In early fall of last year, I was driving south on Piedmont Drive with the afternoon sun in my eyes, while approaching the permanently closed Hibachi Grill and Supreme Buffet, up ahead and to my right.
To my “late-afternoon sun-blinded amazement,” I was able to make out a number of sunlit windshields in the parking lot, making me think that the old restaurant had re-opened after being closed for many months.
Getting closer, I saw that these “windshields” were, in actuality, the illuminated “cubes” of the glass cabs of great machines of destruction (excavators, material handlers, etc.).
The old “Asian mega-buffet” would never open again, at least not in this universe. Perhaps in a parallel universe it never closed (or even opened, for that matter; that’s the thing with parallel universes).
I remembered the welcoming sight of the gold and red “Chinese waving cat” at the cashier’s register when I first went there years before. As I entered, a customer was paying his bill; then, with the tip of his finger, he set the cat’s paw into a repeating wave. I remember thinking, You must first “paw” the cat’s paw with your finger, then, the cat will repeatedly wave at you. The cat’s wave of good luck seemed split between the previous customer upon his exit, and me upon, my entrance.
Also, upon entrance, was a beautiful, stylized fountain with rocks, plants, and goldfish. These goldfish were always safe from being “hibachied.” And I trust that upon the restaurant’s closing, they wound up in their “forever home”: a former staff person’s fishbowl or tank.
Of course, the restaurant’s menu offered a wide assortment of food, measuring up to the second part of the restaurant’s name: “Supreme Buffet!” But instead of listing the “smorgasbord” (bringing in a little Norwegian), I’ll just mention a few favorites.
At the risk of sounding quite “pedestrian,” I always included chicken chow mein, egg drop soup, and egg rolls, with hot mustard and duck sauce. The hot mustard, opposite from the route which snuff tickles the nose, tickled my nose via my tongue and the back of my throat. When my daughter, Rachel, suggested I try the section that made up part of the restaurant’s name: “Hibachi Grill,” I was not disappointed. I called it “action food,” not “food that moves” or “gets the bowels in an uproar” (my father’s favorite saying); but from the cook’s “gymnastics.”
My usual “modus operandi,” consisted of going from buffet pan to buffet pan, spooning a series of “sampling dabs” until every bit of space on my plate was “all dabbed up,” like a Church Homecoming’s “Dinner on the Grounds!”
Many of the choices were tasty and tasty-looking; but some, not so much. I guess great variety also ups the percentage of some things not being “just right” (Goldilocks’ porridge choices were much simpler, but even that resulted in things being “bad” two-thirds of the time).
The buffet pan containing a mass of tiny, cooked octopus was off-putting; so I never got up my nerve. I thought of the old Burl Ives song “I Know an Old Lady,” especially the verse: “She swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her!” (both the spider and the octopus have eight legs).
When I first saw that pan of little octopus, I was working at the Danville Science Center, where I looked after a California King Snake named “Spot,” a red-eared slider turtle named “Thomasina,” a bearded dragon named “Spike,” an iguana named “Iggy,” and a host of unnamed giant Madagascar Hissing Roaches.
Looking at that pan filled with tiny octopus, I thought to myself: “Wouldn’t it be cool if just one of these were only slightly singed and still alive, so I could add it to my small Science Center menagerie!” But I’m sure they come parboiled and packed in a can, not arriving alive in a bag, to be then boiled like lobsters.
My late mother-in-law, Doris, loved Chinese food, and our family got together for some seasonal meals there, but not exactly like that scene in A Christmas Story (1983). On one occasion, Doris said, “Well, I can die now! ( Happily, she survived that pronouncement by some years).
During Hibachi Grill’s ” day of destruction” (over a few weeks, actually), several heavy, tank-treaded machines knocked down walls and picked up rubble in their “teethed mouths,” looking like Tyrannosaurus Rexes eating in a pack (just superficially; for T-Rex, like the snake, “dined” alone). Scientists now even say T-Rex was a scavenger, not a hunter. So, just like T-Rex, these great “mechanical scavengers” were consuming something which had “died” several years before (but in real life, T-Rex would not have waited that long to enjoy its meal).
Some graffiti had been drawn on an outside wall after the restaurant’s closing. The ongoing appetite of the T-Rexes soon reached that graffiti. In this case, the “canvas” had existed longer than the “art.”
The destruction began in the area of the building where the “smorgasbord” of desserts was always set up. I think that area should have been torn down last (Pink Floyd Paraphrase: “How can you have your Chinese doughnuts, if you haven’t eaten your Mongolian beef?”).
The idea occurred to me that just as each life is unique, so is that life’s route to death and decomposition. And it is no great stretch of logic to say that the same also goes for the largest things built by man: buildings.
A couple days later, all that was left of Danville’s old “Hibachi Grill and Supreme Buffet” on Piedmont Drive was a partial steel skeleton, with only some dangling bits of insulation clinging to it, reminding me of the well-picked bones of a chicken wing.
