Part One: The Wrath of the Voll

One night, for reasons unknown to me, I ended up at a family-style Italian restaurant chain called Buca Di Beppo (say that three times fast) that serves food in monstrous proportions. There’s just no way you could eat there by yourself without using a wheelbarrow for a doggie bag. To finish one plate, you’d need at least three hungry lumberjacks. I don’t know where they get plates that big. These plates don’t crumble under their own structural density, let alone under the mountain of food they pile on top of them. They’re an engineering marvel. If you don’t have a large family, a big group of friends or three hungry lumberjacks, don’t even bother going.

To serve these wholly American dishes – I say wholly American because the servings are at least nine times larger than one actually needs – the monster plates…