All-you-can-eat steak night sounded too good to pass up, but it wasn’t. 
  The family-style restaurant is next to the hotel in a northern-Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati, just across the river and a few miles from the airport. 
  The restaurant features buffet dining. I sometimes eat there when I stay in that hotel. 
  I prefer to walk half a mile to a strip of steak houses and chain restaurants, but if the weather is bad and my grease level is low, I go next door for the buffet. When I do, I eat fried chicken and atone for it with black-eyed peas, and heaps of sliced peppers, cucumbers, raw spinach, and other greens from the salad bar. 
  Another pilot and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to eat steak in unlimited quantities for less than ten bucks, even if the meat wasn’t the best in the corral. And it wasn’t. 
  The restaurant appeals to people to whom price and quantity is more important than fine dining—regular, working-class, salt-of-the-earth folks.  
  The line was longer than usual. All-you-can-eat steak night has broad appeal. My friend and I quickly noticed we were among the thinnest people in the place. 
  I idly wondered how much money the restaurant loses on steak night. 
 Plates in hand, we made our way past the salad bar and steam tables loaded with various forms of potato, pale vegetables, and chicken pieces glistening with grease. 
  The steak line was short. 
  The pieces of meat were submerged in watery brown sauce in a deep steel tub. 
  “Is any of that medium rare?” my friend asked the server. 
  “It’s all the same,” the young man replied. 
  “How is it cooked, then. Medium or what?” 
  “All depends on how long the cook cooked it.” 
  We couldn’t argue with that. The server loaded our plates and we went to our table. 
  The definition of “steak” was loose. Seamen from the age of sail probably wouldn’t have noticed if the meat had been substituted for their usual ration of salt beef from casks. 
  “You won’t need any salt,” I said after my first bite. “Probably won’t need seconds, either.” 
  We ate slowly, selectively, searching for edible morsels amid the fat and gristle. The stuff was tender, though. It fell apart at the touch of a fork, just like pot roast. 
  I’d wondered earlier how much the restaurant loses on steak night. After a couple of bites, I began to wonder how much it cleared. 
  We pushed our plates aside and went back to the serving tables for clean ones and selected salad and other things. Small helpings. 
  As we ate, the restaurant filled to capacity, if not in numbers, then certainly in bulk. It appeared than nearly a third of the adults had to carry their bellies around in wheelbarrows. Most of their kids appeared well on their way to developing similar physiques. 
  I’m sure some obese people are victims of bad genes and other medical problems, but the ones going back for helping after helping of starch and grease and topping it off with rich desserts were, if victims they are, victims of something else. 
  There is a near-universal appeal in the promise of something for nothing and similar bargains. We tend to buy things we don’t need or want, just because they seem such a good deal.  
  “They should charge by customer weight,” I said.  “Maybe three dollars a hundred.” 
 My companion looked around for a moment. 
  “If they did that, they’d be selling a lot of nine-dollar meals,” he said. 
  Even if the food had been good, the ambiance would have killed our appetites. We began to feel as out of place as nuns on a nude beach. 
  The restaurant didn’t lose any money on the two of us that night. 
  We picked slowly through the messes on our plates like sated crows in a Dumpster and decided we wouldn’t bother with all-you-can-eat prime rib the following evening.