Seafood in a land-locked state.

Saturday night took Andrew and I to The Seafood Buffet in Deer Valley with Andrew's boss and his wife. I am not a buffet kind of girl. I think that the best part of eating in any restaurant is sitting on my lazy tush while someone else brings me food. Besides that, buffet food is not always, (how to put it delicately?), edible. It's been sitting under a warmer for who knows how long, and one can never tell if that gelatinous goo is meant to be coating the fruit or if a shorter person came along and proved the sneeze guard unreliable.

In fact, the last time that Andrew tried to drag me into a buffet, I whined and complained and flung snobbery about like a whip until we eventually struck a deal - we waited in the parking lot of a Hometown Buffet and agreed that if the next person who emerged from the restaurant was grotesque in any way, we would move on to a restaurant of my choosing, but if it were someone normal looking, ie; bathed in the last two days, no fanny pack strapped around their middle to smuggle leftovers, and able to walk without waddling, then we would go in.

We sat there for twenty minutes and no one came out.

So in we went, and even Andrew agrees that he's never had a more dissatisfying meal. We have not been to a buffet since. See how smart I am?

I figured that this seafood buffet would be a different story, seeing as it's a fancy-schmancy five star restaurant. (I never knew that "five star" and "buffet" could be uttered in the same sentence? You toss "seafood" in with "buffet" and now you're talking potential food poisoning along with all the other yummy buffet qualities.) We got all gussied up and drove just a little past Park City to the Deer Valley restaurant.

I had promised myself that I would try sushi at the restaurant, and not just a California Roll, because that's cheating. I also wanted to try an oyster because I hadn't had one since I was eight and my family had just moved to the Pacific Northwest. We had gone on a little beach outing one day and happened upon a roadside stand that was peddling fresh oysters. We were all trying to be brave and open minded about the seafood in the Northwest, so I tried an oyster, and if I recall correctly, I was the only one in the family who liked it. However, I was a bit of a show-off, still am, so it could have been an act. That's about as exotic as it got, unless you count the time that Dad brought home shark from the grocery store and fried it up in a pan in the kitchen.

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure that it was really shark that Dad brought home. He told us that it was shark, but he isn't exactly Abe Lincoln.

Tangent: When I was six years old, I went on a camping trip with my family. My parents brought their bows and arrows so as to practice their archery. (My parents aren't red-necks, so this must have just been a phase.) Dad was practicing his shot when my sister and I decided to have an adventure in the woods. When we got back, Mom was cooking dinner, which we were informed was a squirrel that Dad had shot with his arrow. Mmmm! Squirrel! I was so excited to try it, and very happy to find that I liked it! So much so, that I wrote about it at school the next week:



Some years later I learned that it wasn't really squirrel that we dined on that night around the fire, but chicken. My dad has always enjoyed telling me big, fat lies, which I always believe and then always share with others, making myself look like a fool.

Now where was I?

Oh, the Seafood Buffet.

So, inside the restaurant, I filled my first plate with selections from the "Natural Bar". I chose three kinds of sushi and an oyster on the half-shell. You might be thinking that I am intelligent enough to put two and two together and figure out that "Natural Bar" plus "on the half shell" meant uncooked, but you'd be wrong. (Because it's a common practice to cook a shellfish and then put it back into it's little shell home. It's all about presentation...) I had no clue that that damn oyster was raw until I caught a whiff of it right before I slid it into my mouth and it left it's slimy, ocean water trail from the tip of my tongue down the back of my throat.

I do know that it's uncivilized to gag and throw up on the tablecloth at a five-star restaurant, so I choked the thing down, chased it with a glass of ice water and came to the conclusion that I had sampled a fully cooked version of oyster at that roadside stand so many years ago, and that even then, I was most definitely faking my appreciation for the delicacy.

Oysters are nasty. And if you ever feel the need to try one "on the half-shell", just imagine licking a barnacle on the bottom of a deep sea fishing boat, and you'll get over it.

Also, eel sushi is not high on my recommendation list, and I am fully confident that people who like sushi are only pretending because they think it's hip and cool to eat raw fish.

I'm glad I tried those things, just to be able to say that I did it, but if I had had to pay for that dinner, I would still be sad. Because even the dishes that were cooked were nothing to get excited about. Even I can make a killer roasted garlic mashed potato. Now all this probably sounds like I am just a huge snob who doesn't like seafood and can't appreciate a good clam when I see one. But I will take a dinner at Red Lobster any day of the week. I don't think that love of a chain restaurant puts me in the snob category. And I will give The Seafood Buffet it's due credit, because I escaped without food poisoning, and I felt adequately pretentious the entire time I was there. Okay, and the prime rib was excellent. So was the chocolate raspberry dessert. Dang! I should've brought my fanny pack!