The Wonderful Buffet Post

      OMGWTFBBQ here we are being all stealthy at Wonderful Buffet!   

   Humble?  Yes. Working-class?  Definitely. Don't come here if you like all that fancy folded napkin shit.  This place is all about the food.    

I've wanted to do a post on this place for years! I finally remembered - AND had my phone ready at the same time, so here we go!

Right as I began snapping I was caught by the head waiter, but he only gave me a stern look. I in turn did a speed run around the steam tables so as not to make things weird - but not until I'd polished off way more food than I needed or intended. No I won't tell you how many times I went back around. Just don't, you know, just don't fucking judge me.  You'd have done the same thing. 

Why this place?  It's humble, it's charmless, and it's a Chinese buffet- which usually means nothing good.  

Thing is, Wonderful breaks all the rules. First of all, it's not really a Chinese Buffet. It's Pan-Asian, with no fixed menu, and the selection changes all night long, whatever the chefs feel like putting on the line.  Everything is made fresh, in-house, and it's the best Asian food you've ever had in your life.  

To the left we see a Bikerly elbow. I'm sitting here taking a picture of the first thing you see as you enter - the check stand, and all their Good Luck/New Years stuff, and their pop and so forth. The booths and the other fittings are from old Burger King dining rooms. Aside from a few silk flowers and a couple of pictures, this is all you get in the way of decor.

No frills whatsoever. 

 It began life as the Chinese Palace back in the 1980s. The inside was done up in 'Rental Furniture of the Eighties' - style, all mauve and black lacquer. The walls were covered in enormous, sugary, electrified murals that depicted landscapes. In each one there were whirling disks of patterned mylar to give the effect of falling cherry blossom petals here and raging waterfalls there. And that's about all the place had going for it; and you couldn't even truly appreciate that without being really, really stoned. Which I was once, while we were seated next to a mural that had flying birds and clouds that travelled around, and a dude poling across a lake in a little boat. I was so miserable.

They sold out to Mr. Wonderful, which is not his real name, and the first thing he did was have the roof tiled and the corners tipped. Then he painted it all a lurid yellow and red. He gutted the interior, burned the murals (I hope) and looted an old Burger King for dining room fittings. 

Mr. Wonderful has done nothing since then but make piles and piles and piles of money. 

A view of the steam tables from my seat. 

 We found this place back when we were riding a lot.  

When you're touring around, a buffet restaurant is just what you want, you see. You come in off the road and you're blown out, you're tired, you have things to think about and things to talk about, and you don't want to dick with waiters and menus, dammit, you want to EAT and SIT THE FUCK DOWN. 

We had just come in from touring lower BC, and took the Blaine border crossing in on the Guide Meridian. We saw the place and thought 'Hey! This will be a nice change from eating school lunch food in a casino'.  Not expecting much.  And boom, this happened, a bolt from the blue.  The food was so good, so amazingly good, so unbelievably good, we were whispering!

It's stayed that good, too. Mr. and Mrs. Wonderful aren't fucking around. 

A little closer. As you can see, this place is about eating delicious food, period. No corny decorations, no presentation, none of this multitudes of wait staff, white tablecloth, salad-fork B.S. 

Crawfish and steamer clammies.

This stuff comes out in every 5-10 minutes. That's how fast it turns. An hour from now this spot  might hold oysters on the half shell and rendang, or baked salmon from Puget Sound and butter chicken.

This sushi had been freshly laid on ice when I first got up with my camera. In the space of five minutes this is what's left of it. The poor sushi chefs are always working back there as fast as their fingers can go, trying to keep up with the demand.  

I mean look at this. All this just came out from the kitchen. Out of shot people are getting up from their tables and heading over, so I'm really moving here trying to stay ahead of the crowd. 

     Let me state here that I haven't covered more than a quarter of what's on offer - and neither does their takeout menu, if you happen to look them up.   There is stuff here that you never see in other places, Malaysian, Filipino, Japanese, Indian, you name it.  I was flying through and filling a plate at the same time, and I had certain things targeted, as may be obvious.

Speaking of target items, here's the New Zealand Green Mussels. They'll be gone in ten minutes, and I will be largely to blame. 

Not targeted items, but interesting nonetheless. This is their American corner, just four pans big. Here we see giant kielbasas for some reason.  French fries, cheese pizza and toasted garlic bread are also present. The Wonderfuls aren't real worried about what constitutes 'Murrican food, and I love them for that.

Black pepper chicken foreground. Potstickers to the right, General Tso's top, and Broccoli Mushroom  Chicken left. I am about to make a dent in that Black Pepper Chicken. It tastes like the pepper as a fruit - no heat, just that perfume of pepper, mild and sweet. That, lemongrass and citrus. It is amazing.

Hot and sour soup, chicken broth, drawn butter and egg drop soup, corn and fried chicken, and sweet and sour sauce.

   I wish I could convey to you how absolutely astounding the food is here.  I mean you sit back and marvel.  And here it is in a forgettable box on the side of the road in Bellingham Washington, being served buffet style.  

   That is some trippy shit.

4. Nationality (check all that apply)

 Well, what do you know. After all these years, come to find out I'm Klamath.  

Am I going to look up my relatives?

NO.

I was adopted. This seems to be a subject of intense interest for other people. They think I must be obsessed with finding out about my background. That I feel like a lost lamb. The biggest and most incorrect assumption, though, is that I must be heartbroken wondering Why My Family Didn't Want Me. 

I do not care. I mean come on. That shit happened when I was a baby. It's like asking a cat why it isn't interested in Australia. I have no memories around which to construct any feelings, so I didn't.  

I did not expect this information to have any effect on me, but it has.  Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I have a people, and they've been here for thirteen thousand years and probably more; so I have a land, too. It's Southern Oregon.   

This really pleases me. 

The Hunts Tomato Sauce Cookbook Post For Mr. Mago

 Here we have Mr. Mago. 

Mr. Mago has requested that I do the post about the Hunts Complete Tomato Sauce Cookbook, the one with the misuse of brown sugar.  Well shit yeah I'm going to get on that; do you see this fucking guy?

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 Ta Da!!! Here it is.  The Hunts Complete Tomato Sauce Cookbook, artfully displayed with all my products, and my paper towels up there, and my Braggs Liquid Aminos. And my Cuisinart.

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You got this book by sending in a can label and a buck eighty-nine to Hunts - or you got one as a free gift at the cash register at our local supermarket. You weren't supposed to, though. The thing was, Hunts would send a bunch of these recipe books out with a shipment of stock. They were meant as a gift for the store employees. The employees, however, already had several metric shit-tons of promotional cookbooks.  They just stacked these up at the register and tossed one into your grocery bag if you bought a can of tomato sauce.  This is how my mom got her copy.

 

This ain't it. This is one I got at a thrift store.  

1976, folks. 

Americas' Bicentennial year.  The Meat Crisis - and I do not lie, there was such a thing and that's what it was called - of 1973-4  had scared homemakers to death. Everyone was still buying hamburger and TVP and whatever the fuck a Round Steak was, convinced that cows were an endangered species or something.  You'd think people were going to starve to death the way they went on about there being No Beef. (This was way before Clara Peller.)  It's what lead us at the Lil' First Nations household to purchase horse meat. 

Our local store, Derringers, had ground up and sold the last of the beef it had been holding in reserve. People were buttonholing the owner after church about when was he going to get in more steaks, the poor fucker.  In a moment of desperation, he brought in a shipment of fresh horse meat from somewhere. We weren't supposed to know it was from Eastern Oregon, but everyone did. Why this was such a huge thing at the time eludes me.  

Anyway, there it lay in the meat case one day, beautifully packaged, surrounded by parsley and crushed ice, so lean it was purple.  

Horse, as it turns out, is delicious.  

This has nothing to do with tomato sauce, by the way. I just thought you should know.

 

   

God I love 1970's food photography!  It makes everything look so sexy!  Not so much my attempts to display this book in an arty way. 

They hit you with the 'Most Requested' recipes first.  And yes, that's a recipe for a bundt cake. Yes, it's made with a can of tomato sauce.  And it's not bad. My godmother used to make this. You do not taste the tomato at all; it's just really rich and sweet.  And an odd, deep red.

As for the Quick Spaghetti? ^^^ It's absolutely horrid.  In fact, here we have the first example of the Gross Misuse of Brown Sugar, Mr. Mago. Clicky to biggie ^^^. Or maybe don't.

Oh my God, oh damn, oh fuck, I have gotten so much therapy mileage out of this ^^^ recipe over the years...

This is the concoction known as 'Swiss Steak' to anyone who grew up in the U.S. in the 1970's. 

In my house, this is what Mom cooked when she was angry.

And cooked. And cooked. And cooked. And cooked.

Before any cooking took place, she had to beat that steak with a meat mallet while she sprinkled on flour, handful after handful. Fuck this 'two tablespoons' shit.  My mom would flatten that round steak out until you could read a newspaper through it. A paste would form and ball up into a blob of flour mixed with beef fragments on the mallet.  She'd pick off the blob and eat that shit raw - then go right back to whacking the steak.  Then the poor round steak would go into a huge iron frying pan with all the tomato sauce and whatnot on 'low' and proceed throw off about a pint of grey water, and shrink, and curdle, and curl up like a bowl.  You could look over from the dining room table and see the rim of that 'bowl' jiggling just above the brim of the pan. I remember this stuff going from two in the afternoon until six in the evening - but surely that can't be right?

Oh yes. Yes it can.

Aaaaaand we're done with that Dickensian Childhood Interlude.

To continue.

Now everybody is going to go 'Ewwww'. And that's because you're barbarians.   VVVV

 

 They used to serve Tomato Aspic at Lippman and Wolfes' fancy-schmancy Frango Lounge, along with a martini for Mom, and a silver platter full of small, cold luncheon this and thats - which, if you were twelve, was just SO STINKIN' ELEGANT.  You got a selection of special forks and spoons to use with each different nibble, and on a dish by itself the glistening aspic jiggled whenever someone bumped the table.

 

Did The Frango Lounge use this ^^^ recipe?  Oh fuck no! God no. No no no. 

This image ^^^ I took does nothing to convey the heaving sensuality conveyed by this meatloaf photograph. It basks in a mellow, sultry light, glistening with fat and juices, tipped toward the camera as if to say 'Go ahead, Tiger. Have a slice.'  And it's a good thing it has all that going for it, because the recipe is garbage. vvvvv

Here we are again with the Brown Damn Sugar Mr. Mago.    

There is no reason for brown sugar to be in this meatloaf recipe. Seriously. None. In fact there's no reason for tomato sauce to be in this recipe either.  -OK OK fine I know your mom did it and your aunts did it and your grandmas and your great-grandmas, but it's wrong and weird and they all burn in Hell now. And Do Not start me on BARBECUE SAUCE ON TOP OF MEATLOAF NO NO NO NO.  Or tomato paste or tomato ketchup or CAMPBELLS TOMATO SOUP  GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

My strong reaction is due to another incident of Childhood Mealtime Atrocity.  I'll spare you the tale and leave you instead with six words - Wonder Bread. Tomato Sauce. Two Hours On Low. 

Yeah, that's eight words. Fine.  

OO, this is extra atrocious! ^^^   

This ^^^ is what they're trying to say is a Pacific Northwest dish.  

IT IS NOT. 

We have access to fresh-caught salmon here.    NOBODY EATS CANNED SALMON.  And nobody who has ever tasted fresh salmon would ever dream of doing something this ^^^ heinous to it. 

Oh, well, unless they moved here from like the Midwest, or the South, where people literally do not care what they put in their mouths. They eat shit like Mayonnaise Cake in those places and then they move here and cry for canned salmon. 'Oh my, where is the canned salmon I done growed up on,' they wail.

 I say 'Yes well, look at how you grew up, asking for canned salmon. You need to get your shit together.'

 

                          Don't ask me what they were smoking back there in the Test Kitchen.

 

Before bagels became the bread product of the trendy there was the Pita; and before the Pita - and it's co-conspirator the Alfalfa Sprout -came the CREPE. We are way back in time here with these Sassy rascals.

You probably had a crepe maker; you probably got one for your wedding or something. Nobody ever used the thing, because Crepes Are Finicky.  They stick. They tear. They're clammy. You have to eat them instantly or they get rubbery and weird; and then what are you? The crepe slave, pouring batter and crying while all your friends are in the other room being all cool eating crepes.

  

I don't know what's making these Crepes so sassy. Maybe it's the 1/2 teaspoon chili powder. 

Honestly, this is just a taco. 

Make a taco. 

Just make a taco.

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Honestly, kids, I don't have the heart to go any further. This cookbook is triggering me. I mean it! Just reading this post over for mistakes I can taste the memory of this stuff on the back of my tongue, like heartburn.  So I will leave you here with the Sassy Crepes and hope that you have a pleasant rest of your life. 

And please just say NO to brown sugar, OK?