Posmodernism: or the gastronomic logic of no puddings

So, young man, old lady, middle aged hermaphrodite-- you want a lot of food do you? But you want it for an amount of pence that could be considered a pittance? Of course you do, it’s what we all want stupid!  

What you need is an all you can eat buffet. Oh, I see you don’t understand.  Let me explain-- an all you can eat buffet is an eating situation where it is traditionally mandated that you must eat all that you can eat.  That is at least the traditional understanding of the contract one enters into when attending an all you can eat buffet. At the very least, it is expected in conformist all you can eat buffet going circles (they like to be known as buffeteers, or the obese) that there is the opportunity to eat all that one can eat-- occasionally individuals are excused eating all that they can eat for reasons of health, such as feeling a bit peaky, intestinal knack or non-specific throat and tummy gam. But even in these rare situations, the convention usually remains that at an all you can eat buffet, one can (and should be encouraged to) eat all that one can eat.

This is at least what I believed until I came across a new type of all you can eat buffet in Birmingham recently, one where you cannot eat all that you can eat. Don’t be fooled into to thinking that this was therefore but a mere buffet-- for none of the cultural signifiers attached to that institution were present(such as a wedding, a wake or (i assume) a bar mitzvah) , and instead the signifiers of the all you can eat buffet (such as large signs saying “ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET”) pervaded. It seems that the staff at The Kolkata Lounge in Stirchley (where this all you can eat buffet is held) have found an important and innovative new way for the all you can eat buffet. My understanding is that through purposefully withholding resolution to a meal by only providing enough puddings for roughly half of the diners, these gastronomic pioneers have contrived to deny their diners’ expectations of narrative (of which the traditional meal is undoubtedly one) conclusion and through doing this can be considered to be attempting to unsettle their diners’ entire ontological conceptions. For, if the traditional form of the all you can eat buffet is shown to be open to modification, then it can be asserted that all other apparently robust institutions are similarly open to alteration.

Alternatively it might be said that someone ballsed up and didn’t order enough of everything, but I don’t buy into such monolithic understandings of truth. The food up until the point of the dessert/denouement’s denial had been extremely decent for an all you can eat buffet, although limited to three main course dishes. The rice, crowded with whole cardamom and curry leaves, was especially good, and the chicken in the curries was nicely tender as were the seekh kebabs-- an item that in the past I’ve found to be often either very dry or very greasy. The limited range of curries were all of a good standard, though all tended towards the milder end of the Scoville spectrum, and the lack of choice was amplified by the fact that two of the curries were essentially the same but one had chicken added to it. It does seem that a rethink might be beneficial on this front, with maybe something like a madras added, and potentially a lamb dish-- both things that could be easily achieved given the excess of sundries taking up space on the buffet.  Anyway, up until the moment the ladoo ran out (we were the first people in the restaurant so it was not as though they’d experienced a rush previously) the overall level of cooking was good, a fact that I believe heightened the level of unsettlement experienced by diners and thus took the event beyond a stocking crisis and into the realm of a postmodern exercise of ontological fragmentation. As John Francois Lyotard might not have put it-- “they were playing at god dammed silly buggers, yet through doing so achieved a rethink of what we consider to be an all you can eat buffet”.