Bananas and Red Sauce

There’s something inherently American about Chinese buffets. I’ve never been to China so I could be wrong, but I’ve always suspected “bananas in red sauce” is a dessert more likely to be found in Tennessee than Tokyo. I’ve shopped at more than one local Asian market and never run across individual cup servings of ice cream. You know what they do sell? Bags of chicken feet and containers of blood.

But not at the buffet. There’s nothing disgusting at the Chinese buffet — no chicken feet or “snake surprise” — only meat that tastes like candy and bananas covered in red sauce. The sushi rolls are filled with cream cheese and served with wasabi (that really isn’t wasabi) or a mysterious orange spicy sauce which is just Sriracha and mayo mixed together. The hot and spicy soup is never too hot and never too spicy. Chinese buffets are like Disneyland. Nobody gets hurt.

Some Chinese buffets are small, like the one off of Mustang Road. Their buffet consists of a dozen steaming pans of food and everything they serve is warm and familiar. That’s the place I once got in trouble for playing peek-a-boo with the owner’s toddler son; the place where their eight-year-old daughter would occasionally pick up our pushed-aside stacks of dirty plates — mostly empty, with only a few morsels we dished ourselves but for one reason or another decided not to eat left behind. That was the place my dad invented putting vanilla soft-serve in a glass and filling it up with root beer from the drink fountain to make his own root beer float for dessert. The only other desserts they offered were stale cookies and tiny pieces of cake that were colder than they should have been and didn’t taste much like cake. Oh, and bananas in red sauce.

Then there are the big ones, or were, like Linn’s Buffet, located between Meridian and MacArthur. Linn’s dining room was decorated like a royal ballroom, with seating wings that ran down each side and a large open area in the middle where customers dined underneath an oversized chandelier. Linn’s didn’t have 20 pans of food on their buffet; they had 200. All the normal stuff — your sweet and sour chicken and your broccoli with beef — sat in the middle of the buffet like an Asian bell curve. To the right were the more exotic foods: boiled crawdads and baby octopuses, both so lifelike that I thought they might crawl away at any moment. To the left, they had the same tiny frozen pizzas that my middle school used to serve in the cafeteria. As a grown man it felt awkward to snatch a frozen pizza and pile it on top of an already heaping plate of meat and noodles, but these are feelings you get over. It makes no sense to serve a frozen pizza on a buffet. When my wife would go out of town for work I would take my kids to Linn’s and they would load their plates up with Chinese Jell-O and Chinese macaroni and cheese. During Linn’s grand opening, they had a mariachi band standing outside in front of the door, playing music. Nobody understood why. A few years later we left work for lunch and discovered Linn’s was boarded up. The mariachi band was not playing that day.

When Susan and I were in college we hosted a couple of Russian foreign exchange students for about a week. Our Russians didn’t care for any food that was remotely spicy. They wouldn’t eat Mexican food and they wouldn’t eat pizza. Mostly, they liked stew. I don’t remember if we exposed them to Chinese food, but I doubt it. Susan’s Russian friend Elaina told us stories of standing in line with a food voucher, waiting for her turn to buy bread. Sometimes at Chinese buffets I eat food I’m not interested in while waiting for better food to come out. When we took our Russians to Walmart, they asked “who controls how much you can buy?” I wish I’d had the opportunity to take them to a Chinese buffet, where how much you eat is controlled by how tight your pants are.

The longest I ever spent inside a Chinese buffet was a month after Mason was born. A terrible ice storm wiped out power to half the city. None of our parents had power, and we were the scared parents of an infant. We loaded our car up with clothes and essentials and drove around town in search of a place with electricity. We ended up at the Chinese buffet off of Reno and Meridian, right next to Night Trips. That buffet was laregely unmemorable, save for the large boat in the center of the restaurant full of tables and chairs. Susan and I sat at the bow of the boat with Mason’s car seat perched on top of an upside down high chair. We ate our dinner as slowly as we could, and when we could eat any more we started drinking tea — dozens of refills of tea. In between refills we called our house with our cellphone to see if the answering machine would pick up, letting us know we had power. It never did. We left when they closed, and spent the night with a friend who had power. We must have been there for three hours that night.

The second longest I spent inside a Chinese buffet was in El Reno, when I was going to Redlands. Jim, Chebon and I ate at the same hole in the wall Chinese restaurant for lunch multiple times a week. I think the name of the place was Muy Wah, although we dubbed dubbed it the Lucky Ducky after something we read in a fortune cookie. Chebon weighed half what I did and would eat so much his stomach would poke out. Jim weighed as much as Chebon and I combined, and could out eat us both. The three of us overstayed our welcome there every time we went. We made up names and backstories for all the employees and wrote fan-fiction about them. I know the old joke, but it’s true — we really did get kicked out of the Lucky Ducky because Jim ate the entire pan of garlic chicken the minute they brought it out. Twice.

I’ve visited Chinese buffets all over the state (country, really), but eventually you settle into your own place. Our place, for a while anyway, was the Yukon Super Buffet. More than the food, I liked the fact that they put “super” right there in the name. Monster trucks should just be called Super Trucks; mansions, Super Houses. Super Buffet had six islands full of food. Plus sushi. Plus dessert. Plus a Mongolian grill area, where you could just walk over and pick out a bunch of food for some guy to cook, and then go make a plate of different food to eat while the first plate of food was cooking. You know what that is? SUPER.

The first time Susan and I were furloughed — the time we didn’t get paid for over a month — our friend Patty met us at Super Buffet and bought us lunch. We weren’t by any means starving, but we had been eating a lot of sandwiches and spaghetti to stretch our money during the furlough, and eating out then was a real treat. I ate so much food that day it was embarrassing. Not even the big cold fish with its head still attached floating in butter escaped me that day. And when we left, like every time we left, we would wave at Maneki-neko, toss a coin into the foyer’s stinky wishing fountain, and pat the giant stone dragon’s that sat just outside the front door on the head as we waddled out to our car.

To be fair, Yukon’s Super Buffet wasn’t that super to begin with, but over the past few years it turned super bad. The place currently has 1.5 stars on Yelp. Of the last 10 reviews, only one diner gave it two 2 stars; everyone else only gave it 1 star, and more than one lamented the fact that they couldn’t give them 0 stars. Yelp reviewer Mike B. said he can cook better Asian food at home. Kelli S. said there were roaches on the floor. Skyler B. said he would not dare feed their food to a pig. James S. said if his son were alive he would be really disappointed, and that he will never go there again. By the way, that was the two-star review.

None of it matters. Last week while driving through Yukon we noticed Super Buffet, like several other restaurants, had permanently closed. The lights were off, the doors were locked, and a sign taped to the door said the location was for lease. I haven’t been there in a couple of years and probably wouldn’t go back based on those reviews, and it still made me sad. You can’t keep a place that big in business for nine months without allowing customers inside. I know of five or six restaurants I used to visit that have closed over the past nine months.

Less than a year ago, the thought of walking around in public with a surgical mask on seemed foreign and awkward. Today, eating in a room full of strangers and touching serving utensils that strangers have just touched seems almost as foreign as Chinese food itself. The only memories of Chinese food my family has made over the past year are of placing to go orders from the tiny place next to 7-11, or grabbing lunch at Panda Express. Not once in 2020 did I fumble with chopsticks in a sushi restaurant, or get kicked in the shin by Susan after instinctively bowing to our waiter while saying thank you (why do I do that??). I’m looking forward to a lot of things in 2021. I’m looking forward to sitting in a corner booth and eating bananas and red sauce again.