My Famous Moment

Well, one of them anyway.

When I was little my Grandpa and Grandma owned restaurants in the Salt Lake area. They had a few of them before I was born: The China Food Kitchen and The Beach Boy are the two that I can remember. They also had two that I was alive for: The Hawaiian and King Quongs. The Hawaiian and King Quongs were both pretty big themed restaurants...sort of like the Mayan is in Sandy UT today. They were big buffet style places with a tiki/island/tropical theme.

The Hawaiian had a stage and Friday and Saturday nights would have live entertainment. Upstairs was the buffet and downstairs was the stage and regular dining with a waiter/waitress. The downstairs also had a lightening and rainstorm show that would go off periodically. I don't remember a lot about this restaurant because I was really little when it was open.

King Quongs however I remember very well. I spent a lot of time there as a little kid. My dad would pick us up from school and we would hang out at the restaurant until my mom came to pick us up after work. King Quongs was also buffet style, with the option of ordering off of a menu. When you walked in there was a giant robotic gorilla (you know, cause of King Kong, but not King King, King QUONG, ha!). I'm talking huge. Sort of reminiscent of the the animatronic things at Chuck E Cheeses. The controls for the gorilla were behind the front desk. It was SO fun to make the thing move when some poor unsuspecting person was standing right in front of it! Ah...the memories. I have lot of memories of helping in the kitchen, fresh dinner rolls, rice pudding, and cream of mushroom soup, sitting at the front table with my grandma and grandpa, sitting with my grandparents friends who were 'regulars' at the restaurant, and playing in the party room (a huge walled off room towards the back) while we waited to be picked up. I never really realized how out of the ordinary my early childhood years were...that was always just the norm for me.

After my parents divorced when I was around 9 I didn't go there as often. It closed a few years later. I often think that if I could go back in time and do one thing, I would go back to the restaurant and eat some of my favorite things: the rice pudding (with ice cream!) and cream of mushroom soup. (Weird things coming from a Chinese restaurant, I know) and when I ate them, I would savor it, knowing it would be the last time I was going to eat it. That's the thing is you never know when that might be the last time you do something. (ew, that sounded kind of depressing and morbid...didn't mean for it to be, it's just a plain and simple truth)

So, anyway...my famous moment. This is a picture of me eating a shrimp for a newspaper ad that ran in the Salt Lake Tribune for the Hawaiian. I think I was about 5. The words read 'Love at First Sight' with me holding the shrimp. I have a print of the actual ad, but it is poster size so I couldn't figure out how to scan it and put it on here...but this is the picture! Wasn't I a cute model? I didn't get paid, but I did get to eat the shrimp for real afterwards!

"Love at first sight"