Iron Crowned posted:

That's weird, every time I've been to Cracker Barrel it's always been packed with families, with at least two boomers and what I assume are their descendants. Then again my only times I go to one are when I visit my family for Christmas.

Iron Crowned posted:

The "cracker" in Cracker Barrel is white people

Schubalts posted:

Every time I've been dragged to Cracker Barrel, I got to experience the "white people that arrived long after us getting their food before us" bingo space. It's the only place where I've had that blatantly happen to me.

MariusLecter posted:

Same.

This was in Texas and I asked the gift shop staff if they had Moxie and was told "what you see is what we got."

Noslo posted:

Does anyone have/remember that goon's story about people watching a group of ritual gluttons strategize their plan of attack for the buffet?

quote:

Why all the Golden Corral hate? Golden Corral is honestly better than a loving movie.

I have a friend named Bruce. Bruce looks to be some kind of honest-to-God pirate at first glance, and I mean Captain Jack Sparrow's crew pirate, and the ornery, mean old loving pirate you'd never, ever want to mess with because he'd bite your God-damned nose off and eat it. He's also wildly into K-pop, choreographs his own dance routines to it, and in the last year or two has started just basically eating like a Korean, which apparently means shitloads of vegetables and cabbage. Anyway, Bruce goes to Golden Corral like 2x a week, which I thought was kind of strange due to his new health kick, so finally I asked him about it.

"Dude," he said. "Golden Corral has a shitload of vegetables, and their cabbage is great. But you're missing the point. You don't go to Golden Corral just for the food, JS. It's loving dinner theater."

And you know what? He's right. For $12 you can sit and watch some of the most hilarious, downright hellishly gluttonous behavior you will see outside the Plane of Fat in the Demonic Abyss. I went with him one time and laughed so hard at some of the poo poo on display that now I go with him about once a month, get a big plate of steak and another big plate of salad, stake out a spot where you can see most of the buffets (and oh for loving sure the CHOCOLATE WONDERFALL) and just observe the kind of unbelievably self-indulgent (and self-destructive) poo poo that would make a European or Southeast Asian's person head explode off their shoulders in horror and make someone with a "sick sad world" sense of humor laugh their rear end off.

Someone, say, like me.

For example, the very first time I went with Bruce I was witness to "the recon." This is a real thing, and what I am about to describe is not an isolated incident, no sirree. Humongously fat people will literally go scout the buffet. Now, I think we all do this to some extent at a buffet, in the "Hmm, what do they have to eat here?" glance-while-walking-to-the-table sense, but this is done with military precision, people. I've watched with my own eyes three people, all of whom were 300 lbs+, meet briefly and talk, then split up and go to the buffets, carefully eyeballing each selection, lips moving, fingers pointing, as if cataloging the unearthly delights that await them, then loving meeting back up in the same place to discuss what they saw and plan an attack. I'm serious. They were like 10 feet away.

"Guys it looks like the fried chicken tonight is coming out pretty fast, pretty sure that stuff's going to be good, but the rotisserie is just kind of hanging out. Pulled pork was kind of crusty but I think if we dug down a bit there's good stuff there. There was a bit of a crust on the edge of the brown gravy and someone dropped some loving broccoli in it but the white gravy's looking fine. Outside of that, hot bar A looks good. And of course the bourbon chicken looks good as always."

"Fantastic. Well, the guy cooking the steaks told me they are busting open a new box in about 20 minutes, so we should probably lay off that until then. I noticed there was a lot of bacon in the green beans right now so that should probably be one of our first stops. The mac and cheese tonight also looks loving delicious, it's got a nice crust unlike that bullshit last week when it was practically yellow water, so we need to move on that. It looks like they recently changed out the taco stuff, especially the nacho cheese, it looks brand new, so, take that for what it's worth."

"Well I've got bad news guys, from what I could see it looks like tonight's a no chocolate cake night, they only have that loving one that has those fake cherries on top, and we all know how that fucks things up."

>groans all around<

"But it's not that big a deal because they just put out rice krispies with chocolate coating and the girl said they've got tons of them. They've also got those sugar cookies and some fudge brownies that look all right, and all the other pie poo poo they usually have."

"OK, so green beans, fried chicken, the mac and cheese, the white gravy, those are tonight's superstars. Let's go."

I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. I expected a loving Wonder Twin powers-esque ring bump at this point, but instead they just all fled to a plate dispenser and began loading the gently caress out of their plates. It really reminds me of nothing so much as when people like, discuss what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Except with food.

This is also when I first experienced the phenomenon of the "multiplate."

Now, your average person will take a plate to the buffet, fill it with food, and go back to their table and eat. But, you see, that person understands that when they are done eating, if they want more, there will be more food available at that time. But the multiplater wants to hedge its bets. What if, between that first and second trip to the buffet, the restaurant suddenly ran completely the gently caress out of food? Like, not even mints by the cash register or gum in the quarter machines? WHAT THEN? Your deliciousness per second (DPS... sorry) will go down!

It doesn't bear thinking about. Now it's unlikely, gentlemen, but not impossible, so as we are smart consumers, we're going to guard against the possibility. So let's each go get three complete plates of food and come back to the table.

Now I'm not talking a meal plate and a salad plate, as I mentioned before I myself do that every time I go to watch this... whatever the gently caress it is, Theater of the Grotesque, I guess. But just imagine for a moment going up to the buffet and getting a plate loaded down with actual loving rib-sticking food. 3-4 chicken wings and legs, a big-rear end helping of mac and cheese, some mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, two corns on the cob, and a yeast roll or two, then taking it back to your table. Time to eat, right? WRONG. DIPSHIT. WHAT IF THEY RUN OUT OF FOOD WHILE YOU ARE EATING YOU GOD-DAMNED NINNY? WHAT ABOUT YOUR DPS?

So you just set this completely full plate down and go get another one, and again you just completely fill the gently caress out of it with food. A couple of steaks, a pile of pulled pork, a rice mountain topped with sugary chicken (MOUNT BOURBON), and a couple of smoked sausages with nacho cheese on them, then you take that back to your table.

You now have enough food at your table, JUST ON YOUR PLATES, to feed an entire platoon of ten year-olds who have been playing all day. Time to sit down and pig the gently caress out. WRONG. DIPSHIT. WHAT IF THEY RUN OUT OF FOOD NOW? YOU'VE ONLY GOT LITERALLY TEN OR FIFTEEN THOUSAND CALORIES ON YOUR PLATE, YOU'RE PRACTICALLY GOING TO STARVE TO DEATH. IF YOU DON'T KEEP YOUR DPS UP WE'LL HAVE TO KICK YOU OUT OF THE GUILD DUDE.

So again you set your second completely full plate down and go back AGAIN. I dunno what the gently caress you get this time, since you already have basically everything they serve, but on one multiplate I watched a dude walk(?) to the salad bar and create the following salad:

1 giant ladle of blue cheese dressing directly onto the plate
Multiple giant scoops of shredded cheese on top of this
Multiple giant scoops of those weird ham cube-bits on top of this
Multiple giant scoops of bacon bits on top of this
Multiple giant scoops of boiled egg crumbles on top of this
An enormous pile of croutons
A giant scoop of mushrooms (I think this "made it healthy" because mushrooms are like a fish or something and fish is negative calorie superfood?)
2 giant ladles of blue cheese dressing on top

Just think about that for a loving minute. OK, frankly, it sounds pretty delicious, but holy poo poo how horrid does something like that have to be for you? Imagine trying to poo poo that out a few hours down the line. But now you have your third plate, and so now you can at least quiet the yammering fear that you won't get to eat everything in the entire God-damned place before it closes down for the night, and at last you can finally start to eat.

Again, this is not fantasy. I've watched this multiple times. I've seen a woman so fat she had to use a walker to move sit by herself at a 4-person table and completely cover the surface of it with plates of food before she started eating, and she cleaned every last one of them. It has the same uneasy, somehow alien fascination of seeing a car wreck, or a really hosed-up porn where the chick is wearing spider prosthetics and hissing all the loving time. You're like, am I really supposed to be entertained by this? I kind of feel bad, and sort of weird, but... I mean, just loving look at it. It's brutal, unchained nihilism unfettered from any concept of moderation or shame or self-preservation and frankly it's kind of fascinating watching someone deliberately say "gently caress any sort of a comfortable life, WHERE IS THE THOUSAND ISLAND CONTAINER?"

So what I'm trying to say is, Golden Corral really is cheap dinner theater, and believe it or not you can actually eat there without consuming ten thousand+ calories if you just eat a steak strip or two and some salad or potatoes or something.

Oh, and did I mention the Chocolate Wonderfall? Well, frankly, if you dare to use that loving thing I salute you, because it wouldn't surprise me to find a live octopus in it. This is already too long for a dumb post about obsessive fatties at Golden Corral, but if I get a chance later I might type up some of the poo poo I've seen people do with that thing.

BTW as a disclaimer I'm a 220-lb dude (6'2" though so I don't look too monstrous) who has spent his whole life losing and then gaining weight. I know it's extremely tough to do, and it's REALLY tough to keep doing and maintain it, but there's a big difference between "I'm overweight, try my best, run 4 times a week, and occasionally overindulge in an entire tub of scoop n' eat cheesecake filling" and sticking your face to the loving ears into the Chocolate Wonderfall and sucking like Cygnus X-1 till security gets there with the the bullropes.

I hope someone liked reading that as much as I liked writing it.

ulmont posted:

Yeah. There's more if you follow the link.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3499178&userid=39659

The Bloop posted:

Iron Crowned posted:

The "cracker" in Cracker Barrel is white people

DiggityDoink posted:

the only good thing about cracker barrel is the potato casserole. its probably some retort pouched bullshit but it's delicious.

The General posted:

Not sure what's funnier, the fact people were surprised Panera doesn't bake it fresh just for you (I'm a little surprised it gets a sous-vide and not a microwave), or the fact she wasn't expecting to get fired for posting the video.

LifeSunDeath posted:

Look what your hubris has wrought

Tony Snark posted:

Between getting this and Chick-Fil-A last year in a town that's like 90% Mexican, Filipino, or both, I can only assume it was for the still overwhelming white boomer unincorporated town 2 miles away because the permits were cheaper.
None of my coworkers have gone to either and you could get any of them in a human sized hamster wheel for a bag of McDonalds.

rndmnmbr posted:

Jesus gently caress. What happened, did the dishwasher call in and they couldn't get anyone else to come in? No one grabbed a server, said "Surprise promotion, motherfucker!" and stuck them in the dishpit? Restaurant kitchens can get a little messy, yeah, but that is beyond the pale.

rndmnmbr posted:

Jesus gently caress. What happened, did the dishwasher call in and they couldn't get anyone else to come in? No one grabbed a server, said "Surprise promotion, motherfucker!" and stuck them in the dishpit? Restaurant kitchens can get a little messy, yeah, but that is beyond the pale.

ulmont posted:

Golden Corral

ulmont posted:

Yeah. There's more if you follow the link.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3499178&userid=39659

LifeSunDeath posted:

You've obviously never had ramen and cheese, it's really good

Hirayuki posted:

I've never been to either Cracker Barrel or Chick-Fil-A because of their politics (my white boomer parents have boycotted CB since forever, and CFA only just moved in recently), but from the sounds of it, I haven't missed anything. I did used to go to Po' Folks when I was a little kid and there was still a Po' Folks in town, and that sounds a lot like Cracker Barrel, down to the golf-tee game. I remember it being pretty good, but then again, I was young. Tell me, Florida people: is it actually poo poo?

Iron Crowned posted:

I've attempted to explain why I don't eat Chick-Fil-A to my dad a few times, but he almost always interrupts to start talking about how delicious it is, and how I should try it sometime

LifeSunDeath posted:

just tell him the truth, it's overpriced chicken that tastes ok, _{but gently caress christians they're goddamn losers}.

Tashilicious posted:

I have seen a lot of "make your own chikfila" and turns out its just normal fried chicken with pickle juice in the breading.
make your own
never buy from christofascists again

Iron Crowned posted:

if you think my parents cook

Tashilicious posted:

oh
boomers

LifeSunDeath posted:

You've obviously never had ramen and cheese, it's really good