Living life: The Buffet experience

A buffet is a meal at which guests help themselves from a number of dishes. Several enticing dishes are lined up to feed the eyes and provoke your taste buds into urging your hunger on. The big idea of the buffet is that people are supposed to serve themselves their own choice of dishes and have their fill. And they have to keep coming back for more for a buffet to pass for a successful one. In world over, the buffet is reserved for the higher classes of society, which can afford to lavish a sensible amount of money on the urges of the stomach in the classy expensive restaurants. Even so, the unprivileged people can only hope to enjoy a proper buffet at that lavish office party, that wedding of the year at a five star hotel or might just reduce their buffet experience to the weekly BBC Food documentary. Not in Rwanda. Every small restaurant promises a buffet experience even if it is tucked inside a shadowy slum in Nyamirambo or lower Kiyovu. So for starters, Rwanda’s commonplace restaurant appears to be the culinary paradise. The tasty salad things, (my Kenyan friend thought salads were for rich people, hated raw vegetables until he landed here), the mayonnaise wholly adored, fodder for the sweet tooth. The restaurant fellows know how to limit the total “tonnage” per person. The disappointment begins with the tiny round flat plates. Trust people to get around issues. The art of loading sand on a truck has been conveniently extended to filling plates. From Rwanda’s chain of volcanoes in the Virungas, citizens have leant a few lessons, those volcanoes with their wide bases and a pointed peak, perfectly balanced. The demolition of the volcanoes is systematic, with a top to bottom management approach, leaving no evidence of any past crimes. My favorite food demolition expert is this middle aged man, with a tall gait and a generous waistline. By generous, I mean the rim of flabby flesh around his torso, also known as love handles, (don’t ask me how they came to name those). The rim of flesh accentuates itself around the belly, falls over, like a government stomach, flapping along with his unsure steps. The thing is my demolition man’s routine tells a lot about his waist. He picks a plate and dashes to the middle of the line where the mafriti lies invitingly, like an obligatory bad habit, waiting to be devoured and send the fat straight to the wrong places. Mr. Demolition man piles the potato chips in the middle of his plate to form a Mt. Gahinga, then returns to the beginning of the queue, rolls the thick strands of macaroni all around to come up with the Sabyinyo. He throws some cassava and beans on top in a simple but effective manner resulting in the Muhabura and tops it up with a sprinkle of mashed cassava leaves, some salad and lots and lots of mayonnaise, ends up with the Karisimbi. He sits down, sends everything down his throat like he has no worries about the repercussions on his bulging belly, belches in satisfaction and looks forward to tomorrow’s mountain building exercise. Contact: kelviod@yahoo.com