Yesterday I posted about musical guilty pleasures, and that got me thinking. The idea of guilty pleasures never really crosses my mind too much, as I never really considered much of what I do or enjoy to be guilty. But, having given this subject some thought last night and this morning, I’ve decided that I have quite a few guilty pleasures, especially in light of my new “lifestyle.”
Not THAT kind of new lifestyle you goobers. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’m talking about my relatively new dietary lifestyle where I can actually tell you how many fat grams or calories some things have and I don’t immediately order whatever has alfredo sauce off of the menu now or hit buffets thrice weekly.
That said, here are a few of my (non-musical) guilty pleasures.
The first and most obvious one is the buffet. I don’t care if it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner either. There is nothing quite so appealing to me as the concept of all you can eat type restaurants.
See, I love to eat, and I love to eat a LOT. I always have. In my old life, there was only one way to tell if I was done eating, and that was the blissful feeling of total bloatedness to the point of near nausea. This is the toughest part about my healthier way of living. I eat less more often instead of eating more more often.
As for what kinds of buffets I love, it really doesn’t matter. I’ve loved the Shoney’s breakfast buffet, the Eat n’ Park buffet in Pittsburgh, the Chinese buffets all around my office, CiCi’s pizza buffet (where my personal best is 18 slices of pizza crust and all) and BBQ chicken or rib joints (like Country’s Restaurant in Opelika, Alabama where all you could eat of either chicken or ribs and a large, refillable tea was $4.79).
But the greatest buffet on the planet is this place:
If you’ve never heard of it, here’s the description from the menu page:
Operating under the unique service concept of espeto corrido, which translates from Portuguese as “continuous service,” Fogo de Chão satisfies palates and the desire for something original. Instead of ordering from a traditional menu, Fogo de Chão offers a prix-fixe system where guests can sample the entire menu, or just focus on their favorite items.
The lunch and dinner menu features unlimited servings of 15 different delectable cuts of fire-roasted meats, a sumptuous buffet of gourmet salads and fresh-cut vegetables, and a variety of Brazilian side dishes.
Each guest uses a two-sided disk to control the pace of their meal. The green side signals the Gaucho chefs to bring out skewers of sizzling fire-roasted meats to carve at the table. The red side indicates a stopping point. Turning back to green lets the Gaucho chefs know to start offering the meats again.
The traditional side dishes of warm cheese bread, fried bananas, crispy hot polenta and seasoned mashed potatoes are automatically brought to each table and replenished throughout the meal. The restaurant’s award-winning wine list, traditional Brazilian beverages, and a variety of decadent desserts complement the experience.
Sure it costs like $44.95 per person for dinner (plus your drinks and dessert), but man, there might not be anything more satisfying than a full-on case of the meat sweats.
Oh, and the pride one feels when one’s quite pregnant wife is the only person at a table of 20 that never once turned her disk to the red side to dissuade the gaucho from bringing her more and more glorious meat.
p.s. If you’ve got the stones, you can go to lunch there for half the price of dinner and still get all the same stuff. But I recommend taking the afternoon off. No one wants to see you throw up five people’s worth of fire-roasted meat in the Q2 forecast meeting.
Other culinary guilty pleasures include McEwan’s India Pale Ale, just about any good cheesecake, pistachios (which I still have in small quantities), Ruffles Sour Cream and Cheddar chips, Cheddar Chex Mix, an entire large Tombstone pizza just for me, three hot dogs and homemade Egg McBagels (which are like homemade Egg McMuffins but on bagels. It was a health concession for me to cut down from three to two in a sitting of either of these fine treats).
Guilty pleasure #2: Reality television.
And I’m not talking about American Idol / So You Think You Can Dance / Making the Band / America’s Got Talent type of dumbass shows. Those lost credibility when…wait, they never really had any. Except maybe when Kelly Clarkson won. After that…zip.
And I don’t watch shows (or episodes of shows) where they make people eat weird shit. There’s nothing dramatic to me about a guy eating hog testicles or a partially developed duck fetus. That’s retarded. If you’re gonna do that and call it television, then simply take Joe Rogan’s idea, which is this:
First of all, it’s a pay per view event. Pick ten people that sign up, at random, and bring them to Vegas. Set each one in front of a pile of 20 pounds of dogshit on a scale, and start the clock. The person that eats the most dogshit by weight in one hour wins ten million dollars. I mean, who’s not paying to watch that? Besides me, that is.
I’m talking about shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, Celebrity Fit Club, The Surreal Life, Supergroup, the franchise that is Rockstar: (insert band name here), Run’s House, Meet the Bradys, Joe Schmoe, Hell’s Kitchen, Iron Chef, the now defunct The Restaurant, The Real World, Road Rules, Real World vs. Road Rules, Newlyweds, Punk’d, Starting Over, Pros vs. Joes, Hogan Knows Best, The Apprentice, Average Joe, Beauty and the Geek, Dancing With the Stars, Kathy Griffin - My Life On The D List, Pimp My Ride, the first couple seasons of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, and well, you get the point.
The irony is that I frequently bitch about reality TV killing actual television and yet, looking at this list, I am possibly single-handedly killing real television.
My other guilty pleasure category is the non-buffet but horrifically unhealthy breakfast joint. Whether it’s The patty melt plate with double hashbrowns well done with cheese and a grilled cheese with bacon at Waffle House, the Grandpa’s country fried breakfast with three eggs scrambled with cheese at Cracker Barrel, the country fried chicken with three eggs scrambled with cheese IHOP or even a big similar breakfast at Huddle House, I’m all for it. And God forbid you be a hotel or some out of the way place with a breakfast buffet like The Lantern Inn on Lake Lanier. Oh sweet Mary. That place has a full buffet but you have to read the tags because you can’t tell the chicken from the pork from anything else because it’s all deep fried.
Oh, and now that Denny’s has that new Mega-Grand Slam Breakfast, I feel like I’ve seen the Bigfoot and Lock Ness Monster of guilty breakfasts and now I just need to find a Denny’s without first building a time machine to get to one. The last one I knew of for sure was at I-285 and Chamblee Dunwoody Road and sold bottled beer.
At 3am.
To 17 year olds.
Drunk 17 year olds.
I think I need a moment….
What say you?