Last month while visiting Minnesota, Susan and I ate at Sushi Train, a local restaurant. I’ve since learned that there is also a restaurant in nearby Tulsa called Sushi Train, but the two places are unrelated. “Sushi train” is slang for any conveyer-delt driven sushi bar, so discovering that there are multiple restaurants with this same name is not completely surprising. It would be like finding two buffets 1,000 miles apart that were both named “Buffet.”

It’s hard to know what’s authentic and what’s not authentic when it comes to Japanese and Chinese food. For example, 99% of all wasabi is fake, simply a mixture of horseradish, mustard, and green food coloring. It is also true that most people in China have never heard of, seen, or eaten a Chinese fortune cookie. So I wasn’t sure is conveyer belt sushi was really a thing in Japan or just something invented here, but it turns out conveyer belt sushi restaurants are very popular in Japan and date back to the 1950s. We would have gone even if it wasn’t authentic, of course, the same way I mix my wasabi into my soy sauce like the uncultured gaijin I am.

The way the restaurant works is very simple. There’s a long, winding conveyer belt that snakes its way past every table in the entire restaurant. Riding on the conveyer belt is a never-ending parade of sushi plates. There are six different colors of plates, and each plate has a specific price. You’ll find the cheapest items on yellow plates, which cost $2.55. The most expensive items arrive on purple plates, which are $6.95 per plate. (The prices of the plates are hanging multiple places throughout the restaurant.) As things pass by that look delicious, all you have to do is remove the plate from the conveyer belt and set it on your table. “Once you remove it from the belt, you bought it,” our hostess reminded us.

All of the plates had little plastic covers over them to keep them clean and fresh. I’ve seen videos of other restaurants that do not do this, so I’m not sure if this was introduced post-COVID or if it’s a restaurant-specific thing. Also, the plates rode atop little holders explaining what each one was. It was not uncommon to see multiples of the same thing pass by, so we rarely found ourselves waiting to find something to eat. Most of the sushi plates had 4-6 pieces of sushi on them, and after finishing each one we stacked the multi-color plates onto our table. When it came time to pay the bill, our waitress simply counted the number and color of plates, did the math, and handed us our check.

It was both relaxing and a little mesmerizing to watch the sushi make its way around the restaurant. I’m told as items get old they are removed and replaced with fresh ones, and occasionally we saw multiples of the same item stacked on top of one another. We arrived somewhere between lunch and dinner and almost had the entire restaurant to ourselves so it was very calm and relaxing. I can imagine that might not be the case during peak business hours.

Sushi wasn’t the only thing on the conveyer belt. We picked up a bowl of edamame, and saw a few small salads go by as well. I was slightly disappointed that the Sapporo I ordered was hand delivered by the waitress and didn’t arrive via conveyer belt, but in retrospect that was probably for the best.

We really enjoyed our visit to Sushi Train, and our first experience with conveyer belt sushi. I am now considering building a conveyer belt that runs through our entire house, for sending me my phone when I leave it in the other room or perhaps a refreshing beverage from the fridge. I think I’m on to something here…

Nailed It is a Netflix baking competition where non-professional cake decorators with questionable skills do their best to reproduce fancy and artistic cakes in a short amount of time. The cakes are based on their taste and appearance, both of which are often bad, and the results are often disasterous. For Valentine’s Day, Susan came up with the idea of having our own “Nailed It” cake decorating competition. The day before Valentine’s Day Susan found a picture of this cake online, and recreating it to the best of our ability was the challenge.

Just like on the show, Morgan, Susan and I were required to use lots of things to recreate the came. The “gift box” the puppy was in was made of cake, covered in fondant. The puppies were sculpted from Rice Krispy treats and covered with buttercream icing. Prior to the competition Susan had already baked the cakes and Rice Krispy treats and had all the icing mixed up. We focused our competition on the design more than the actual baking.

With everything we needed ready to go, we grabbed our supplies and got to decorating! None of us had ever used fondant before, which comes in chunks that can be rolled out into sheets and draped over cakes for a super clean and smooth look. I found a shot glass was just the right diameter to cut out polka-dots with, but made a rookie mistake by not moving my cakes onto the presentation board early enough. We originally set a time limit of one hour to decorate our cakes, although because there were no cameras rolling we gave ourselves a few extra minutes to wrap things up. Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned.

After all the cakes were done, the best cake was obvious, as was the worst. Here are the final results!

FIRST PLACE: MORGAN O’HARA

Morgan’s cake turned out amazingly well. From the piped-on hair to the ribbon on top of the dog’s head, Morgan indeed nailed the cake’s design. I literally think this is the first cake Morgan has ever decorated and we were all surprised at how well it turned out.

SECOND PLACE: SUSAN O’HARA!

The dog Susan made didn’t look quite like the puppy in the picture, but it was still recognizable as a dog (that is until a few minutes later, when the front of its face fell off). Her bow was a little more droopy and there were a few other minor issues, but it was a close race and it still looked pretty great.

FAR, FAR THIRD PLACE: ROB O’HARA

I’m… not quite sure where to begin. I rolled the fondant out too thin, which caused it to tear. I tried adding more fondant to the sculpted head to give it some shape but it just made it lop-sided. We didn’t have black fondant so I smeared brown icing on his nose which made it look like my dog had been eating poop. Without any black fondant I ended up using red for the eyes which made my dog look like it had the mange. I’ve never tied a ribbon in real life and making one with icing is tough.

The one good thing about ugly cakes is that they still taste like cake, and now we have three sitting out on the counter. We had such a fun time decorating them and spending time together in the kitchen on Valentine’s Day. Who knows, maybe this will become an annual Valentine’s tradition!

Any review I write of last weekend’s Onion Burger Festival in El Reno wouldn’t be fair to the fine people who worked hard to put on a great event. There was nothing wrong with this year’s festival, nor was it significantly different from any other Onion Burger Festival I’ve ever attended. It wasn’t you this year, Onion Burger Festival. It was me.

Dad and I arrived at the 34th annual onion burger festival shortly before lunch, with the smell of caramelized onions already wafting through the streets of El Reno. We parked where I always park, a secret spot just a few car lengths from the festival that’s somehow there year after year. Less than a minute after parking, the two of us were enjoying the festival’s traditional car show.

There seemed to be less cars than usual — maybe it’s because Coffee and Cars fell on the same day. The cars on display fell into one of three categories: restored classic cars; custom works in progress (think lowriders with lots of primer); and what appeared to be brand new cars, right off the car lot. Seriously, half a dozen Mustangs in the show looked as if they had been come straight from the Ford dealership just down the street.

As dad headed back toward where we had parked, I made a quick trip through the heart of the festival. I paused for a minute to watch a group of young girls dancing in the warming summer sun. In the heart of the festival, kids with cotton candy waited in line to enter one of the available inflatable bounce houses.

Here’s a little secret — we rarely eat onion burgers at the Onion Burger Festival. It feels a bit like getting drunk on green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. So far this year we’ve had onion burgers from Sid’s (at least twice), Tucker’s, and Big Ed’s. As tasty as the unique Oklahoma burgers are, there’s no way I would wait an hour for one while standing under the 80+ degree sun. Instead, we stopped by a local BBQ restaurant on the way home that had so/so barbeque and glorious air conditioning.

I’m slowly reacclimating to being in large groups of people. Each time I find myself surrounded with people in my personal space, I just want to walk away. I just spent two years social distancing and constantly worrying about breathing other people’s air. I’m trying my best to readjust.

The Onion Burger Festival deserves a better write up than this one.

Honest, Onion Burger Festival. It wasn’t you this year. It was me.

There’s something inherently American about Chinese buffets. I’ve never been to China so I could be wrong, but I’ve always suspected “bananas in red sauce” is a dessert more likely to be found in Tennessee than Tokyo. I’ve shopped at more than one local Asian market and never run across individual cup servings of ice cream. You know what they do sell? Bags of chicken feet and containers of blood.

But not at the buffet. There’s nothing disgusting at the Chinese buffet — no chicken feet or “snake surprise” — only meat that tastes like candy and bananas covered in red sauce. The sushi rolls are filled with cream cheese and served with wasabi (that really isn’t wasabi) or a mysterious orange spicy sauce which is just Sriracha and mayo mixed together. The hot and spicy soup is never too hot and never too spicy. Chinese buffets are like Disneyland. Nobody gets hurt.

Some Chinese buffets are small, like the one off of Mustang Road. Their buffet consists of a dozen steaming pans of food and everything they serve is warm and familiar. That’s the place I once got in trouble for playing peek-a-boo with the owner’s toddler son; the place where their eight-year-old daughter would occasionally pick up our pushed-aside stacks of dirty plates — mostly empty, with only a few morsels we dished ourselves but for one reason or another decided not to eat left behind. That was the place my dad invented putting vanilla soft-serve in a glass and filling it up with root beer from the drink fountain to make his own root beer float for dessert. The only other desserts they offered were stale cookies and tiny pieces of cake that were colder than they should have been and didn’t taste much like cake. Oh, and bananas in red sauce.

Then there are the big ones, or were, like Linn’s Buffet, located between Meridian and MacArthur. Linn’s dining room was decorated like a royal ballroom, with seating wings that ran down each side and a large open area in the middle where customers dined underneath an oversized chandelier. Linn’s didn’t have 20 pans of food on their buffet; they had 200. All the normal stuff — your sweet and sour chicken and your broccoli with beef — sat in the middle of the buffet like an Asian bell curve. To the right were the more exotic foods: boiled crawdads and baby octopuses, both so lifelike that I thought they might crawl away at any moment. To the left, they had the same tiny frozen pizzas that my middle school used to serve in the cafeteria. As a grown man it felt awkward to snatch a frozen pizza and pile it on top of an already heaping plate of meat and noodles, but these are feelings you get over. It makes no sense to serve a frozen pizza on a buffet. When my wife would go out of town for work I would take my kids to Linn’s and they would load their plates up with Chinese Jell-O and Chinese macaroni and cheese. During Linn’s grand opening, they had a mariachi band standing outside in front of the door, playing music. Nobody understood why. A few years later we left work for lunch and discovered Linn’s was boarded up. The mariachi band was not playing that day.

When Susan and I were in college we hosted a couple of Russian foreign exchange students for about a week. Our Russians didn’t care for any food that was remotely spicy. They wouldn’t eat Mexican food and they wouldn’t eat pizza. Mostly, they liked stew. I don’t remember if we exposed them to Chinese food, but I doubt it. Susan’s Russian friend Elaina told us stories of standing in line with a food voucher, waiting for her turn to buy bread. Sometimes at Chinese buffets I eat food I’m not interested in while waiting for better food to come out. When we took our Russians to Walmart, they asked “who controls how much you can buy?” I wish I’d had the opportunity to take them to a Chinese buffet, where how much you eat is controlled by how tight your pants are.

The longest I ever spent inside a Chinese buffet was a month after Mason was born. A terrible ice storm wiped out power to half the city. None of our parents had power, and we were the scared parents of an infant. We loaded our car up with clothes and essentials and drove around town in search of a place with electricity. We ended up at the Chinese buffet off of Reno and Meridian, right next to Night Trips. That buffet was laregely unmemorable, save for the large boat in the center of the restaurant full of tables and chairs. Susan and I sat at the bow of the boat with Mason’s car seat perched on top of an upside down high chair. We ate our dinner as slowly as we could, and when we could eat any more we started drinking tea — dozens of refills of tea. In between refills we called our house with our cellphone to see if the answering machine would pick up, letting us know we had power. It never did. We left when they closed, and spent the night with a friend who had power. We must have been there for three hours that night.

The second longest I spent inside a Chinese buffet was in El Reno, when I was going to Redlands. Jim, Chebon and I ate at the same hole in the wall Chinese restaurant for lunch multiple times a week. I think the name of the place was Muy Wah, although we dubbed dubbed it the Lucky Ducky after something we read in a fortune cookie. Chebon weighed half what I did and would eat so much his stomach would poke out. Jim weighed as much as Chebon and I combined, and could out eat us both. The three of us overstayed our welcome there every time we went. We made up names and backstories for all the employees and wrote fan-fiction about them. I know the old joke, but it’s true — we really did get kicked out of the Lucky Ducky because Jim ate the entire pan of garlic chicken the minute they brought it out. Twice.

I’ve visited Chinese buffets all over the state (country, really), but eventually you settle into your own place. Our place, for a while anyway, was the Yukon Super Buffet. More than the food, I liked the fact that they put “super” right there in the name. Monster trucks should just be called Super Trucks; mansions, Super Houses. Super Buffet had six islands full of food. Plus sushi. Plus dessert. Plus a Mongolian grill area, where you could just walk over and pick out a bunch of food for some guy to cook, and then go make a plate of different food to eat while the first plate of food was cooking. You know what that is? SUPER.

The first time Susan and I were furloughed — the time we didn’t get paid for over a month — our friend Patty met us at Super Buffet and bought us lunch. We weren’t by any means starving, but we had been eating a lot of sandwiches and spaghetti to stretch our money during the furlough, and eating out then was a real treat. I ate so much food that day it was embarrassing. Not even the big cold fish with its head still attached floating in butter escaped me that day. And when we left, like every time we left, we would wave at Maneki-neko, toss a coin into the foyer’s stinky wishing fountain, and pat the giant stone dragon’s that sat just outside the front door on the head as we waddled out to our car.

To be fair, Yukon’s Super Buffet wasn’t that super to begin with, but over the past few years it turned super bad. The place currently has 1.5 stars on Yelp. Of the last 10 reviews, only one diner gave it two 2 stars; everyone else only gave it 1 star, and more than one lamented the fact that they couldn’t give them 0 stars. Yelp reviewer Mike B. said he can cook better Asian food at home. Kelli S. said there were roaches on the floor. Skyler B. said he would not dare feed their food to a pig. James S. said if his son were alive he would be really disappointed, and that he will never go there again. By the way, that was the two-star review.

None of it matters. Last week while driving through Yukon we noticed Super Buffet, like several other restaurants, had permanently closed. The lights were off, the doors were locked, and a sign taped to the door said the location was for lease. I haven’t been there in a couple of years and probably wouldn’t go back based on those reviews, and it still made me sad. You can’t keep a place that big in business for nine months without allowing customers inside. I know of five or six restaurants I used to visit that have closed over the past nine months.

Less than a year ago, the thought of walking around in public with a surgical mask on seemed foreign and awkward. Today, eating in a room full of strangers and touching serving utensils that strangers have just touched seems almost as foreign as Chinese food itself. The only memories of Chinese food my family has made over the past year are of placing to go orders from the tiny place next to 7-11, or grabbing lunch at Panda Express. Not once in 2020 did I fumble with chopsticks in a sushi restaurant, or get kicked in the shin by Susan after instinctively bowing to our waiter while saying thank you (why do I do that??). I’m looking forward to a lot of things in 2021. I’m looking forward to sitting in a corner booth and eating bananas and red sauce again.

The thing I liked most about television’s Cheers was right there in the theme song: it was a place where “everybody knows your name.” Every time Norm or Cliff or any of the bar’s regulars walked through the front door and down those steps, they were greeted by name by Sam or Diane or Coach or Woody.

I have never been greeted by name at any bar or restaurant. I don’t even know how that could happen. No waiter or waitress has ever asked my name, and I’ve never found a smooth way to inject it into conversation. (“By the way, my name’s Rob, and I like cheese.”) To be honest I’m impressed every time a server is able to remember our order without writing it down. There’s no need for me to inject additional information into his or her brain.

It’s funny that I fantasize about employees remembering me by name when I don’t reciprocate. Even when servers introduce themselves to me by name, that information is long gone by the time our food arrives. If I can’t be bothered to remember their name, why would I ever think someone would bother with learning mine? Especially when, again, I don’t even give it to them.

I mention all of this for two reasons. One, because Susan just tried Walmart’s curbside grocery pickup for the first time; and two, I just tried to explain what a “cookie card” was to my kids and they looked at me like I was crazy.

Synder’s IGA (formerly Snyder’s Foods) was an Oklahoma-based chain of grocery stores. The one in Yukon, which sat on Main Street (aka Route 66), opened in 1961. If you lived in Yukon in the 60s, or 70s, or 80s, or 90s, or 00s, you definitely knew someone (or someone’s kid) who worked at Snyder’s. In this 1983 article from the Daily Oklahoman, owner Jim Snyder said “We have an obligation to get groceries to the lowest price possible. But there’s more to it than that. I still like to walk into a store where people know my name.”

When I was a kid, my mom did most of her grocery shopping at Snyder’s, at least for a while. There were other bargain grocery stores, like Crest, but they were in other towns, and Snyder’s was a locally owned store right there on Main Street. Every time my mom went grocery shopping at Snyder’s I tagged along for four reasons: the toy aisle, the magazine section, the arcade games, and the free cookies.

While my mom pushed her shopping cart up and down each aisle, I would venture out on my own (or with my sister in tow). I would survey the toy aisle first before heading to either the magazine section or the arcade games. There were two arcade games at Snyder’s, Zoo Keeper and Moon Patrol, sitting right next to the exit. Sometimes my mom would give me a quarter or two and I would play a couple of games. When I was out of change, I’d stand around watching other kids play or, if no one else was around, ignore the giant “GAME OVER” letters on the screen while thrashing the joystick and mashing the buttons in a bit of wishful theater. But the toy aisle was small, and one could only pretend to play arcade games for so long, which meant before long I would end up sitting on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack reading issues of The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Mad, or Cracked.

While eating a free cookie.

You see, Snyder’s issued Cookie Cards, which entitled the holder to one free cookie per visit. There were no strings attached and no gimmicks; they didn’t want your telephone number or ask to see a receipt or anything like that. You just walked up to the bakery counter, presented your card to the person behind the counter, and they handed you a free cookie. And just to be clear, we’re not talking an Oreo or some other off the shelf cookie; these were fresh baked cookies, right out of the oven — chocolate chip, I remember most — that were hot and a little soft and came wrapped in a little pocket of wax paper. And then I would take my fresh little cookie and go to the magazine rack and plop down on the bottom shelf and read magazines for free while most likely smudging the pages with whatever chocolate I hadn’t licked off my grubby little fingers.

Snyder’s closed in (I believe) 2003. There’s a Walmart Neighborhood Market one mile east of the old Snyder’s building, and a Walmart Supercenter two and a half miles to the southeast. (There’s another Walmart Supercenter eight miles north on Northwest Expressway, and a third, ten miles to the south, in Mustang.) There’s still a Homeland in town, but the newcomers are Smart Saver, Aldi, and Sprouts.

Last weekend, Susan tried Walmart’s new Grocery Pickup service. According to her, it worked exactly as advertised. She placed her order online, arrived during an agreed-upon time slot, and someone loaded her groceries into her car. They even called her by her name, although to be fair, they were holding a sheet of paper with her name and order printed on it. I’m sure if I entered a restaurant and handed my server a piece of paper with my name on it, they would call me by my name, too. They would probably talk about me by name after I left, too.

I guess by all counts that grocery pickup service works pretty well. The few items they didn’t have, they upgraded to higher priced items (at no cost to us). It was fast, and convenient. They even know your name.

But they’ll never have cookie cards.