It took an energetic campaign to get Jason and our friend John to submit to the Panda Buffet in New London, Connecticut. On the drive back to NYC from a friend’s wedding, we had just passed through Rhode Island without glimpsing a single viable dining option (State motto: “Taco Bell? Fat chance!”), and I was quickly moving through the nausea-and-headache stage of hunger to one of open weeping, when we spied the Panda Buffet tucked unobtrusively next to a mattress store. After some pleading on my part, I was perusing all five of its bizarre food bars in a kind of transported bliss. Even though I would have settled for anything above a Pet Smart at that point, I was secretly delighted that we ended up at a Chinese buffet. Salvation, thy name is fortune cookie.

I understand that a buffet is not most people’s idea of paradise. Dwell on the all-you-can-eat concept for too long, and it will seem a little grotesque to even the most expansive eaters. It should come as no surprise that it was a 1940s American hotelier, Herb MacDonald, who took the little Swedish sideboard of cold fish known as the smorgasbord and raised it to the gargantuan, fixed-price spectacle we know today.  Who among us hasn’t fallen for its gluttonously seductive charms? Once, as a child, I ate so much at a buffet that I got sick at my aunt’s house later, and I can still remember the panicky look on her face when I woke her in the middle of the night, a look that said, “Good lord, my sister’s youngest child has killed herself with crab legs.”

But I maintain that my main attraction to the All-You-Can-Eat buffet has less to do with sheer quantity and more to do with the spectrum of choice. To this day, it’s hard for me to approach a really good salad bar without feeling the intoxication of a feudal lord who can now sample the riches of the defeated kingdom at will. Even better are the weird convergences and juxtapositions that this variety encourages. At one point, at the Panda Buffet, my plate consisted of some vegetarian sushi, spinach au gratin on top of white rice, garlic bread and some cherry tomatoes. And this was at a Chinese buffet! Anyone who has read a college textbook chapter on postmodern pastiche has to get a tiny kick out of something like this, right? It was hard for me to keep the silly grin off my face, even while Jason and John were sampling the fried rice with extreme trepidation.

But perhaps the most likely reason behind my fondness for the Panda Buffet is that it functions for me like Proust’s comforting rope of memory in the dark. Llalan and I were obsessed with the Super-Deluxe Chinese Buffet in our hometown (I believe that she wrote the one and only dining review ever published in our high school newspaper about this very establishment), and I still think fondly of the mural of covered wagons that decorated one wall long after the restaurant had ceased to be a Ponderosa steakhouse. We had lengthy eating competitions, with the garlic green bean (never pluralized) as the focal point. Even the words “super-deluxe” when uttered in conjunction fill me with the deep calm of being among very old friends.

And so, you can keep your other roadside bits of nostalgia, your McDonald’s and your Pizza Huts and even your Waffle Houses. When I saw the placard reading “garlic green bean” posted just above the sneeze guard of the Panda Buffet, I knew I was home.