As America Eats, So Does Fat Guy

[Fat Guy]

I'm going to spend a week eating like a real American. This isn't so much a matter of choice (though I did promise, a few months back, to perform the experiment sometime) as of circumstance: I'm going to be in High Point and Hickory -- two towns in North Carolina where the main business is furniture -- supporting Mrs. Fat Guy on her book-promotion tour and the only entertainment available to me is eating.

Indeed, eating seems to be the primary form of entertainment available to anyone around here. It seems to me that as a cultural matter the lack of anything to do other than eat, shop, watch TV and movies, and abuse substances (and spouses) is bound to create a society that mostly eats, shops, watches TV and movies, and abuses substances (and spouses). Is a society of professional restaurant reviewers far behind? But I digress.

It would be possible for me to eat well here, in theory, if I lived here -- not that the people who live here seem to do that very much. Of course, there are supermarkets and farmers markets -- really nice ones. But the fast-food parking lots are the ones that are full, I'm in a hotel without cooking facilities, and our time is extremely limited. So we're eating every meal in restaurants, and the restaurant options are mostly chains and single-unit establishments trying to be like chains. It seems as good a time as any to check in on a bunch of these places.

Sure, there are a couple of good restaurants around -- I'll get to some of those as well -- but this week they're just a distraction. The mission is real American food not that fancy European crap served by waiters in penguin suits to idle rich communist gay Jewish New Yorkers. . . Sorry, just trying to get in character.

Friday, August 1, Lunch

Taco Bell

On a 13 hour drive (made 2 hours longer than it needed to be by the need to divert from I95 to some Virginia back roads as a means of bumper-to-bumper traffic avoidance) the last thing you want is delays, and Taco Bell is at the extreme fast end of the fast-food spectrum. It's so fast, they don't even use a spoon to put beans in your burrito -- they have a bean gun hooked up to a hose connected to a tank of bean product. Taco Bell is also cheap -- really cheap. I didn't even have to use any bills to pay for my food; I was able to buy a couple of bean burritos and a soft drink (unlimited refills) with only the loose change in my pocket.

The bean burritos are actually quite tasty, provided you don't have expectations of getting something that tastes very much like an actual bean burrito. Palatability can be further enhanced by the addition of Taco Bell's pretty-good hot sauce. Experience has taught me, however, not to stray too much farther into the menu at Taco Bell.

Friday, August 1, Dinner

Kepley's Barbecue

Hey, barbecue is fast food too! Anyway, after one fast-food meal at a real chain restaurant I was getting kind of bored of the experiment and wanted some good food. I'll try to be better-behaved going forward.

Kepley's is the only barbecue place in High Point I know of that actually pit-cooks its meat with wood. What's interesting is that the totally inferior place up the road seems to do far more business with the locals, whereas at Kepley's you're likely to run into the barbecue-pilgrimage crowd and others with printouts of recommendations from the Internet. But we're talking die-hards only, because Kepley's isn't a first-tier pilgrimage place and isn't in any of the books.

I can't imagine Kepley's could stay in business based on in-store sales, but they've got this barn -- Kepley's Barn -- out in the country that they use for catering weddings and corporate parties and such. That must be their profit center. We had a great chat with Mr. Kepley last time we were in town and he seemed to be saying as much.

I've been to several of the top "Lexington style" (chopped pork shoulder with vinegar and red pepper sauce) barbecue places and I think Kepley's is as good as any. The hush puppies are especially nice, because they avoid the common problem of being too sweet. A barbecue plate -- chopped pork, red slaw, hush puppies, fries, and pickles -- is something like $4.29.

[Fat Guy]

Saturday, August 2, Lunch

K&W Cafeteria

Curiously, there are three cafeteria restaurants in High Point all with two-letter names joined by an ampersand: K&W, J&S, L&R. A keen intellect is required in order to keep them straight.

I can't understand why cafeterias have disappeared in most of the country. They seem to have everything going for them: they provide cheap food at a reasonably high quality level (compared to the typical fast-food chain restaurant) and the diversity of offerings is impressive. I especially like being able to see the food, though of course there are also drawbacks to eating steam-table-type food especially that it can get kind of dried out (or, to avoid that, they basically have to paint it with fat).

I had roast beef, carved right off a big roast, and I was able to specify the nice medium-rare part from the center. It was $3.39 for as big a plate as I would have wanted. Everything is a la carte. I also got some mac-and-cheese (excellent) and some hush puppies (poor -- I should have known not to get any kind of steam-table fried food). Mrs. F-G had a piece of salmon (totally respectable), corn bread, and coleslaw -- all good. That plus drinks was about $12. I'd like to see cafeterias make a comeback, but somehow I get the feeling that their time has passed and they've been replaced permanently by buffets and fast-food chains.

Saturday, August 2, Dinner

Chick-Fil-A

Chick-fil-A comes very close to being a flawless fast-food chain restaurant. I highly recommend it to anybody who doesn't believe fast-food in a chain-restaurant format can be good. The chicken sandwiches are in my opinion delicious, as are most of the side items like the coleslaw and the crinkle-cut fries. The basic sandwich is a breaded chicken breast cutlet pressure-cooked in peanut oil and it's great. It's served on bun with a few pickle slices -- no mayo or anything like that. If you want condiments, you add them yourself. The same sandwich is available grilled -- of course not as delicious, but still quite good. It's a real shame the closest one to me is in Paramus, NJ -- there are none in Manhattan.

[NeroW]

Chick-Fil-A?

Huh?

[Jason Perlow]

Chick Fil-a rules. I could eat 3 or 4 of those things. They're addictive. Nuggets are awesome too.

Taco Bell? Jesus Steven, you must have been desperate.

[Fat Guy]

Chick-fil-A Web site

[Fat Guy]

Taco Bell? Jesus Steven, you must have been desperate.

It's not about desperation, though I was desperate. It's more about an experiment. But it so happens I enjoyed my bean burritos well enough. The trick at Taco Bell is not to order any of the more ambitious items.

[NeroW]

The Boy brought over Taco Bell on Thursday night.

He didn't finish it all. One of the leftover items was a bean burrito.

Even Fritz Brenner didn't eat it. And that's a freakin' miracle.

[Fat Guy]

Maybe my next experiment will be a week of Taco Bell, paid for entirely out of the change crock. Or maybe I could get the company to comp it, though then there's always the risk that, as a known reviewer, the chef will pay extra attention to my food and the service I receive will be atyipcal.

[Explorer]

How about Bojangel's Chicken and/or Cracker Barrel?

Funny you're there, we were there 3 yrs ago, on the way from Charlotte to Jamestown- our destination was FurnitureLand, a 100,000 sqft furniture store.

[fifi]

My current Taco Bell addiction is the Steak Gordita.

[Fat Guy]

How about Bojangel's Chicken and/or Cracker Barrel?

Funny you're there, we were there 3 yrs ago, on the way from Charlotte to Jamestown- our destination was FurnitureLand, a 100,000 sqft furniture store.

Actually, it is more than ONE MILLION square feet. How do I know this? I'm married to the leading authority! The book we're here promoting is Ellen's Shopping the North Carolina Furniture Outlets.

[Dave the Cook]

Chick-Fil-A also has great lemonade. Unless you make it yourself, or convince a relative that loves you (a lot) to make it, you won't get better.

[jhlurie]

Chick-Fil-A?

Huh? 

Going from eating Taco Bell to Chick-Fil-A is a jump equivalent to going from drinking "Milwaukee's Best" Beer to Heineken. It's like watching a Paulie Shore movie then switching over to an Albert Brooks movie. You aren't climbing to some kind of artisitic pinnacle, but you are going from pure crap to something filling, and essentially decent.

Chick-Fil-A even has the best calendar ever sold by a fast food chain (I mean unless some fast food chain somewhere is selling a swimsuit calendar). Cows in humorous poses, and monthly coupons (sometimes two) which outweigh the five dollar cost of the calendar by a fairly large factor, even if you only use three or four of the fourteen or fifteen provided.

[alacarte]

Maybe my next experiment will be a week of Taco Bell, paid for entirely out of the change crock. Or maybe I could get the company to comp it, though then there's always the risk that, as a known reviewer, the chef will pay extra attention to my food and the service I receive will be atyipcal.

Please reconsider, unless you will enjoy tapping on a laptop from the seclusion of the nearest lavatory. You'll be spending a lot of time there.

[elyse]

What, no breakfast?

[Varmint]

Seeing Steven and Ellen are in my home state, I must chime in.

K&W Cafeteria (and its brethren) is a statewide institution. Try going there in about an hour when the churches let out. You'll have quite a wait. These places represent much of the old South's principles: simple food served quickly at a fair price. I'd say these cafeterias (and the barbecue joints) are equivalent to the diners of the North. I've never been a big fan of these places (I have no self discipline and end up with 11 items on my tray), but for convenience and cost, they're top notch.

The only downside of Chick-Fil-A is that they're closed on Sundays. And who ever said that a free market society has no morals????

Rather than barbecue, Steven needs to start hitting some of the "meat n' 3" joints. I'll see what I can dig up in the Triad and Unifour areas.

[NeroW]

Or maybe I could get the company to comp it, though then there's always the risk that, as a known reviewer, the chef will pay extra attention to my food and the service I receive will be atyipcal.

Dude, are you being for real? They're not going to know who you are!

[fresco]

Or maybe I could get the company to comp it, though then there's always the risk that, as a known reviewer, the chef will pay extra attention to my food and the service I receive will be atyipcal.

Dude, are you being for real? They're not going to know who you are!

After his most recent posts, there is probably a likeness of FG in the kitchen of every Taco Bell in the world.

[Malawry]

K&W is pretty good. We always liked J&S more, though. I thought their food was fresher. I loved K&W for breakfast when I was a kid. Fried apples and biscuits, mmm!

Will you be hitting any of the NC chains? Ham's comes to mind. I love their homemade chips even if the rest of the menu is nothing special. Try to get to the original in Greensboro, along Friendly Ave. My dad used to eat there when he was in high school.

Next time you hit a cafeteria or other local-yokel place look for Boar and Castle sauce. Used to be a burger joint in Greensboro way back when, and while it's been closed for decades some factory somewhere still makes the sweet-tart sauce. Not bad on fries.

-Malawry, who is a native of Greensboro and whose closest childhood friend lives in Hickory

[Fritz Brenner]

The Boy brought over Taco Bell on Thursday night.

He didn't finish it all.  One of the leftover items was a bean burrito.

Even Fritz Brenner didn't eat it.  And that's a freakin' miracle.

Yeah, but I took a good-sized bite. And it certainly wasn't any lack of quality on the bean burrito's part that caused me to stop eating-- my stomach was still full of sausage pizza.

[Fat Guy]

What, no breakfast?

We have a stash of fruit and a coffee maker in the room, so that covers our routine breakfast and snacking needs.

[Fat Guy]

Sunday, August 3, "Meal"

Golden Corral

When cops who work the night shift take their "lunch" breaks, they refer to it as "meal" because there's no real name for it. Likewise, the thing we ate at Golden Corral can only be called "meal" because, for $5.99 each, we did pretty much all of our eating for the entire day and night. And we seemed to be the only people in the place who didn't have 2-for-1 coupons from the local newspaper, or veteran's discounts, or senior citizen discounts, or some other way of reducing out cost to one cent per thousand calories instead of the three cents per thousand calories we were paying.

For those of you living under a rock or in France, Golden Corral is an immensely popular chain of buffet restaurants -- 470 locations in 40 states. If your goal is to eat as much food as possible, it's hard to think of a more effective way to achieve it short of becoming a duck on a foie gras farm. The buffet stretches on seemingly into infinity. You can peruse it ten times and notice new items every time.

The trick, as we learned quite by accident, is to go on a weekend at around 10:30am. This gets you in for the breakfast buffet, but at 11:00 they change over to the lunch buffet and you can keep eating. So if the eleven million choices of breakfast food aren't enough for you, you get a whole 'nother set of choices. I suppose if you kept eating until 4 or 5pm, you could have the dinner buffet as well all on the same ticket.

Some people hate buffets. I have no fundamental objection to a buffet and am in fact happy with any buffet that offers me enough good food to get me through. So I don't really mind if 75% of the items on the 100-item buffet are crap. That still leaves me with more than I could possibly eat -- and I'm no slacker in the eating department, even though I feel positively svelte in any Golden Corral restaurant (if you walk into a fast-food restaurant, you won't necessarily feel that you're surrounded by fat people; the serious obesity action is at the all-you-can-eat buffets). The thing I like about buffets is that, of course, they give you choice. And if you're creative, you can use that choice to great effect. For example, by stockpiling bacon from the breakfast phase of the buffet and then collecting bread and some salad-bar vegetables from the lunch phase, I was able to create a BLT. And because it's a buffet, you can take as much bacon as you want. At a normal restaurant, they charge you 2 or 3 bucks for like 4 or 6 strips of bacon. At Golden Corral you can take, say, 80 strips of bacon (I probably came close) as part of your $5.99 investment, and then you can have breakfast and lunch. I'm not all that good at arithmetic, but I think if you crunch those numbers you'll find that they're paying you to eat there.

I'd rate the breakfast buffet at Golden Corral on par with that of a good hotel breakfast buffet. It's pretty much the same concept: there's a guy with an omelet station where you can specify various vegetables, cheeses, and meats and he cooks omelets to order. He can also make you fried eggs -- ask for ten of them, nobody cares how much you eat. There's another station with all the breakfast meats, including big fat sausages split and cooked on a grill (they have the grill set up behind glass in the middle of the station so you can watch the action), as well as various griddle-cooked items (pancakes, french toast -- you can observe the griddle as well) and waffles. Those items aren't made to order, but turnover is exceptionally high and you can game it so as to get stuff right off the grill if you care. What will become the salad bar station at lunch is, at breakfast, filled with fresh fruit -- quite a good selection -- and cereal. There's also a bakery area where they make biscuits, danish-type things, and other stuff I can't remember. Throughout the buffet are also various industrial food-service offerings that look as though they came out of huge cans or tubs: corned beef hash, various gravies, things with fluorescent cheese on them, etc. If you get hung up on the presence of these items, it's easy to dismiss the whole buffet as garbage, but the way I see it you get all-you-can-eat bacon (good quality crispy bacon), sausage, eggs made to order, blueberry pancakes, waffles, biscuits, and fresh fruit for $5.99. Just ignore the other stuff, or taste it out of morbid curiousity.

At lunchtime, the food definitely takes a step down in quality (breakfast tends to be the strongest meal at any buffet), but you can still put together some good-enough plates. They change the fruit station into a salad bar, they start throwing mediocre-quality steaks on the grill instead of breakfast sausages, and the egg station becomes a taco bar. The various breakfast meats and other items are replaced by things like good quality fried chicken (go ahead and take seven fried chicken breasts if you like), not particularly good pot roast, and all sorts of starches best ignored. They also put out a whole ham at a carving station, which I think they rotate with a whole turkey and a whole roast beef. The bakery area starts churning out desserts. There's a soft-serve ice cream area with a range of toppings available. It's quite abundant. I'm understating the offerings for the sake of being believed.

[fresco]

Is the objective of this place to make it completely uneconomical to eat at home?

[Fat Guy]

That seems to be the direction in which we're headed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, within a few decades, cooking at home becomes mostly a hobby pursued by the well-to-do.

[dumpling]

Steven- a scientific question. Given the variation from your normal eating habits, have you found that in your quest for Americana that you are losing or gaining poundage?