Lets face it: we all judge certain books by their covers. Sometimes we don't even look at the cover…read morebefore we already have a preconceived notion of what we will experience. These are all based on past experiences, so there is certainly some validity to these judgements. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong. But our ideas of how things should be, and are, often align.
I was judging the hell out of this cover. I didn't even want to see the author or the title page or the table of contents. I was in the middle of nowhere SC and starving. I had been looking for somewhere to eat for the last hour but Francis Marion National Forest isn't exactly Times Square. It was nothing but trees for miles. Side note: when driving through uninhabited places like this (my cell phone had no signal for most of an hour) I always wonder, morbidly perhaps, if there are any dead bodies out there? Surely there was some Ted Bundy acolyte that decided to follow in the steps of his mentor, take a hostage, and dispose of the body. Am I the only one thinking this? I often wonder and plot how I could get away with the perfect crime. What else am I going to think about for 60 minutes?
I pulled into the parking lot and liked what I saw. The place looked fairly new. The asphalt in the parking lot was still cooling from just being poured, the signs and lights that adorned the exterior were bright and new, good stuff. The interior represented more of the book cover I was imagining. A little run down. It was cold outside so the buffet steamers had the place as humid as Key West in July. I could just hear the moisture penetrating and settling in the carpet and ceilings and window panes.
I sat at the bar and chose the buffet for the meal. Remember, I had just contemplated the perfect crime (and solved the mystery, btw), so my brains and body were depleted. I saw a whole new set of covers to judge at the buffet line. And I will be honest, it looked like I was about to read War and Peace while high on marijuana: does plain and arduous ring a bell?
The food was actually pretty damn tasty. Nothing blew my mind but nothing made me want to hurl insults or regret my decision to dine here. The fried chicken, as buffet fried chicken often tastes, was dry and chewy. Was this a product of the grueling buffet environs or a product of poor cooking? I lean toward the former because everything else was A-OK. Bonus points for having black eyed peas, a true southern delicacy.
All in all a pretty good place. Nothing was five star but nothing was one star. Outside of the 2.5 star chicken, I give it a solid 4. I had the mac and cheese, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, black eyed peas, green beans, and even the cake was ok. If caught in the muck and mire of the Swamp Loggers haven, I would come here again.
