Soup Diary 101022

A few words about buffets: they are almost always disappointing. The appeal, of course, is that you can really fill up on a lot of different dishes-- you really don't have to decide on just one thing to eat. In Las Vegas, all the casinos have buffets, some of which are pretty fancy, offering all kinds of exotic items. But in the end, they are almost always disappointing. The reason is because it is virtually impossible to just stick to the good stuff, as the temptation is too strong to try a bit of everything and inevitably very little of it lives up to expectations, and by then you're too full to go back and have a little more of the stuff you liked. In fact, my experience is that the salad bars tend to be the best part of the buffet, because they're hard to mess up. After our visit to Red Rocks Canyon, Bill and I stopped at a new casino/resort on the western edge of the city to check out the buffet. It certainly had a nice clean atmosphere, and as usual, a couple of things were pretty good (the roast turkey, for example, was fresh out of the oven, and they had some really nice calzones in the Italian section) but while I left full, I wasn't really all that satisfied-- not like the Ellis Island dinner I wrote about yesterday. Actually, one of the highlights turned out to be the soup. They had New England Clam Chowder (which I don't like) and Chicken Noodle, which, under the circumstances, had every reason to be very ordinary at best. But in fact it was very hearty, with huge chunks of chicken (bigger than any I spotted in the chicken enchilada from the Mexican station) which were more plentiful than the noodles, a real (positive) oddity. You know, that soup might just be enough for me to give in and go back to a buffet next time I'm down there, even though I usually find myself swearing them off immediately after every visit.