bachelor tonight and tomorrow while Kathy is out of town with several friends- and the best thing I could come up with for some wild entertainment was a trip to Waukegan, Illinois to eat a satisfying meal at one of my very favorite restaurants, Sweet Tomatoes.
It drives Kathy crazy whenever preface my description of this place with the words “It’s a buffet, but . . . “ because she thinks that makes it sound like Old Country Buffet, which is most certainly is not. It is indeed a buffet, but the food is incredibly delicious and distinctive – and a lot of it is low fat and vegetarian. It’s also made from scratch, unlike Old Country Buffet and similar places where 9/10ths of the food looks and tastes like it came from a can. At Sweet Tomatoes, it’s all wonderful food – and there are even these neat little signs above most of them which tell you something about the dish at hand. And it’s all you can eat for the very reasonable cost of $10.19 – which makes this place a culinary heaven-on-earth for me. Of course, I’m someone who chose to take my future bride to Bonanza Steak House on our first date back in 1989. Yup, my idea of impressing a woman was to take her to dinner to a place with trays. Rudolph Valentino I wasn’t.
Anyway, Sweet Tomatoes is a terrific place (thank you, Polly and Mark, for introducing us to it) with the biggest and most splendid salad bar on earth – an array of wonderful breads, muffins, biscuits – several different prepared dishes – and my favorite part of all . . . eight different soups. It’s a rotating lineup each day, and today was Big Chunk Chicken Noodle, Continental Lentil and Spinach, Irish Potato Leek, Three Bean Turkey Chili, (low-fat), Deep Kettle House Chili (naughty but incredibly delicious), Chicken Pot Pie Stew, Pumpkin Bisque, and Yankee Clipper Clam Chowder with Bacon. The last one completely grossed me out – I don’t think I could have eaten it if I were a starving man on a desert island and this was all there was to eat – but I sampled all of the others and loved them all.
Whenever I go to any sort of buffet, I am reminded of an experience I had many years ago with a precious friend of mine named Everetta McQuestion, who I have probably mentioned from time to time in my blog. (And I may have even shared this story at some point.) She was in her early 80’s when we first met, but ageless in so many ways- although there would be these occasional moments when I would be rather starkly reminded that she was an elderly woman. One time I remember taking her to Sunday lunch at Old Country Buffet in Racine – and this was back when the place had one long buffet line rather than being broken up into various stations. Anyway, I was ahead of her and whipping along at my usual hectic pace, when I realized that she wasn’t right behind me – so I slowed the pace and tried to wait for her, but it turns out that she was poring carefully over every single item she was choosing to put on her plate. “Carrots. Ooh. I like Carrots.” And she would carefully spoon some carrots on to her plate. Then she would look to the next item for a few moments and then say “Cauliflower. I like cauliflower.” And she would carefully spoon some cauliflower on to her plate. And she proceeded from there to “mashed potatoes” and “green beans” and on and on – and meanwhile, there was this traffic jam of impatient people behind her who were trying to imagine what was holding things up so seriously. And I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do to speed her up except to say encouraging things – ask if I could grab her a beverage or rolls- anything to get things taken care of further down the line. By the time we FINALLY got through the line, it seemed like there were 200 people in line behind her, ready to strangle her. Heck, part of me was ready to do it for them. Fortunately, she had absolutely no idea what sort of gigantic traffic jam she had unknowingly created. . .
That story has made Marshall and me chuckle over the years – and whenever we’re having a meal where carrots are being served, we quote Everetta with a smile. But at some point I started seeing that frustrating experience at Old Country Buffet in very different light. Now I realize that Everetta was someone who deeply and profoundly appreciated things- and the last thing she would ever do is whip through a buffet without stopping to savor the thought of each and every item she served to herself. I, on the other hand, tend to mow through a buffet line like Evel Knievel … One of us was doing it the right way, and the other was doing it the wrong way – and I’ve come to realize only recently that Everetta is the one who should give lessons in buffet-visiting – not me. And her example in the buffet line is worth considering as a model for living life itself.