It started out as a normal visit to the Sirloin Stockade. My family and I were going to the restaurant along with my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and two of my cousins. My other aunt would have come, but she had made a recent decision that she didn’t like the food.

After complaining to ourselves that the buffet prices seemed to have gone up (having made satisfactory visits to Sirloin Stockade many times before), we began to dish up at the buffet. So far, so good. We sat down and began to eat.

We waited and we waited. Our drinks didn’t come. Finally a waiter came and my parents expressed that we had been waiting. He apologized and went to get our drinks. He promised us we wouldn’t have to wait for anything else. After delivering the drinks, we found ourselves waiting for our baked potatoes. My dad, my mom, and I had ordered a potato (the potatoes being an optional free addition to the buffet). After being flagged down, the waiter fetched two potatoes and had to be told that we had ordered a third. After the departure of the waiter, my mom noticed that her potato looked rather… odd. She smelled it and the odor was repulsive. Of course, everyone wanted a chance to smell the rotten potato, so the dish was passed beneath the noses of a good portion of those seated at the table.

The waiter returned and my mom reported the rotten potato. He took the rotten potato and gave my mom the third potato which he had been carrying. After performing the potato swap, my mom smelled her “new potato” and it was “rotten” also. I tried to convince my mom to report the second rotten potato to the waiter, but instead my dad offered to eat it for her. The waiter never came with my dad’s potato.

Meanwhile, I was beaming that my potato was, as I described it, “flawless.” With much reluctance, I decided to offer the potato to my mom, but she declared that it smelled rotten also. I could not understand. The other potatoes did indeed smell rotten, but mine smelled, as I put it, “like a potato.” After further investigation with utensils, I was appalled that deeper down inside the potato, it had the same rotten look as the others, and it smelled, as I put it, like “a combination between rotten carrots and squash.”

During the rest of the meal, my iron-stomached can-eat-anything dad abandoned the second rotten potato, my uncle announced that the cookies tasted like they had no sugar and twice as much flour, my mom announced that the pineapple wasn’t ripe and that the lettuce was soggy, and I announced that the restaurant’s trademark rolls were hard. The only praiseworthily-tasting items there were the hamburgers.

By the time our meal was concluded, our stack of plates, many of which still held uneaten food, had overflowed onto the neighboring table. Being a rather large group, we had many plates which we desired to be removed from our presence. The waiter finally came to take some plates away.

He had accumulated a stack of plates in his hands when the entire stack of plates slipped out of his grasp and crashed onto the floor. He then proceeded to break the second commandment and say, “at least they didn’t break.” After picking up the plates and leaving on the carpeted floor an assortment of chicken and salad remains, he said, “it’s just one of those nights.” The waiter then left our table with a mess of food on his apron, while we burst into laughter and sympathized amongst ourselves, “poor guy.” After the waiter left, my cousin Kati described the sequence of events as, “the curse of the rotten potato.”

The waiter then returned with his apron in a much-improved condition to take the next round of plates; before offering to do so, stooping down and picking up a chicken bone from the floor. He then accumulated another stack of plates. Being in a sitting-down position and the waiter standing up, I was able to see a steady stream of “salad juice” trickling onto his apron. He obviously was having problems stabilizing the salad plates. Poor guy.

After his departure, I also noticed that another stream of salad juice had been directed at my brother’s coat. The spill was then speedily cleaned with a squadron of napkins.

The waiter came back several more times and carried away stack after stack of plates. He seemed very relieved to get away from our accursed table.

As we were leaving, my grandma made the unpopular decision of leaving the waiter a three-dollar tip. Despite the fact that we had a bad experience in terms of food, we thought it was so funny that we didn’t really think of filling out a comment sheet.

Ah well, at least the hamburgers were good.