Last winter, I wrote about a bad customer-service experience I had at Old Country Buffet. I defended my patronage of OCB in the first place this way:

Nearly all restaurants these days have some sort of gimmick: the waiter pours olive oil into a dish on the table, instead of offering you butter; the bread you dip in the olive oil is strange; the desserts are all some ?Chocolate Decadance Orgy? idiocy, which is offensive both in its misunderstanding of the meaning of the word decadence and because it?s usually no good.

Old Country Buffet, on the other hand, is incredibly gimmick-free. They serve ham, and roast beef, and vegetables, and rolls, and ? this is the really exotic thing ? ordinary chocolate cake (among other things) for dessert.

I went there again yesterday, only to find no ordinary chocolate cake in evidence. In its place, they offered chocolate cake — the same cake — but now with whipped-cream frosting and with little chunks of toffee sprinkled on top. In case you’re wondering, this isn’t really an improvement.

And the name for this dessert, according to the little engraved plastic sign on the sneeze guard? “Chocolate decadence”. Going by the actual definition of ‘decadent’ — which is ‘being in a state of decline or decay’, incidentally — I would have to say that this is an accurate description.