As a food writer, it’s sometimes all I can do to resist placed in front of me. At the recent Music City Food + Wine Festival, I will emphatically state that I have no regrets for the two days I spent eating and drinking some of the best that local and national chefs had to offer. (Although I wasn't like the guy who kept coming through the line to get 20 helpings of Porter Road Butcher's amazing 130-day aged steak. I hope that greedy bastard’s colon exploded.)
But I did have one thought: What if instead of grazing for four hours from stall to stall, table to table and tent to tent, I had grabbed a platter and combined all that food into one heap before I sat down to consume it? Would I have eaten that much if I’d seen it all at once instead of by the bite served on adorable bamboo boats? Probably not.
A decade ago, my favorite comfort meal during a crappy day at work was a Chinese buffet. Just about any Chinese buffet as long as there was a chance at all-you-can-eat (AYCE) fried chicken bits with that red transmission fluid sauce on it. That was before I learned that many of them were getting their food from one commissary kitchen on Eugenia that was subsequently raided. That was also when I weighed 30 pounds more than I do now.
So I have to take care to ration out my calories when I can, considering that alcohol carries a bunch of “empty” calories as well. And I hit the YMCA at least three times a week to try to sweat off some sin. But all of this doesn’t mean I can’t be tempted by a good AYCE deal every now and again.
I was turned off by TGI Friday’s offer of The Endless Appetizer, where $10 got you plate after plate of boneless wings, potstickers, crispy green bean fries (whatever the hell those are), mozzarella sticks, potato skins and BBQ chicken flatbreads, as long as you showed them you have cleared your previous plate. As much as I could wreck a few plates of boneless hot wings, that just wasn’t how I wanted to take a few days off of my lifespan.
But I’ll admit a soft spot for O’Charley’s, because they are local, they never freeze their meats, and I met my girlfriend there a hundred years ago when I was playing in an acoustic combo in the alley between O’Chuck’s on White Bridge and the Pier One next door. She was a cocktail waitress, and it was love at, oh say, twenty-third sight.
During all those visits to see her, I also grew quite fond of O'Charley's chicken tenders, with honey mustard, bleu cheese and ranch dressing that you can now buy by the jar at your local grocery. So when I heard that O’Charley’s was offering an AYCE deal on those tenders, I admit I was intrigued. For $10.99 every Tuesday night, you can gorge on hand-breaded tenders to your heart’s (dis)content. Also interesting is their Thursday deal, with the same arrangement on AYCE fried catfish for just a buck more. I used to be a big fan of the catfish basket at the Sportsman’s Grille until the price got out of hand and the catfish shrank to kitten fish proportions, so I may give this a try. I also heard rumblings of a Free Pie Wednesday, so I may just camp out for three days in a row and relive my wasted youth for awhile on a familiar bar stool.
You can look for me there or at the downtown YMCA in the mornings.
