My Bottomless Pit

 

This morning I had a meeting near the Knox/Henderson area of Dallas and then had lunch with a good friend at Chuy’s, a Tex-Mex joint on McKinney.  As we were chatting about the soap opera going on at her job and the jewelry we’ve been making on the side, I wished I had brought my camera to photograph the million hubcaps decorating the ceiling of this very colorful restaurant. I know I’d promised yesterday to stop blogging about food, but I am here to tell you I inhaled the vegetarian enchiladas the second they arrived. What can I say, Mexican food is a religion here to most of us. 

 

Prior to lunch, I had 15 minutes to kill so I went on auto pilot and let my long term memory guide me around McKinney to Knox to Abbott into University Park. This used to be my stomping ground when I was an undergrad at SMU, when a bunch of us would regularly meet for “liquid” lunches especially after exams. Or just on Thursdays. It’s a part of my life I no longer recall clearly, and as I drove around on instinct toward the university, I felt lost amidst new, unfamiliar construction and in misplaced nostalgia. There will always be parts of your life that you can never get back or particularly care to do over if you had the chance, but the memories of being young, really young, can sometimes be startling. Unsettling even, especially when your present revisits your youthful illusions in the context of  where you’ve been since then.  Good thing I had Tex-Mex to settle my head and stomach.

 

Speaking of filling my bottomless pit of a stomach, the pictures in today’s blog were taken at a seafood buffet restaurant (Best Buffet) somewhere in Plano. Such a place does not really warrant a mention for its novelty but this particular restaurant’s immense selection of food choices does. When I was in Belgium we went to a Chinese buffet restaurant that had a wok and teppanyaki, as well as the usual offerings of fried food, dim sum, salad, desserts, etc. This place was always packed because the all-you-can-eat concept is still relatively uncommon there, and because, well, such a cornucopia of offerings simply appeals to human gluttony everywhere. But this buffet in Plano would have satiated even the greediest of all gourmands.

 

Not only was there a wok station, there was also a grill for steaks, in addition to the six big areas of seafood, soups, sushi, fried foods, noodles, salads, fruits, and desserts.  I suppose it’s surprising to find this size of a buffet outside of Vegas. And the reason you only see pictures of seafood here is because after my first run of crab and shellfish, I couldn’t exactly pick up my blackberry again:

 

I’m really going to try to blog about something else next time.

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