Just in case you were wonderin’:

Smorgasbord



Smorgasbord is an anglicization of the Scandinavian word Smörgåsbord. It is a buffet style table in a restaurant, or a holiday feast at home, prepared with many small dishes. For a fixed amount of money, one is allowed to eat as many of these as one wishes. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore etc. It may also be used to indicate any diverse group, synonymous with Hodge-Podge.

I always wondered why, of all the different words for all the different kinds of culinary delight in the world, we Americans had to go out and get the ugliest. What’s wrong with buffet, anyway? Too French?

There’s a chain of restaurants throughout the Southeast called Williams Bros. (no relation). My grandmother would take us there as children, and we’d puzzle over what, exactly, the smorgasbord was all about, and why other restaurants didn’t have them. One of my earliest memories is asking her why this exotic creation was confined to the WIlliams Brothers’ and, I believe, Davis Brothers’ Family Restaurants. She shook her head in a sad wistful way, probably damning the defective genes that gave her this idiot-child to feed, if only for that day.

It always seemed like grandma was one stupid question away from tying me into a weighted sack and tossing me into Lake Allatoona.