Blue here, bringing you Burnt Toast on a chipped plate. Yum! Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m a pretty good cook but that’s not what I’m going to be writing about. At least, not right away. There’s this thing I like to do that I think we can relate too on some intimate level. It’s really rather simple. I like food. Not just any food, but good food. Especially here lately, I’ve started to really enjoy trying new foods that I have either not heard of, or heard of but never had the opportunity of trying. Adventurous? Probably not like Jack Sparrow, but hey… It’s a pretty big deal for me!
Some of my best childhood and teen memories include going to restaurants and discussing the quality of the food and service as well as guessing the seasonings and ingredients used in the dishes that we ordered with the only important person in my life at the time - my mom. Whether it was Pizza Hut or Captain D’s, or something even more exotic like The Crab Shack in Tybee Island, Georgia, it was a fun game that we liked to play. Now, at the time the most adventurous I got was visiting the same restaurants and ordering the same dish just to try my hand at another guessing game of what they did with the food. Fast forward ten years, I’m not that same kid.
Today, I’m a single twenty-seven year old working for a big company - nothing too fancy - trying to make do with what life has handed me. I’ve fought that nasty disease called anxiety, paranoia, depression and low self-esteem for the majority of my life. Okay, so all of my life. But there comes a time when you have to tell yourself that enough is just enough. Some days, this anxiety is crippling, and there are days that I feel like spending hours that I could put to good use just hiding in dark corners from my demons. It took hitting rock bottom to finally tell myself that I can either let things knock me down and keep me there, or find something that makes me happy to pick myself back up.
I started visiting restaurants I’ve never been to in an attempt to try new foods and venture outside of my comfort zone. My comfort zone is my bed, a blanket, and Rookie Blue playing on my Mac desktop while my dog is breathing in my face. At first, I started going with my friend, we’ll call her Chuckles because she has an amazing laugh that’s so damn contagious I wish i could bottle it for rainy days. She makes me smile. Chuckles and I would go to movies, and then dinner or the other way around.
But we didn’t have the same days off, so I had to try this out myself. Baby steps. I went to the Layton Mall to Spencer’s, and then Box Lunch - by the way, they have the absolute BEST Disney swag collection in the entire WORLD. Next, I went to the theatre by myself. At first, it was scary. Then I took my amazing dog, Kodak, with me. That was an amazing experience! He’s also one of the reasons I came up with Burnt Toast.
The point I’m getting at is…
Every week or every other week, I’m going to visit a new pub, cafe, diner or restaurant. I’ll take pictures of my meals and beverage, I’ll write reviews, name prices and leave contact information in my blog so those who are traveling to Utah or live in Utah and want to try new places will know what to expect! Plus… This is going to be fun!
On a side note… I’m going to go back a few months and review a Chinese buffet in small Taylorsville, Utah.
It was like any other day, and every other time when I would make a split second decision to decide something new. Planning doesn’t exactly work out for me. And boy… I was craving Chinese food something awful that day! So it’s around 2pm on a Saturday, which I found was REALLY smart of me judging by the line that was leading out the door. I walked up to the counter and told them, embarrassingly enough, that I needed a table for one and then took a seat to wait. The wait wasn’t so bad. I suppose if I had a bigger party, we’d be waiting longer but it’d be a party so we really wouldn’t care.
My waiter, or waitress because they had long hair and beautiful features and questionable piercings that I couldn’t really determine if they were gender specific or just general piercings, quickly seated me at a table that would have easily housed six people. Not awkward at all, as I watch bigger families slide into small booths and cast glares at the big girl thinking she’s gonna have a smorgasbord right there in the already all you can eat buffet. Excuse me… I didn’t asked to be sat at a huge table for my lonely self!
After my drink was ordered, I set out on the challenging mission to get a my first plate of food for that smorga-whatever-it-is that the dagger shooting eyes insinuated previously. Oh man, the food looked amazing. Craw fish, noodles, rice, and Teriyaki chicken, oh my! I got a little of everything and went back to my table.
And then went back for another plate… Why not?
After getting my plate of meats and veggies and all the bad stuff in between, I sat down and got to work.
The rice was crunchy for one, the Craw fish was amazing but everything else was either dry or over cooked. The sushi wasn’t even that good - sushi was a new thing for me, too. So I’m probably not the best judge on that.
I didn’t finish my food. I know, I feel horrible. I could have taken the leftovers to the homeless men in Smith’s parking lot, but I don’t think they allowed that. At least, not for free. So, deciding that since I was paying for food I wasn’t finding any joy in, I went back to the buffet to try some more sushi, grabbed a couple of odd things like fried octopus tentacle (I called it a testicle to my co-worker when I was explaining this story to him. He thought it was hilarious.) and a couple of craw fish.
After grabbing another plate, I went back to my table and started plating this already plated food in a way that I thought was appealing. I had fun just taking pictures and posing the dead fish and… other dead fish with rice and whatever was rolled up in that sushi. A few pictures later, I did devour the sushi and craw fish, then went home.
All in all, I’d give the experience a 2.5/5. I’ve had better Chinese buffet before. The service was great, the waiter/waitress was prompt and kind but I couldn’t get past the quality of food. But hey! That doesn’t mean there aren’t other Chinese buffets that I can try out in the massive city of Salt Lake. One of them is bound to be amazing!
