This past weekend, I made a terribly long overdue visit back up to Virginia to visit my family. After my dad had picked me up from the airport, I suggested that we go out to eat so that we could have some awkward father-son time together. Ultimately, we ended up going to a Korean joint for jajangmyeon, but on the way there, I could help but feel tempted to suggest the Old Country Buffet that was also on the route to the Korean restaurant, for old time’s sake.
It’s a good thing that such did not come to fruition, otherwise my dad would have witnessed his grown son shed tears – it was closed, permanently. And as of March of this year, no less.
I knew that OCBs and their parent company were in trouble, because I remember reading posts back in February that documented the company’s financial struggles. Subsequently, I remember being relieved when the Fairfax OCB was not on the original list of 74 underperfoming restaurants that faced the corporate axe.
Clearly, this is around the time I kind of fell off the internet grid, fell behind in the news, and went dark to the happenings of the world. Despite surviving the first round of cuts, round two came an abrupt month later, and then all OCBs, as well as affiliate buffet restaurants were all subsequently closed down, with most notably, the Fair City Mall location, that upon its departure, takes a piece of me with it, to the commercial afterlife.
I’ve poured more of my share, of a little bit out for my dead homies, which are restaurants that I’ve had attachments to. Yes, fat guy tragedies I know, but it never doesn’t suck whenever a place I’ve always enjoyed, shutters their doors and closes for good. The Grate Steak in Newport News, Malibu Grill in Fairfax, and now OCB in Fair City Mall, are all restaurants that I’d been to numerous times on numerous occasions, where I’ve gained countless pounds but also had countless laughs, positive experiences and good memories.
All of them gone for good now.
The Fair City OCB is especially a sad loss, because they, more than any of the other restaurants, had a lot to do with a lot of my self to this very day.
It all started in my junior year of high school, when we had a unit in English dedicated to baseball literature. It was during this time in high school that I was introduced to Bernard Malamud’s iconic novel, The Natural.
I wasn’t into baseball nearly as much as I am into it today, but the one thing that a close friend and I took from the story was that the main character of the book, Roy Hobbs had a propensity to eat like a madman, with the justification being an analogy that the food was filling a hole in his soul, ostensibly one created by the time he lost during the presumed prime of his playing years as the result of getting shot by basically a depression-era star fucker.
Sure, the book is ultimately one of my all-time favorites, and the character Roy Hobbs has stuck with me to the point where it’s often times, if available, variants of my internet handles and presence in various places. But how it works its way into a story about Old Country Buffet is that one day, my friend and I decided that we celebrate the Roy Hobbs Day in the story, instead of participating in the class vs. class softball game that marked the end of the baseball unit. Alternatively, we decided that we would honor Roy Hobbs by doing what Roy Hobbs did all throughout the story – eat like a madman.
And the Fair City Mall Old Country Buffet was where we decided to celebrate Roy Hobbs Day.
Our goal was simple; eat until we could eat no more. Lasting longer than a senior citizen was also a challenge that we inevitably failed, because nobody manages to linger and last longer in an OCB than the elderly.
So like Roy Hobbs would, we ate, and ate, and ate. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, veal patties, pork chops, French fries, fried fish, baked fish, ham, roast beef, you name it, if it was available on the buffet, into our mouths it went. We ate to the point where getting up from the table and walking out of the establishment was a challenge. Daring to get into the car required two minutes of steady breathing and a break, to make sure we wouldn’t hurl the momentous amount of food we had shoveled into our mouths.
This was the first Roy Hobbs Day. It would not be the last. Eventually, the act of simply going to buffets became known as Roy Hobbs Days, regardless of if it were at OCB, or any of the myriad of buffets we would discover and sample. But always and often, we would return to the Fair City Mall OCB, and eventually the OCB itself got a pseudonym – the Roots, for where the whole phenomenon began.
And it was at the Roots where god only knows how many meals were consumed. Some simply for the sake of being hungry and having a meal, but then it was also a place where we celebrated occasions, like finishing summer school government class, or where we ate after the SATs. It’s where some of my friends went to carb-load after weighing in for power meets. It’s where my group of friends had a final meal together, before one went overseas to serve the country. It was a place that we gathered.
And now none of us will ever gather there ever again.
Lots of restaurants have shuttered with me eulogizing them as if they were influential human beings. Some, with more jest than others, admittedly, but as far as the Roots is concerned, I’m genuinely sad to discover that they’re gone for good.
To some, they were a gross troth of an establishment, where fat people shoveled insane amounts of sludge into their traps, to satiate their inhuman gluttony. But to me, it was a place where sure, some gluttony was had, but it was where memories were made, laughter was shared, and a whole lot of fucking veal patties went down.
