The Soul-Sucking Prospect of a Free Lunch

Which is grosser? The food on the right or the pitch on the left?

I don’t want to badmouth a restaurant I’ve never been inside, but this is unappetizing on multiple levels.

It’s important to let you know that this place used to be a Golden Corral and fair to admit I have some biased (if very hazy) memories.

I didn’t have a “bad” meal, during my first and last Golden Corral experience in the late 1990s, but it was a little, well, Golden Corral-y. Now, I don’t want to alienate people who are Golden Corral fans. My bias is personal and possibly irrational.

I just remember how extra-fat I felt in the cut-rate cafeteria gluttony. I’m not usually self-conscious, but I’m heavy enough to feel watched at a buffet. As if there were diabetes anthropologists with hidden cameras documenting my kind. 

If you haven’t been, Golden Corral is a chain buffet steak restaurant. If I recall, the steaks are made to order and brought to your table after you’ve loaded up cafeteria style, yessing and noing your way through the side dishes that might include, like, hamburgers and fried chicken. 

My dad was skinny and also a fan of the steak buffet chain Sizzler (or the other one, the one with the TV show name). I don’t even know if those are restaurants any more (and I’m not checking), but they seemed like the “upscale” versions of Golden Corral, which is too bovine a name for a place with troughs of mashed potatoes. 

(Bonanza! That was the other buffet steak restaurant!)

I also feel like the steaks were too cheap for the price. Like, for an extra $3 or something, you got a steak with your buffet, and even then I knew I didn’t want a $3 steak. 

Regardless of your position on national steak buffet chains, I think we can agree that they’re lower-rent sit-down places without being pejorative. 

When you open a steak restaurant where a Golden Corral used to be, there are bound to be some ghosts undermining any attempt at being “upscale.” For example, reimagining a Golden Corral and selling steaks there is going to attract people used to paying Golden Corral prices. 

JoJo’s likely has found the sweet spot. Internet picutres show a menue and a salad bar, so maybe it’s more Costco-meets-Ruby Tuesday’s than pure Golden Corral.

The place has been open a year or so, as I understand it, but I noticed it a couple weeks ago on my way to a sushi place on the same block and told my wife the same thing I’ve been trying to get at here. That it’s an odd choice to replace a Golden Corral with a Golden-ish Corral.

I hadn’t thought of it again until I got this piece of scam mail.

It mentions leaving your checkbook at home several times.

According to a very brief internet search, EcorZone looks like a hustler’s franchise, a Herbalife for home improvement, say, that sells products it claims makes your home more fuel? efficient. Heat efficient? It claims to lower utility bills. 

There’s no way to say this without sounding like an absolute ass, but here goes:

This ad is targeted at people who don’t know what gourmet means or at people who believe “gourmet” means, “food you can’t eat comfortably in your car.” Like, you need knives and napkins and shit. 

Full disclosure: It is taking everything in my being not to go have the meal and listen to the pitch. I’m dying to report on this gourmet dinner where they’re going to try and sell me a whole-home purification system.

Sadly, there are some things you can’t do ironically and covering naked human tragedy is one of them. 

I can project myself into that meeting, though, among the white-haired skeptics praising the food quality or harumphing about it under their breaths waiting for the pitch. The jocular sales guy in his khakis and golf shirt, radiating the kind of positive energy we usually associate with cocaine use. The hard sell that comes with the insistence of dessert, as everyone assures the enervated sales-host that it truly was a gourmet meal to beat all gourmet meals. 

Mostly, though, I think of the mutual desperation to con without being conned, the low-grade avarice hanging in the air and it just makes me bone-sad.

I see it too clearly, which takes the fun out of it.