I wanna green salad on the side

News on the Chinese buffet restaurant front: the buffet place nearest my parents' house closed for some sort of sanitary issues. I don't know the details. My father mentioned as we were on the way to meet my brother and his wife that the restaurant had gotten listed in the local newspaper under the regular column about which restaurants in the amusement park, and which local Chinese restaurants, pizza places, and Italian restaurants not explicitly pizza places have been closed because a surprise visit from the health inspectors revealed they weren't respecting health or food safety codes. I never see this column since I can't get the newspaper.

A new buffet place did open up one strip mall over from the next-nearest place, the one that went fish-oriented. I don't know if it's actually new or if I never noticed before because I didn't have reason to go to it when there was a restaurant I already knew I liked there. Anyway, I gave it a try and pretty swiftly realized that I probably shouldn't try a Chinese buffet restaurant while I'm attempting to cut down the amount of meat I eat. I'm not succeeding at eating vegetarian, but I have cut things down to about one directly meat-based meal a week with surprising ease.

Anyway, in the spirit of charity I'm going to assume I got there on a bad night. The food was a little too warmed-over, suggesting that I got there just enough before the dinner rush that they hadn't really started ramping up the lo mein production. More, though, too much of it was oddly bitter, so when you got past the spring rolls there wasn't much I really found delightful in eating. A small unpleasantness which wasn't their fault was a kid the next booth over who was sipping her Jell-o through a straw, and then a few seats over a very elderly man on oxygen was eating in between coughing fits. I certainly don't begrudge an elderly man having a night out like this, or a kid having some fun, but the food needed to be better for my overall impression to be more favorable. I might try them again closer to a probable peak food-cooking time, but I doubt I've found the new buffet restaurant for my needs.

Trivia: George Westinghouse, as his interest in electricity grew, also developed a natural gas deliver system, from which he earned 36 patents. Source: Empires of light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: The Day The Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Gordon Thomas, Max Morgan-Witts.