The Road to Gluttony

To this day, I get mildly ill just thinking about it.

When our kids were very young, we took a few family vacations to the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. This was about 15 years ago and, even though our travel habits have evolved considerably since then, the kids – now adults – still remember those trips with great affection. Because the kids speak well of it to this day, I choose to remember those trips fondly as well, even though I still have the occasional traumatic flashback of trying to claim pool chairs at 7:00 in the morning.

Atlantis has water rides and pools and dolphins and such, but the thing about those vacations that still resonates with me – as in, “I can’t believe we ever did that” – was signing up for the Atlantis meal plan. It was hard not to. When you book your Atlantis vacation, it’s one of the screens that pop up, and they really make it seem like a reasonable, even necessary, convenience. The meal plan is expensive, but, given the alternatives, it’s probably cost-effective. You see, being captive in the resort, they jack up the prices at the restaurants so much that you would be a fool to eat at those places without something pre-arranged. The corporation that runs the Atlantis properties engineered it this way. Why? I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that they make more money that way.

(By the way, that happens to be the answer to 99% of life’s questions.)

Being on a meal plan might be billed as a convenience, but for me it was unsettling. It hurt my pride. It’s not exactly food stamps, but how else to explain the hushed voices used when asking the waiter “how does the meal plan work in this establishment, my good man?” Even though being on the meal plan can literally cost you thousands of dollars, doing “meal plan math” is one of those things that inherently make you feel like a loser and a cheapskate.

Much like Disney World, Atlantis has that special ability to induce you to spend exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege of feeling poor.

Welcome to Atlantis, dirtbag.

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The irony is that the in-your-face nature of this commercial bargain leads to a state of mind where the guests have a heightened awareness of the economics of the situation and therefore try to maximize the return on investment. This leads to excess.

That is why there is only one logical end point to any meal plan: gluttony.

Here’s our meal plan story, circa 2010.

Atlantis has a bunch of restaurants and makes every effort to ensure that its meal plan participants enjoy gastronomic variety, as only a multinational hospitality enterprise could conceive. They care so much (or little) about the food that they call the restaurants “concepts.” Just like in real life, where Italian food sits high up on the food hierarchy, in the resort there was a recreated Italian restaurant that was always in high demand. It was called Carmine’s. Being a concept, not a restaurant, it had all the trappings of what a corporation believes should be in an Italian restaurant, like red and white checkered tablecloths and photos of Joe Dimaggio on the walls. It’s the kind of restaurant where Michael Corleone would go into the men’s room, but instead of coming out with a gun, he would have drowned himself in the toilet.

For purposes of this story, the key feature of Carmine’s was that it served its food family style. The portions were enormous, each one purporting to feed four adults.

I didn’t make the rules for the meal plan, but the rules were the rules. There were five of us at the time, two adults and three little kids. We were therefore entitled to five appetizers, five entrees, and five desserts. Family style or not, that’s what we paid for. And kids on vacation like to order their own stuff.

I don’t remember everything on the menu, but I do remember the spaghetti and meatballs. The table was filled with them. You could have fed the entire Italian Olympic team. Every member of the DeLuise family would have been satiated for days. There were going to be doggy bags involved, and lots of them.

Even though it was a long time ago, I do have vivid nightmares memories of the dessert. I remember something called the Titanic.

Carmine’s might have been a concept, but there was nothing conceptual about the Titanic. It was very much made of substance. It was a giant ice cream sundae clumsily arranged to look like a ship. It was billed as being able to feed the entire table. This was an understatement. It was the size of a small turkey. It had at least ten giant scoops of ice cream and was draped in fudge, nuts, and whipped cream. I’m pretty sure it had bananas, too. There seemed to be no culinary training required to make the Titanic. There was no ingredient that you couldn’t find in your local grocery store, or a bodega. It’s the kind of dessert the kid on Home Alone would have prepared for himself the minute he realized that the rules that used to govern his life were now obsolete. It was a monstrosity.

And we ordered three of them.

Fuck you. You weren’t there.

We dug in, but it was hopeless. Being ice cream and it being 100 degrees outside, the Titanic was something you couldn’t take back to your room. So, after futilely consuming as much as we could – like half of one vessel – we sat back and watched the others gradually flatten and congeal before our eyes. It was similar to watching the actual Titanic slowly sink into the waters of the North Atlantic, but much sadder.

The waiter watched side-eyed from afar. I wish I could say he was disgusted, but he toils night after night in the belly of the meal plan beast and its twisted incentive structure. He bore witness to this debacle with the attitude of someone surprised we didn’t order five Titanics.

The Aftermath. How much spaghetti and how many meatballs can you fit in a standard hotel room? We were going to find out. The take-home boxes filled the mini-fridge, stained with corporate-approved marinara sauce. At first it seemed like a coup, the problem of lunch solved for the week, but who wants to eat yesterday’s spaghetti when you’re still entitled to the fruits of the meal plan each day of your vacation? There were still so many concepts to choose from: the recreated diner, the recreated deli, the recreated Chinese restaurant, all of which you apparently had to reserve weeks in advance. Because we didn’t realize this, we were usually eating at these places at 4:30 anyway, which had already solved the lunch problem for us.

If for some reason we wanted to go back to Carmine’s, it was always fully booked. It seems as if the economics of the situation were not lost on our fellow guests. The meal plan math was iron clad.

It was the travel hack where everybody loses. Perhaps none more so than the Atlantis cleaning staff, doomed to trudge from room to room, daily discarding days-old boxes of cold, dry pasta and decaying beef, forever cursing Mr. Carmine and his crimson foodstuffs to the deepest depths of holiday hell.