Slab To paraphrase Richard Milhouse Nixon, I am not a food critic. I have reviewed restaurants before, but those were promotional pieces that were written purely for the money (and not much of it, at that). I've also reviewed condominiums, though, and I would hardly call myself an architectural expert. The average high-school term paper would be of more benefit to the information-seeking reader on the subject of menus and meals. I know what I like, though, and so I bring the same ambivalence to restaurant write-ups as I do to movie critiques. Usually, if a movie gets a poor review, it simply means that the writer didn't like the film (or didn't get it). And if an eatery gets panned, I generally chalk it up to the critic having had a bad day - a fight with the spouse or something. That's why I was compelled to write a letter to the local New Times when it blasted a hangout of mine, the Armadillo Grill in Phoenix. The critic was so egregiously cruel to the place that one had to wonder if his overtures to the waitress hadn't been spurned that night. But grotesque writing happens every day. The queer thing about it was the nature in which the paper's editor so strongly defended his writer. It was almost as though I had slapped his wife. Never mind that, though. One of the reasons I could never be a food critic (other than the fact that my knees couldn't take all the stooping) is that I just don't go out to eat that much. It's a terrible thing, really, to be such a homebody. It makes sense to me, though. For instance, there's a local place nearby called the Monastery. It's within staggering distance of my house. There, the beer is cheap (at Happy Hour, anyway). The ambience is perfect; they have firepits, a back yard big enough for volleyball, a pool table, video games, a few TV sets, and a grill where you can scorch your own meals if you like. I can't summon the will to go there, though, when my house also has a fireplace, a back yard big enough for volleyball, a pool table, video games, a few TV sets, and three grills where I often scorch my own meals. And the beer is considerably cheaper when it's sitting in my designated beer 'fridge. As a result of playoff basketball fever, the fog of barbecue has been a regular occurrence in my neighbhorhood. The shelves in the designated beer 'fridge are bowed from the weight of all those bottles. As a result, yesterday, the scale reported to me that I had tied my all-time heaviest weight. Without divulging the actual figures, suffice it to say that if I were a boxer, I would be matched with someone closer to Mike Tyson's size than, say, Oscar De La Hoya's. Bully for me, I guess. But I know what to do, since I played football in high school and can never forget the terrible things that were done to us back then, when the coaches forged us into slabs of iron with arms and legs. It's no fun, but it is formulaic, and can be attained through nothing more than willpower and time. As far as anyone else's advice goes, I'll stick with Mark Twain on that: Never go by what you read in a health book, because "you could die of a misprint." When asked about the "epidemic" of obesity in America (which seems about as genuine as our Social Security "crisis"), most health experts will tell you that our problem is that we favor portions that are too large to be practical. I call it a sign of prosperity. Indeed, a recent University of Iowa study shows that the belts of affluent Americans are loosening, not tightening. But I'm not a food critic, like I said. I just know what I like. Some people complain about the Nanny State being too involved in our lives. They strongly disapprove of lawsuits against fast-food chains, as they frowned on litigation against tobacco companies. I tend to agree with those people; in this country, we can eat ourselves to death if we so please, and many of us do. Who cares about obesity's overall effects on the economy? Will Americans as a whole (or should I say a doughnut hole) slim down for any reason? Fat chance, as they used to say, before we all became politically correct. This leads us to Clearfield, Pennsylvania, home of Denny's Beer Barrel Pub. They now offer a record-setting burger that weighs in at fifteen pounds on the plate. You read that correctly: Fifteen pounds. The patty itself weighs ten and a half pounds, and the 25 slices of cheese and other condiments make up the rest, along with the bun. The price is a heart-stopping thirty dollars. According to the owner of Denny's Beer Barrel Pub, this "Belly-Buster" burger "can feed a family of ten," which means it could probably kill a family of five. No wonder the rest of the world doesn't understand us. And here I thought, for all this time, that it was due to a couple of meatheads in the White House. Paul Heller 05/03/05 << back to the archives
	All site contents © 2005, Paul F. Heller