The Work of the Golden Corral

Four years of hard labor and conspicuous consumption at the feed trough

Oliver Bateman demonstrating “Golden Corral Pride” in 2002

This personal essay, published by the late, lamented MEL Magazine in 2019, was intended as a correction of a previous piece of “quit lit” that focused on my time at the Golden Corral. That article, which ran in VICE in 2015, was poorly edited and clearly intended as an attack on the restaurant. This did not reflect my own feelings about the Corral, which, while mixed, were more good than bad. I wouldn’t have worked there for so long if I had detested the experience.

There was something about the Golden Corral that spoke to me at that particular time in my life. I was an empty vessel in those days, devoid of spiritual sustenance, and it was this longing that I wished to describe. Thanks to editor-in-chief Josh Schollmeyer giving me carte blanche to write the gonzo features that spoke to me, I was successful on that front. However, with the passage of time, I’ve come to believe there are technical details from the VICE article that warrant a second hearing. If I can’t incorporate them in the body of this article, I’ll footnote them where appropriate.

Following the publication of this MEL story, several online-only acquaintances asked me if I really ate that much food. The people who know me “IRL,” who have laid eyes on this buffalo head of mine — now incapable of fitting even in the size-8 Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap I proudly wore during my time at the Corral — did not ask such questions. My appetite is boundless, even if it has never been applied to those competitive eating feats with which most “casuals” are concerned. There is no market for eating 5-8 pounds of steel-cut oatmeal or 30-40 buckwheat pancakes over the course of a single day. There are no awards given for eating one’s meats raw simply to save preparation time, or at least there weren’t in 2002.¹ Yet I do what I must, because I can.

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I was 16 when I began college as well as started working. At the time, I had no support from my parents, and thus, no choice in either decision: I needed to attend the state university in Chapel Hill, because the tuition was cheap, and earn money for expenses, because no one had any money to stake me. I lived a few miles from the nearest Golden Corral², and when I went there in search of employment, management took my work permit and handed me an apron. The next three years of my life were set in stone — nothing but lecture classes and the buffet, and without the latter, I couldn’t have passed the former. I was starving and desperate, and the sustenance provided by the Corral kept me from destitution. In return for this support, I overcooked sirloin steaks, burnt omelets to order, and kneaded yesterday's uneaten dinner rolls into tomorrow's bread pudding.³

I cannot begin to explain how lonely this period of life was. I lived with roommates who came and went, and I had no social life of which to speak. In order of importance, my priorities were the gym, the Golden Corral, and school. I skipped classes to work extra shifts. If I felt my bank balance was sufficient to get me through the week, I’d try to skip work to complete extra workouts at the gym. An insistent voice in the back of my mind urged me to build mass, even if this mass would be utterly useless, because the alternative was embodying the weakness that my father despised.

Just an average day in the dishroom

The food at the Golden Corral⁴ became the hub of the wheel around which my life turned — it was, I thought, the only conceivable way I could get paid to consume the mass quantities needed to build a massive self. I started on the cash register and then waited tables, but these were poor vehicles for maximizing consumption. Still, new habits developed. I learned to surreptitiously sneak into the bakery and squeeze two or three rolls into my mouth, easing them down my throat with a big gulp of lukewarm water. I grabbed chicken fingers and french fries whenever they appeared in the order window, reasoning that guests wouldn’t miss one or two of these treats. And since I frequently closed the store and attempted to clean the horrifically smelly lines of the ice cream machine — for heaven’s sake, never drink ice from an ice machine or serve yourself ice cream from an ice cream machine — I would seize the bags of sweetened ice milk that hooked to the lines and drink from them as if they were canteens.

This was just the beginning, too. I’ve been told that personal narratives aren’t intrinsically interesting, but my Corral-abetted diet from 1999 to 2002 was sui generis — an introspective journey deep into the heart of my guts. And once I got certified on the hot bar and the grill station, all bets were off. While working the hot bar, I created a number of systems for loading more calories into my body. I kept consuming my water-drenched “bread snacks,” but also started eating lard and batter “crisps” from the fryer. I took handfuls of uncooked sirloin tips and shoved them into my mouth.⁵ Eating raw meat in general became an important focus, since I believed I was training myself to develop a “cast-iron stomach” like the pro wrestler Pepper Gomez, one of my father’s favorite grapplers from the 1970s.

The weekends were my game days, as I’d try to work a long enough shift to eat from the breakfast, lunch, and dinner rotations. On Saturdays and Sundays, I always signed up for the early-morning shift so that I could make the omelets and the imitation “krab” salad. For the omelets, I’d be situated in front of a few gas-powered ranges and given numerous quarts of liquid egg and bowls filled with toppings like bacon and green onions.

Unlike my customers from the local megachurches⁶, the majority of whom demanded that their eggs be “hard” or “extra well done,” I’d take big swigs from the liquid egg quarts and gargle them with toppings from the bowls. The “krab” salad was prepared in a large plastic container, into which the "krab" was dumped from its airtight plastic packaging and mixed with Miracle Whip and green onions. Often, as I kneaded the “krab” from lump into strings, I would take hunks of the stuff and eat it. Usually I was wearing gloves, but the daredevil side of me seemed to enjoy the preparation all the more when I wasn’t. YOLO, I suppose.

Waste not, want not

I saw my co-workers more frequently than I did friends and relatives, and I grew quite close to them. I worked hard, harder than I have at any job since, and they respected me for that, but mostly they respected me for how much I could eat in a single sitting. The majority of the workers on the hot bar and in the bakery were immigrants from Central America and Eastern Europe, and something about the way I devoured these mountains of food pleased them the same way that eating three sleeves of Oreos had impressed my maternal grandfather, also an immigrant. “That fat boy can eat better than any hog,” he used to boast to my parents after they’d returned from a weekend away to pick me up, and the admiration of my fellow employees arose from a similar place.

For a solitary person who neither dated nor even socialized much, it felt nice to be appreciated for something, even if that something had nothing to do with history or journalism, the subjects I was studying, or any of the ostensibly deep thoughts with which I believed myself to be grappling.

When a “rush” occurred, as on Sunday morning after church, people stopped being polite and started getting real

Thanks to the Corral, I never purchased a university meal plan and rarely bought food at the grocery store or other restaurants, not that I could have afforded to anyway. Alas, my food budget has been an utter disaster ever since, given that one of any item is too many and a million isn’t nearly enough. What good is a pint of ice cream when I used to be able to drink a gallon of watery ice cream from the bag? Why should I be satisfied with a small slice of premium cheesecake when I used to devour those Jell-O instant cheesecakes two or three at a time, sometimes stacked one atop the other? Who on earth could eat only five or six halfway decent-tasting scratch-made biscuits and call it a day? Even today, Costco is a personal necessity; its oversized portions strike me as sensible meals.

A typical scene in the “trash room”

“Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled” is a line to which I often returned during this college-age period of absurd hunger, insatiable hunger, sacred hunger. It seemed to me that everyone I encountered at the Golden Corral arrived hungry, each of us starving in our own way. And the hunger was satisfied differently depending on the person: One guest could eat a couple of hot rolls and be full, while another would need to eat an entire extra-well ribeye steak with “double ketchup” and “burnt fries.” A few customers would have already rushed to the Corral bathroom, which I cleaned in a decidedly half-assed way a few times a day, and begun to feel better after relieving themselves, while others would hold it in and hope that everything remained in place until they get home.

But me? I hadn’t really been properly filled up, even once. Nor had I ever thrown up due to an upset stomach. I, who had eaten so much that I lost the count and sequence of it, remained hungrier than anyone else in this world.

Not long after graduating in 2001, I left the Golden Corral and went to work for Abercrombie & Fitch. There, at age 19, I slowly began to lurch into adulthood, still empty inside but now without easy access to the foods that had kept my hunger pangs at bay and my anxiety to a minimum. As the years passed, I began to think — isn’t life but an intermittent fast for our starved souls? Like everyone else, I’ll die sometime, and I know I’ll die hungry, without ever having had a satisfying meal in my life. And I’ll approach the life-giving force at the heart of the universe, a “God” or “Nature’s God” or some such thing, through the Golden Corral buffet line.

That demiurge will ask me if I found everything okay, if everything tasted alright, and I’ll just stand there in silence, with the muteness familiar to anyone who has nothing to say to these nervous, over-eager fast-food managers so desperate to find out if you’re going to demand your money back.

1. Nowadays, what was and still is an instrumental (and exceedingly private) activity for me has been given an absurd faux-philosophical heft by people who have built “influencer” or “intellectual” brands around it. To each their own, but to me that’s just kid stuff — stuff I’ve been doing since I was a kid.

2. A couple weeks ago, when I was picking up some prescriptions at a pharmacy adjacent to a Golden Corral, I decided to walk over to the restaurant and peer into its windows. I missed the place, I guess. It had been such an important part of my youth, the site of many valuable first experiences, only a few of which were regrettable. My visit didn't occur at 3:55 p.m., which is the perfect moment to buy dinner, right before the registers change over to the increased price, nor was it 11:00 a.m., when the doors open and the fresh items on the buffet look almost good enough to eat. Rather, it was around 2:30 p.m., a dead zone in the restaurant's operating schedule. This is the point of the day smack between lunch and dinner, when the cheaper lunch foods are left exposed and unattended while the hot cooks and grill cooks begin preparing dinner. It's when the servers take their smoke breaks, availing themselves of pick-me-ups before what they hope will be a profitable dinner shift and leaving veritable Everests of un-bussed, half-eaten food plates to fester under the LED lights. Since it was a Monday, usually one of the worst nights for the Golden Corral, the servers’ hopes were unlikely to be realized unless a few buses of hungry Little Leaguers materialized out of the aether.

3. The first thing I realized while working at the Corral — and this was especially notable in 1999-2000 at the heyday of 80-cents-a-gallon gas — was that Americans waste stuff because they can, for the same reason a dog or cat chases its tail, and for no better reason than that. The second was that Americans get what's coming to them. They get their money's worth, even if that means throwing away food that would be better served by being repurposed to nourish the least among us. The Corral, which also managed to get its money's worth in spite of the bad behaviors of its rapacious customers, couldn't donate all the uneaten food or untouched leftovers to food banks or homeless shelters, because, you know, lawsuits.

4. At the Corral, a buffet purchase entitled the purchaser to all he could eat, after which nothing could stop him from depleting the buffet. The price, set by some bean counters at the corporate headquarters, presupposed that the average patron would devour two or three plates of food and would wash it down by buying an overpriced soda. Thus satiated, he would stack his two plates in a neat pile on the table, and leave a three-dollar tip. The savvy buffet-icianado, however, knew to purchase ice water, fill up 30 plates of food, nibble at all of it, and then leave the mess for the server to haul away (who, in the interest of cost control, hadn't been tipped so much as one red cent). By acting this way, you beat the system — and really, what was the harm in that? In spite of this, the Corral is profitable and generally always has been, in part because its bigwigs don't waste money on slick advertisements and in part because they exact steep discounts from their food distributors. The workers are paid reasonably well (I was making around 11 or 12 bucks an hour when I quit) and the managers earn high base salaries and competitive bonuses. Each year, the menu — which once upon a time existed to emphasize standalone offerings like sirloin tips, with the salad bar serving merely as a fun add-on — grows smaller and smaller, with more made-to-order items moved to the buffet.

5. I was eating raw meat and raw eggs long before these acts were imbued with cosmic significance. I ate to live; I didn’t live to write about how eating informed my life.

6. The reason the Corral dish room becomes so fetid and miasmal (with standing, food-sogged water so moat-deep that I and an enormous El Salvadorian dentist with a strong Greco-Roman background would slip and slide while wrestling in it) is because its patrons lose all sense of proportion once they pass through the corral and thence to the trough. The reason I sprayed off dishes with a garden hose, dozens at a time, and then restacked them and hurried them back out, was because we had no choice. The Sunday post-church patrons needed their slop buckets, and if they didn't get them, everyone on staff would catch holy hell.