Welcome to Seafood Carnage

I have not, as yet, addressed the cuisine of the Outer Banks. This is not because there is no cuisine. There is plenty, although not all of it is to be found on one's plate.

One way to experience the cuisine of the area is to dine at a buffet. We, of course, wanting the full experience, did this, stopping at a popular seafood buffet for dinner one night. It is perhaps fortunate that we did not bring along a food safety inspector, as he or she would almost certainly have immediately shut down the buffet, unless he or she was from the area, in which case he or she would have said, "Welcome to the Outer Banks dining experience! Be prepared to duck. "

In honor of the restaurant's 10th year of operation, the buffet was offering 10 different kinds of crab. Our server talked about this wonderingly, as if it were a watershed moment in history, another Woodstock. Indeed, the crab buffet was very popular with the other diners, who seemed quite willing to overlook the myriad body parts sticking out at all angles from the warming plate, all jumbled and mangled together. This so impressed me, however, that I endeavored to order something else, such as a grilled cheese sandwich, but had to be content with some sweet and sour chicken and ice cream. The buffet did not, I noticed, offer 10 different kinds of ice cream.

The thing about seafood is that there are almost as many contents left on one's plate after one has eaten as there were before. For this purpose the server sets a large bucket on the table, into which diners dump the remains of their dinner, and which he periodically empties into another, larger bucket and hauls away to some secret location, probably your car trunk. In his haste, our server would sometimes leave behind a trail of discarded appendages that fell from his bucket. This no doubt explains why, as I was sitting in our booth, I kept encountering something underfoot. I looked down, which in retrospect was probably unwise, as I was met with the sight of a lone crab leg, sitting there for who knows how long, becoming progressively more unrecognizable as it was crunched and smashed. I considered dashing out the door and screaming. As Joe was not finished yet, however, I decided to handle the situation in a mature way, which is to say that I kicked the crab leg over to someone else's table.

Which a food safety inspector, had we brought one, would probably merely have laughed at, and sworn me in as a full-fledged Seafood Carnage Participant.