As you may have seen the other day, I tweeted "I will not feel the Pandemic is truly over until I feel safe going into a Hometown Buffet." It got a lot of forwards but it also got a response from my friend Marv Wolfman who tweeted — and others retweeted — "There never was a time when going to a Hometown Buffet was safe." I have several things to say to that…
First: Marv, you and I have eaten together in restaurants way less safe than Hometown Buffet. Secondly: It's a joke. "Hometown Buffet" fits into the joke. Certain proper names fit into certain jokes better than others.
I actually didn't mind Hometown Buffets that much…though I must admit to not being in one for well over fifteen years. A long time ago, I felt safer in a buffet — any buffet — than I did in many order-off-a-menu restaurants. When you have as many food allergies as I do, you like seeing your food before you commit to it.
It's one of the things I used to like about Vegas…though I liked the buffets there more before '06 when I had my gastric bypass. Back then, you could stuff yourself and feel you were getting closer to "even" with the casino. After the surgery though, I couldn't eat enough to make most buffets cost-effective and a year or so later, my sweet tooth disappeared and I gave up pies, cakes, cookies, cute little creme puffs, ice cream, etc., further limiting my consumption.
So I largely gave up buffets because I didn't want to pay $40 for the eight bucks worth of food I could consume. But before that, a Hometown Buffet was fine for my purposes, especially if they had someone carving a freshly-roasted turkey. Yeah, most of the vegetables were canned and the fried shrimp were frozen and tasted like they were 90% breading wrapped around one stale Goldfish cracker. Yes, some of the food in the steam tables seemed to have been there since the invention of the steamship.
But if you find yourself dining in cheapo restaurants due to lack of funds or options, you learn there are some things they just can't ruin. Working on studio lots that sometimes had no commissary (or one as bad as some of them are), I learned that the catering truck could usually make a decent grilled cheese sandwich. So that and a bag o' chips was an acceptable lunch. And if a buffet was carving a freshly-roasted turkey and they had mashed potatoes, I was fine. I'm not saying no one ever ruined those items but it's not easy.
So that's my admittedly-feeble defense of Hometown Buffets or places like Hometown Buffets. And it brings me to the other thing that I heard in response on Twitter and in my e-mails: Is the Hometown Buffet chain — which includes brand names like Old Country Buffet and others — still in business?
I dunno. And after about twenty minutes today searching the Internet, I'm still not sure. They don't seem to have a website, they did declare bankruptcy and a lot of their outlets closed on account of The Pandemic. But a lot of chains have gone through bankruptcy — and were doing so before the lockdowns — and there's a difference between closing for the duration and closing forever. A lot of the former are now reopening.
Are those kinds of buffets gone for good? A lot of the ones in Vegas — more than were expected — are reopening. What's more they're raising the prices because people seem willing to pay it. And they're going back to the serve-yourself model where you walk up, pick up the same spoon fifty customers before you used and put pasta from a large serving tray onto your plate.
But I'm not sure about Hometown Buffets and Golden Corrals and their clones. If you find out for-certain, lemme know and I'll pass it on. I just wanted to say that if Hometown Buffet is gone for good, it wasn't as bad as some folks who pounced on my Tweet said it was. And if such places do come back, you probably won't see me in them unless I'm stranded where that's my only option and they carve real turkey.