Souplantation

Eating out here is cheap. (That, and Levi's jeans, I've discovered.) We went to a restaurant last night that excelled in cheapness beyond my wildest dreams. And it was quite good.

It started with a salad bar - I didn't measure it, but they claimed it was 55 feet long, and I believed them. It had salad. A lot of salad, of lots of different types - the special salad of the moment was spinach leaves with cherries. When you got to the end of the salad bar, you paid - I think the limit was what you could get on one plate, and it was a reasonable sized plate (although not huge). The price was $8.99 for adults, and $1.79 for kiddies - and drinks were $1.79. For four of us, the price was around $31 (tax probably got added somewhere there, so there's no point trying to make it add up), that's about £16, although I usually think of it as more like £20 (when I'm translating, in my head).

Once you were past the salad bar, you could eat as much as you could of anything. There was soup (4 kinds, including a very chunky vegetable soup, which I thought would be watery and horrid), 4 kinds of pasta (the boys were fond of macaroni cheese). There were baked potatoes and baked sweet potatoes and two kinds of pizza. There were desserts, tapioca pudding (when was the last time you saw that on a menu that didn't have a dinner lady standing next to it, taking your 25p off you?), jelly, watermelon, apples, cakes, muffins, apple and cherry cobbler and a frozen yogurt dispensing machine, with vanilla and chocolate.

The thing that surprised me is that they made a big thing about fruit and vegetables, and not just in a McDonald's-y lip service sort of way. (Well, they couldn't, with that much salad). They said what proportion of your 5 a day was contained in a bowl of soup (most of it) and things like that. It's seems weird that somewhere selling really cheap fast (ish) food does that - I can't imagine it happening in the UK. They said what was vegetarian or not (if it wasn't obvious, like with some salads).

The other thing that surprised me was that there was a supermarket next door. If I lived anywhere near that place, I'd never go shopping for food again. Except for cornflakes to have for breakfast.