I Sure Am Fat (2)

I am not a picky eater, but I am picky about where I eat. For reasons that are partly political and partly aesthetic, I normally refuse to eat at large national chains like Applebees, Chilis, or The Olive Garden, nor will you ever find me darkening the door of a McDonald's, Taco Bell, or Burger King (unless I happen to be needing a restroom - I have absolutely no problem peeing into a McDonald's urinal). Most of the time this isn't a problem - cities like Boston and Philadelphia offer plenty of local, non-chain culinary options, as does the Valley, and when I travel I'm usually pretty good at sniffing out idiosyncratic diners and burger stands. This is usually accomplished with the help of a guidebook of some sort, but it still counts.

My restaurant snobbiness gets much harder to maintain (and, consequently, much more visible) when I'm visiting my family in Oklahoma City. Like most middle American cities - if "city" is even the right word here - OKC is a gargantuan postmodern wonderland of prefabricated, low-rise, high-volume fast food and "family dining" outlets strung along four-lane, 45-mph secondary roads like beads on a rosary: for every nine fiberglass-and-fake-stucco franchises there's at least one gigantic Wal-Mart or comparable big-box monstrosity - put them together and you've got what rosary-kneeders call a decade. There are a few small, locally-owned places struggling here and there against the corporate onslaught, but it takes great effort to seek them out, and effort is not really part of the local dining culture. I, of course, am willing to make that effort, as are most members of my family (both because their preferences tend to coincide with my own, and, in those instances when they don't, because they are sensitive to my peculiar fussiness on this point), but for most other (normal) people around here the default choice for a meal out is usually the local KFC, Red Lobster, or IHOP. On those rare occasions when I find myself unable to escape an invitation to dinner at one of these places, I'm usually pretty good at resisting the temptation to engage in some sort of self-righteous grandstanding (as the younger me would have done), and instead grit my teeth and go along - but I'll be damned if I'm gonna enjoy it.

One partial exception to the corporate casual-dining hegemony in middle America is the prevalence of buffets. Country-style, Chinese, Indian, or Mexican, buffets have many of the supposed virtues of the national chains - they're convenient, the portions are as massive as you want them to be, the prices are relatively low, the food is low-risk predictable - but they tend, for reasons that remain slightly obscure, to be locally owned and operated. Nevertheless, most buffets are quite a few notches higher on my Scale of Depressing Dining Experiences than even the shabbiest and dirtiest Whataburger or Subway. Do I really need to explain why? Okay, I'll be quick:

1) Though buffets offer a vast array of different types of food, buffet food sits out in the open getting cold, congealed, stale, or polluted in one way or another from the moment it's brought from the kitchen.

2) I always feel that, to get my money's worth, I need to get as many different types of food as possible onto my plate. This normally leads me to eat a wide variety of cold, congealed, stale, or polluted food in great quantities, and I usually feel quite sick afterwards.

3) A good portion of one's fellow buffet patrons will often be grotesquely overweight. Should the food itself fail to ruin one's appetite, the sight of a trailer-sized father-of-four ladling a fourth helping of baked macaroni and cheese into his gaping maw, like cement into a mixer, will usually do the trick.

4) I have to get up and get my own food.

For a long time, my father's family frequented a Chinese buffet about a mile from his house, and I would get dragged along more often than I cared to. Everyone agreed that the food was terrible - the desserts were particularly abysmal: stale store-bought pink cookies and runny soft-serve ice cream (I can't tell you how sad I get around bad desserts) - but it was relatively inexpensive and close to the house, so it became an easy meal when there wasn't any food in the fridge. To my mind, the worst thing about this particular buffet was the large-screen television that sat in the corner and showed, at top volume, whatever reality TV show or cable news channel the proprietors decided to turn it to that day. Invariably the four people in our party would be seated right in front of the TV, and we would then spend the rest of the meal feeling self-conscious under the stares of our fellow diners, many of whom would position themselves at their tables to watch the TV while they ate. I'm talking about married couples sitting side-by-side at their tables, eating their slimy chop suey in perfect silence as they stared at the large talking screen. If not for the swarm of Asian waiters busily refilling their Diet Cokes, you'd think they were in their own living rooms eating from TV trays. It was, in a word, horrifying.

Luckily, when I was home for about three weeks last summer I managed to break the hold of the horrifying Chinese buffet on my family. Any time the question of where to eat dinner arose, I quickly brought up the Chinese buffet in order quickly (and perhaps a tad self-righteously) to dismiss it. This seemed to have the desired effect, and I can now happily report that it's been at least a year since I've bitten into one of their stale pink cookies.

There is one buffet, however, at which I still manage to find myself every time I come home, and, what's more, I don't object to it in the slightest. This is the Sunday brunch buffet at Ingrid's Kitchen, a German restaurant in the older part of town that's been there for about 30 years (that's several lifetimes for an OKC restaurant). Ingrid's is the very soul of quirky, unselfconscious authenticity, a sort of old-fashioned deli/restaurant that wouldn't be out of place in New York or Boston but that is completely without parallel in OKC. It's tacky and slightly grubby (water-stained drop-down ceilings, cheap wooden trellises above the cash register); it loudly proclaims its Germanness in the best ethno-American fashion (bathrooms wallpapered with clippings from German magazines, cheap 1970s German pamphlets and children's booklets strewn across a shelf against a wall); it serves wonderful German food (wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, sausages) and delicious desserts (tortes, cakes, cookies, pies); and both the clientele and staff are unlike anything else you'll see in this city. On Saturdays they have a small band - elderly retirees backing a middle-aged woman singing golden hits of the 1940s and 1950s to a crowd of silver-haired customers - and on Sundays they have a large buffet of standard breakfasty stuff and nonstandard Germany stuff, along with salads, bread, pasta, and a large dessert table.

Last Sunday, after I sat down with my first plate from the buffet, I looked at the table next to us and saw an outrageously large Asian priest dressed all in black. He was perched on a small chair across an octagonal table from a slender, bald white man with glasses and a grey beard. The slender man wore a large wooden cross around his neck, a red-and-black flannel shirt about three sizes too large for him, and matching red-and-black cowboy boots. They were gossiping about church matters, but they looked like characters from a Graham Greene novel. And then there was the guy whom we've dubbed Roast Beef, after what is clearly his favorite food. He strolled in shortly after we arrived and beelined to the buffet counter, showing no hesitation whatsoever, clearly a regular. He was a tall man of about 60 with a black leather jacket, a head of frizzy, shoulder-length, brightly bleached hair, and a savage fondness for roast beef, which he piled in great heaps atop two plates that were already full to overflowing with eggs, sausage, bacon, and waffles. I was both appalled and overjoyed. The other patrons - several young couples, a table of women with hair like newscasters, and a few other solitary male regulars - were too busy eating eggs and sauerkraut to notice the strangeness of it all. Or to notice the lack, anywhere in the dining room, of a single television.

And me? I had one plate of breakfast food, one plate of German food, and one plate of dessert. My dessert was a slice of chocolate-strawberry cheesecake, a scoop of warm bread pudding (smothered in butter sauce), and a scoop of warm chocolate gooey cake pudding. Just a week ago that amount of food would have lasted me for days. Now, as I slowly become a rotund piece-of-crap academic, it barely saw me through the afternoon. An afternoon that I spent reading and watching Lord of the Rings.

This is how it begins.