Recently I was at a buffet dinner where crab cakes were among the featured entrées. When it was my turn I held out my empty plate to the server at the station, who placed upon it: one crab cake.
There it sat, alone, off-white on a field of off-white. It looked like a very nice crab cake, but not an especially large crab cake. It looked like it was meant to be half of a pair, to be honest, and at the buffet I didn’t feel bad about wanting another, because that is the one good thing about buffets, that you can have more.
I don’t tend to order crab cakes at restaurants, although I like them. Crab cakes are a high-margin item: restaurants tend to charge a lot for them, relative to how much you get. I don’t necessarily judge a platter by its size, but I do like to get some bang for my buck. Often I’d rather order a half-pound burger for $12.50 than a couple of crab cakes artfully drizzled with aioli for $24.95.
You probably know, and if you don’t you should, that the people who run salad bars and buffets like to feature bread and pasta at their feasts, and feature them early, because big-eyed, small-bellied customers tend to gorge on carbs up front, and take it easy later on the prime rib — and the crab cakes. But I happen to know this was not that cynical sort of buffet. This was a special event. Those crab cakes were bought and paid for. They were, in short, my crab cakes.
Some people worry extensively about how much of a crab cake is crab meat and how much is filler. I agree if it is a lousy crab cake it doesn’t matter how large it is. But I could see from where I stood that this was a good, crabby crab cake, light on bread crumbs and mayonnaise, bumpy with lumps of authentic shellfish. A crab cake worth having.
I held my plate unwavering in place, which as you know at buffets is the universal sign for “more.” Whereupon the server, disgust curling his upper lip, said, “You want another one?”
I should mention that the buffet had just that moment opened. This was my first stop. It’s not as though I had already bellied up to the butcher block again and again. Now, maybe I fill out my sportcoat a little too completely, maybe I look like a man who has on occasion been all too full of crab cakes. But this was no such occasion. (And for the record, I never have.)
I might have shrugged and shrunk back, retracted my dish, slunk along to the next station. But on this night instead I said, “Yes, I’d like another, please.”
At that, his shoulders slumped. In defeat or dismay, I couldn’t tell. At last, he laid a second crab cake beside the first. I couldn’t help but feel that he had selected from among his heatlamped stash the smallest delicacy still on offer, but I accepted my small victory and moved on.
It seemed a strange episode to me, especially knowing this was a closed party and the leftovers would probably be thrown away. What was that crab cake to him? If he could find it in himself to distribute buffet crab cakes only with great reluctance, had he perchance chosen his line of work poorly?
It could have been worse. There’s a restaurant in Thiensville, Wis., called Chuck’s Place, which made news two years ago because of its Friday all-you-can-eat fish fry. A customer who goes by the moniker “Big Bill” — said to be 6-foot-6 and more than 300 lbs. — was removed by police one night after eating, the restaurant said, too much fish.
It sounds like a nutty case. If it’s all you can eat it’s all you can eat, right? But of course, there’s more to the story.
The restaurant’s owner claimed that Big Bill had been served “at least 20” pieces of fish that night, and said that he had actually cleaned them out of fish fry fish. So they attempted to send him home with a care package of “more expensive” fish, whatever that might mean, “for the inconvenience.” That act of kindness did not assuage Big Bill.
He refused to pay. So the police were called and the customer was kicked out, banned. In response, he picketed Chuck’s Place on the basis of false advertising.
We’ll never know whose story to believe. Big Bill says they gave him six bite-sized pieces and cut him off; the restaurant says not only was he downing a lot of seafood, he was also feeding his friend, who had not paid for the fish fry, a violation of the fish fry rules.
The truth probably lies somewhere in between the claims. But it’s not too hard to believe that the staff at Chuck’s Place took Bill’s bigness into account when they shut him down. “Sorry we ran out” doesn’t exactly ring true, not on fish fry night in Wisconsin. If he’d been a trim 5’8”, 140 lbs. as he dove into filet No. 20, he might have been treated as a wonder instead of a nuisance. It wasn’t that he was costing them money. It was that he was seen as a glutton. Immoral.
Back at my table, I tucked into those crab cakes (and a martini brimming with olives—only generosity from the bartender). I ate them, and my serving of rare beef, and my serving of chicken piccata, and the roasted potatoes, and of course that’s an absurd amount of food to eat at one sitting. I was beyond full. Big Bill would have been disappointed in me.
As nonplussed as I was at the time, the server was vindicated. Not in his manner, but in his judgment. I only needed one crab cake. All you can eat should mean all you can eat, but maybe all you oughta eat would be a better standard. If Chuck’s Place had put that on their sign, maybe Big Bill would still have left full, and still be a regular today.
