My $29.95 License to Gluttony

This past Sunday evening, my family and I paid a visit to our favorite restaurant Minado in Natick, MA.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this little piece of heaven, Minado is a small chain of restaurants in the Northeast (and Pennsylvania) that offers "All You Can Eat Japanese Seafood Buffet".

For those of you people that know me and my affinity for Japanese food is not surprised that I would like a restaurant like Minado. But what most of you probably don't know is that I turn into a complete different person when I go to an "All You Can Eat" establishment. Let me explain.

When I am at a normal restaurant, I would sit down and order a meal - only ordering what I like and eating it at a normal pace. Enjoying each bite and appreciating the fine taste of the food. But when I go to an "All You Can Eat" joint, I am consumed by the drive of eating more food to justify the cost of such buffet. Often a lot more.

The guy on the right is not trying hard enough, no time for gang signs when stuffing sushi in ones mouth!

The drive to maximize my return on investment is not limited to Japanese all you can eat restaurants, it applies to any place where I pay a fix fee for unlimited quantities of food. It can be some $6.25 Chinese lunch buffet, a Mongolian Grill place like Fire and Ice, or the buffet at Bellagio, my goal is the same - eat more than the cost of entry.

Let me take you through my evening at Minado, to illustrate my techniques in "sticking it to the man" in the all you can eat buffet arena.

We arrive at the door around 5:00 PM. On this particular snowy Sunday, Minado is rather slow. They try to seat us near the front door, we request for and were given a table closer to the action. This is important, as you want to minimize the travel time to the food.

I get to the table, stay just long enough to put my stuff down and head straight for the food. My general strategy at the beginning of a buffet is always this - eat the most expensive food first and fast as possible. The reason behind it is simple, like a run 'n gun offense, I do not want to give my stomach a chance to feel full until I at least break even.

Minado offers both sushi and sashimi as well as all sorts of cooked Japanese / Chinese / Korean dishes. For dinner, they also offer King Crab legs and raw oysters. The novice here will go right for the King Crab and oyster first. This is not good, why? Because like a pretty girl, there will be many suitors for the crab legs and oysters. You'll end up spending more time waiting than eating.

I make a quick beeline to the sushi section. Normally I would encounter a line, where several people are slowing in front of each type to sushi to read the identification tags. The paradox here, as I have discovered, is that the fatter the person is - the longer it takes for them to read the tags. I get very very angry at these people. Come on, whatever you're getting here is going to have less fat content than the sticks of butter you generally shove down your pie hole, take one of each kind and move the fuck on!



Luckily for me, the snow has limited the number of slow porkers at the sushi/sashimi line. I was able to eat four plates within 30 minutes. The key here is to grab as much eel as possible - then work your way down to the other fishes. Stay way from California rolls, those are cheap to make and will shrivel up your testicles - and the next thing you know you'll wake up and you're cheering for the Lakers.

Satisfied now that I have eaten my money back, as well as stored up a healthy profit - I begin my next phase. I load up on cocktail shrimp, sip some cold beer (yes, I know that I have to pay extra for the beer. Hence, I need to pad the profits before drinking). As the food is slowly digesting, I begin my critique of others' buffet habits.

As it is true in any of these buffets, the big profit margins are with the starchy foods. Why else would most of these places stock up on a mind numbing variety of pasta and other breads? I take the next 30 minutes or so pointing out the rookie mistakes others make to members of my family. These errors at Minado generally consists of people grabbing buckets of rice (both fried and white), noodles/dumplings (fried or even worse - soupy), salads, and anything like crab rangoon that you can get easily at a buffet that is 1/3 of the price. I give them nicknames as I snicker to myself. My family ignores me as they are busy eating crab legs, I continue on amusing myself by mentally calculating the ROI of each person's plate as they walk by.

This may fly for a $7.99 Chinese buffet, but at Minado, you're a sucker.

Better, but they're not paying you for presentation.

Yes I know playing the buffet game my way seems like a lot of fun, but it is not without consequences. Nope, I am not talking about the discomfort from overeating, but rather the pesting of others when their buffet habits are not up to par.

Many years ago, I remembered a friend brought along a date to dinner at Fire and Ice in Cambridge. She ate one single plate consisting of maybe 3 shrimps and 2 pieces of meat, said she was full, and stopped.

After several rounds of questioning from me, in a manner I am certain that she would classify as "uncomfortable", she finally confessed that she ate a sub before she went out. I think I may have repeatedly mocked her for her lack of planning, and I think she may have gave me several dirty looks before they left early. I don't know, my memory is a bit fuzzy.

A few years after that, I visited an all you can eat restaurant in Taiwan. This restaurant not only have raw sushi/sashimi, but also have a Mongolian grill section with all sorts of raw meat that you can mix and grill. It was rather expensive by local standards, but I was confident that I can make it work. Until I discovered that the all you can eat included beer. Yes, all you can drink beer; and you don't have to order it from the killjoy wait staff - you pour your own. Growing up in Massachusetts where happy hour was outlawed many many years ago because the drunk wife of Governor Dukakis, of course I went batshit crazy with the free (well, felt like free) beer.

In order to keep people from drinking too much, the restaurant used tiny hotel bathroom sized cups for all the drinks; and to prevent people from bringing in their own large mugs, kept the beer tap low so you can only fit their tiny cups under it.

How did I beat the system? I took a big tray and filled up a beer pong rack of glasses each trip, and drank at least 3 glasses as I filled up the other glasses.

At this point, you probably think my downfall was that I drank too much and passed out on the food, or some other alcohol related outburst. Nope, not by a long shot.

Yes, I did drink rather fast, and was buzzed. But alcohol only played an indirect role in the disaster that took place the next day.

In my haste to quickly maximize my investment through both food and drink, and the fact the meat that was meant to be grilled and raw sushi/sashimi being next to each other; I may have ate some raw meat uncooked. This being August in Taiwan, the lows for each day is in the high 90's - I probably ate some "not so fresh" raw meat to boot. The net result of this debacle was an afternoon of projectile vomiting, and a trip to the hospital that evening with a case of mild food poisoning.

What was the lesson learned here? Don't multitask, grab ALL of the food first and separate them accordingly before you start with the beer.

I have since visited similar types of restaurants in Shanghai, where the sushi buffets were extremely cheap; but their profit center seemed to be beer - roughly $9 for a Bud. Damn commie bastards.

Someday I hope to return to that wonderful restaurant in Taipei, but for now, I'll settle for Minado.