Suppertime at the Devil’s Buffet: A Review of Souper Salad

My wife, Emily, and I went to a Souper Salad buffet in Mesa recently. She was ill and the only thing that she could imagine stomaching was salad in large quantities and wide varieties. I agreed, because the prospect of going to the local grocery store and spending the amount of time it would take to shop for ingredients and then cook those ingredients seemed a lot like work.

Souper Salad, like any buffet, is decorated with inoffensive nondescript stock photos of vegetables and vague wall art depicting soup and steam. Outside of a Souper Salad, there are planters shaped like various round vegetables or fruits. At four in the afternoon, it was us and a dozen retirees. The employees moved quickly around the buffet line, restocking items in preparation for the early lunch rush when the snowbirds descend. The few already present, given away in the parking lot by their Canadian license plates, were a warning for the line that would soon come streaming through the doors in search of mellow flavors in a variety of textures, finished with a bowl of vanilla soft-serve with peanuts and sprinkles for toppings.

I had the fettuccine pasta. The pile of gluten was mixed with corn and mayonnaise and tasted vaguely like a Hawaiian macaroni salad I remember fondly, so I kept eating. At some point, I realized I’d been full since the first plate of salad, but the nostalgia kept me at it, chasing the hint of something better I once enjoyed. That, I think, is what the buffet represents more than any other restaurant: Our very human desire to regain the wonder we once had by engaging with dimmer and dimmer phantoms of our past.

Consider the conflicting histories of the buffet: Many point to the less indulgent Swedish smorgasbord, while others argue that the Depression with its Chicago Dogs and its 25 cent all-you-can-eat oysters was the impetus, an invention of necessity rather than excess. Due to one entertaining anecdote that shows a direct line to the buffet, we consider Las Vegas the true birthplace, with its late-night spreads that keep gamblers playing the slots, only stopping for a quick bite instead of leaving the casino for a meal.

In the case of the Depression, people who once had enough to go out on the town were now home boiling their leather briefcases and drinking dirt soup. That might be an exaggeration, but, unless you lived through the Depression, you can’t prove that I’m wrong. Imagine that you’re walking down the street, searching desperately for a job, the taste of dirt soup still on your tongue. You see a sign: 25 cents. All-You-Can-Eat Oysters. Suddenly, you feel like the wealthiest man in the world. The worries and troubles of the Depression wash away. You eat forty oysters and don’t even worry about the month of diarrhea that will follow.

If you like the Vegas option, consider the gambler at his station, playing for hours to recapture that initial winning streak from so long ago. If only he could win something, anything. It wouldn’t matter if it was a bowl of lukewarm dirt soup. Along comes the Vegas buffet, free for the players or ridiculously cheap. Now these sad sacks with their dwindling bank accounts are eating snow crab and filet mignon. They’re kings. They might look down at their leather shoes and laugh at how one mere hour before they were planning to boil and eat them. The buffet reinvigorates the fantasy that they’re already winners, and they keep on playing.

I would go into more detail on the smorgasbord, but I think the Swedes are so embarrassed by the association with the buffet that it’s probably an international crime to compare the two.

Regardless of where it came from, all origins share the ideals of convenience and pleasure. Which explains why we chose the word, “buffet.” It comes from the French and means “stool,” referencing the minimal walking and maximum eating while sitting that takes place during the buffet experience. Of course, there’s another type of stool we could discuss, but it’s so obvious that it isn’t even fun to make a joke about. Instead, let’s think about another definition of the word, “buffet.” It may not be as significant as I imagine, but it’s at least interesting to note that, in other uses of the word, to buffet is to “strike repeatedly and violently.” This, connected to the buffet line, could suggest the cramps that follow several hours after consuming several plates of mystery meat and fried biscuits. It could also suggest the painful slap of nostalgia across the face of a food junkie still chasing that first high experienced so many years before in the comfort of their childhood home. It may also be a suggestion to the buffet worker to strike the serving spoon out of the hands of those who are back for their third or fourth plate of pot roast and orange chicken.

I grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and in the Book of Mormon, the “buffetings of Satan” are often referred to when discussing temptation and addiction. As a child, I thought that Satan had weaseled his way into a Hometown Buffet franchise. This may have carried over into adulthood since I clearly still work under the assumption that buffets are inherently evil — which, for the record, is neither a doctrinal or cultural belief of the church, as made clear by the sheer number of buffet restaurants in the state of Utah.

Regardless of the interpretation, the sense of violence remains. Simply changing our pronunciation from “buff-it” to “buff-ay” seems to hide that underlying aggression, but it can’t save the buffet regular from the truth: Consuming so much food in one sitting is antithetical to a long and healthy life.

Which brings us back to Souper Salad, where I watched as a man walked the buffet line, loading his plate with pasta soaked in cream sauce and rolls greasy with butter, using a crutch to balance on the one leg he had left. My immediate thought was that he was diabetic, though that’s a rude assumption. It’s likely that seeing him reminded me of my step-grandfather, who lost both feet to diabetes and told me one night as he ate a bag of chocolate peanut clusters, “I’ll take two doses of insulin tonight.”

But why eat the whole bag? Why not have one, savor it, and have another the next day? It could be that the flavor of something like that, the hint of something we cling to from the past, numbs us to our modern concerns by taking us back to a time when we were naive to all the nightmares of the world — war, taxes, expiration dates on dairy — so we indulge like the hospital patient overusing their morphine button so that the taste never dissipates, leaving us with the tacky aftertaste of cheap ingredients and bitter preservatives. Is that sustainable? I’d ask my step-grandpa, but he’s dead from the effects of diabetes.

This seems like a good time to let the reader know that I am not a paragon of fitness. In my first semester of college, I bought a Double-Decker Moon Pie and a Schweppes ginger ale every day until the woman behind the counter whispered a little too loudly to another student, “I’m so worried about him.”

Of course, we could get better. We could change our lives. My dad saw his father and brother taken too young from heart issues so he got a check-up and, several stints and a change in eating and exercise habits later, he’s projected to live well into his eighties. Some people go to extremes, cut out all meat, follow strict diets that don’t allow for food that our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have during their time. The logic? Those ancestors were strong and healthy. The proof? Who knows? In our understanding, their lifespans were shorter and they were dumb as rocks. But we aren’t much better, even with our fancy technology and near-century lifespans. Ask a man where his wi-fi comes from and he’ll say, “the cloud.” Ask him where the cloud comes from and he’ll say, “Wi-fi.” Who is this hypothetical straw-man that I’ve created to represent all mankind? I think you’re missing my point.

You can go today to a restaurant and order a burger with a portobello mushroom or a tofu chunk or some other substitute that tastes enough like beef to help you forget for a moment what you’re eating. Sure, it’s healthy. But it has the same problem that the buffet line does. We’re still trying to reminisce through food, eating our beef substitute because, if it tastes like soy, we can’t bear what we’ve become. I knew a man who, in an attempt to carve a six-pack from the landscape of his stomach, would eat a single serving of rice for lunch each day. He told me that the best way to do so was to take your favorite seasoning or sauce and dump it all over the rice until that was all you could taste. He wanted to be healthy, but he had no desire to enjoy the food required to get him there. We eat health bars with flavors like “mint chocolate” and “peanut butter explosion” and they taste like dirt soup with the texture of chalk, but that hint of a beloved flavor from our fat days helps us gulp it down and forget that we’ve sold out, joined a gym, and stopped buying whole milk.

It fascinates me that the people at a buffet line and those at the local GNC overlap in any way, though I accept that I’m working in a lot of hypotheticals here. But it can’t be denied that our taste for nostalgia has gotten out of hand. As adults, we aren’t supposed to watch cartoons, yet the theaters are full of reboots of our old favorites for the new generation. We’re glued to the TV to binge on the latest gritty, grown-up approach to our favorite comic book superheroes even if the writing is bad and the ideas are only half-fleshed out. The whole idea of binging on TV is problematic as it conjures up images from the old afterschool specials of young people overeating and throwing up in lonely stalls all in an attempt to fill some void with food while avoiding the repercussions of eating it, the same way we eat at the buffet but refuse to go home and cook that dish we’re nostalgic because we’re afraid to find out it’s not as good as we remember, the same way we watch ten episodes of a show in one sitting then immediately move onto the next without thinking about the schlock we just ingested and its glaring flaws. We want the constant flavor without the terrible what-have-I-done-with-my-life aftertaste.

We left Souper Salad full, no doubt. But, aside from the fettucine and the one-legged man and the tacky decor, I don’t remember any of it. I do, however, remember my mom’s cabbage rolls, and I’ll try every disgusting, watery, bland one I find in the hopes of recapturing that initial, surprising experience. My important taste memories are, more often than not, older than my high school diploma. Have I eaten my last meal? Is every meal I eat from now on just an attempt to stave off the inevitable changes that come with age and death? Well, that’s a dim view of the future to conclude with, but I leave it to someone else to tell me how I can go back to the buffet line without considering it a major defeat.

But the ice cream was good and the breadsticks weren’t bad, so, three out of five.