By Taylor Smith, Staff Writer

Published in print Jan 14, 2015.

Imagine walking through campus on a quiet, weekend evening with your friends.

You are searching for food but the food court in the EUC and Subway is closed and the Bojangles is too far away.

  There is the Caf and its underling Taco Bell, but you are a sane and sensible person, you don’t need any of that.

Let’s assume you and your friends are terrible cooks and are too lazy to order anything.

Losing hope, you look around and see the glowing beams from three spotlights aimed towards the heavens.

  Naturally, you follow the lights; they are of three colors, red, white, and blue. 

Each display the image of a bull’s skull, three bovine deities staring down at you. 

You come closer to see a lone building with the smell of honey barbeque lingering in the air.  Then a glowing neon sign flashes the words, “The Fifty Steaks of America,” UNCG’s first and only steakhouse.

The idea came about long ago when my friends and I, dining at the Caf, began suggesting ideas for better food on campus.

Sure the Caf has healthy alternatives in comparison to other places on campus, but why live to be eighty when you can die in your early twenties choking on the cooked fat of a freshly killed cow?

Let’s say you and your friends just finished and passed your midterms; naturally you all would like to celebrate.

  Where on campus could you go for a great self-congratulatory dinner? Nowhere on campus that’s for sure.

“What about Old Town?”  I hear some of you saying.

  Sure it makes for a good place to go if you and your friends would like a somewhere to go celebrate.

Sure it also has pretty good food, but it is also incredibly cramped and it doesn’t take Flex.

  You know what would take Flex?  The Fifty Steaks of America.

Convenience sells.

The whole point I’m trying to make is that the current dining options at UNCG are not the most convenient or diverse.

  There are, of course, multiple fast food places that cater to different types of food.

  By diverse, I mean the actual experience of getting the food.

  If we exclude delivery, there are two ways to get food on campus.

  Standing at a counter waiting for food or going to the Caf to get the food yourself and then desperately search for a place to sit.

Call me lazy, but if I’m going to treat myself I want to do it as conveniently as possible.

Imagine that at Fifty Steaks of America you could walk in and be greeted by a waiter dressed up as one of our nation’s famous historical figures.

Suppose your waiter, Abraham Lincoln, escorts you to an open table and then proceeds to take your order.

The steakhouse would go beyond your expectations; you could see your food cooked right in front of you.

You get to choose the cattle that your steak comes from and you get to watch the cooks kill it with the machete of your choice.

  Then, as they toss the steaks onto the grill, your waiter, dressed as the sixteenth President, will recite the entire Gettysburg Address.

  The best part would be the steaks themselves, but not just for their taste; these steaks would be shaped like one of the fifty states.

I say all of this in jest, but by having a steakhouse or even just a formal restaurant on campus, could give students the chance to have the most convenient dining experience the university has to offer.

So when you walk into this restaurant, you don’t have to go to a crowded buffet and then search for a seat.

Someone will be there to seat you. To serve you.

Having a restaurant of this caliber would provide students with something that no other dining option has on campus can, the convenience that we deserve when treating ourselves every once in a while.

And seeing as how The Fifty Steaks of America is a celebration of the selfish, gluttonous nature of the USA, The only thing that could top that is if the restaurant sent people to carry you from your room to the table.