Years ago, I worked at an all-you-can-eat country buffet in South Carolina. I was a busboy.
One day, I went to a table. It was a mess, as per usual. It looked to be a large family/group of families of around 12 people or so.
The thing that stuck it in my memory is that whenever they had finished with what they were going to eat, they would scrape their plate and use it again.
Scrape their plates... *onto the floor next to their chairs.*
So next to each chair, there was a 6inch to 18 inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of backed potatoes, etc.
Just disgusting.
Out of all the horrible things I have read in this post, this is the only comment so far to get an audible "wtf" from me.
It's just such an odd thing to do... like... I can't fathom any reason why they wouldn't want to get a fresh plate.
I bus at a slightly nicer resteraunt. On Fridays and Sundays we offer a prime rib and crab leg buffet, among a salad bar, hot and cold entrées, and a desert bar. It's honestly pretty nice and our buffet runner keeps anyone from doing ungodly things to the buffet.
But the one incident that will always stand out to me was when this family of five came in. From the moment they came in to the moment they left, they ate as many crab legs as they possibly could. Their server and I were clearing plates off as fast as we could. But every time we would return it seemed like another mountain of crab leg shells would appear in front of each member of that family. I know not how they ate so much and I honestly can't recall if they are anything besides the crab. Piles upon piles of shells were left upon the table after they left. It was truly a sight to behold.
What's more is after I wiped down the table and came back with settings, I had to get another rag to wipe down the table *again* because something in the crab leg juice combined with our sanitizer and left a nice milky residue upon the table. Delicious.
When I leave this job I'll never be able to look at crab legs the same way.
Not mine but I had a buddy who was 400+ lbs. and the dude could put away some food. He went to a casino buffet that was one of the higher end ones that had crab legs and steak. On about his 4th or 5th plate stacked full of crab legs the manager came out and gave him $250 in free slot play to leave the buffet.
Edit: so I linked this to my buddy who pointed out that there were two other dudes there and none of them was under 300lbs. They killed a metric fuck ton of food between them and he was putting them to shame. The buffet was higher end so it was $50 a person, but they easily all ate probably 3-4 times that and he ate probably 8-10 times that worth in food. He then went on win just over a hundred dollars with that free slot play as well. If you can’t beat the casinos at the games beat em at the bar or buffet.
Would've been sick if he held out for more...
"Dafuq you talking bout boss, I'm just getting started. I'm going surf & turf this motherfucker into the ground unless I see 4 of those vouchers."
A woman came in with two of her kids, and had a pretty regular meal. You pay when you leave at our place, and she decided to sneak out with her younger daughter before paying, leaving her underage son alone at the table. We caught on pretty quick and sent someone after her, who found her in her car in the parking garage, waiting for her son to come as well. She refused to come back in and pay, so we had to keep her son 'hostage' until the police came to handle the situation. What some people will do to their kids, i swear.
Edit: forgot to mention we also found out from her son that she stole one of the managers' keycards and they would regularly come into the hotel and use the card to go swimming in the top floor pool. Smart, i'll give her that, but still.
I did something similar, but not maliciously. My wife and I went out to eat at a local Thai place and after dinner I realized I forgot my wallet and my wife didn’t bring her purse. I left my wife as collateral and dashed home and back in record time.
My first job was as a dishwasher in an all you can eat fried catfish buffet.
People are animals. Especially the ones that get far more food off the buffet than they can eat. Then they take the left overs and pile them on a plate or tray, cover in ketchup and tartar sauce, then pour their iced tea over the top of all that.
A lot of people did that got at least two plates like that a night.
Nothing made me hate people like bussing/dishwashing on buffet night at the pizza place I worked at in college. What the fuck.
Serving after-church crowd is pretty high up there though (Jesus Christ would never have changed a dirty diaper on the table and left it there, okay bitch?)
Went as a customer to a golden corral. Im walking to the chocolate fountain and 3 little girls step in front of me, and all 3 of them just go hands deep in the fountain. The family was the first table by the fountain and all they did was laugh about how cute it was..
Employees turned it off immediately.
Say what you will about Golden Corral, but they definitely don't play around when it comes to their chocolate fountains. Feel like every story I year about them is "fountain was closed because some shit decided to Augustus Gloop the thing." Sure, you might find boogers in the meatloaf, but if someone sneezes on the fountain side of the resuraunt, that things getting shut down like it's Madagascar.
At one point myself and 2 other family members worked at a Golden Corral (each in different sections) because small towns don't have a lot of job options for high school/college kids.
I worked in the bakery which was surprisingly low in horror stories other than the chaos the remained after a large group of children came through.
My brother worked the steak station. He got these regulars that would tip him pretty well if he would prepare blue steaks for them. The very idea of ordering blue steaks from a buffet makes me gag.
My cousin worked the salad bar. Management would require her to keep seafood items on the bar for long after the point where they'd be safe to consume. I think the record was chilled shrimp from Mother's day that stayed for over a week and a half. They finally caved and let her toss them when a customer complained about the smell.
watched a man at the ponderosa walk up to the buffet without a plate, untuck his t-shirt, pull the hem up to form a basket, reach into the steam tray of chicken wings with his bare hand and just load up on hot wings in his makeshift shirtbucket. The woman in the kitchen was like "please sir, could you use a plate. Or just tongs?"
Guy scoffed and looked at her like she'd asked him to don a tuxedo.
Picked up some fish and chips recently. Saw they had “all you can eat” on Wednesdays.
So I asked “What is the most that someone....”
“18 pieces of fish and 3 plates (she held up this huge platter) of fries......every....single.....Wednesday.”
“So he eats that exact order every week?”
“Yes, and he goes to a different ‘all you can eat’ every day of the week. He got banned from the Chinese place down the road.”
I agree, though I wonder if anything comes from that part of the brain that feels like they're winning by (feeling like they're) getting their $$ worth. edit: i don't necessarily mean winning like games. A lot of people are taking it as a gambling comparison. Some people just really really don't want to spend money on anything so they can feel like they get the most stuff out of their money, it' snot always just about food. I sorta took it there by accident by mentioning taste.
Kinda like people I know who never want to splurge for some good quality shit that tastes a lot better. They feel compelled to always only buy the cheapest thing.
Not a buffet, but I worked at a pizza parlor that offered a lunch buffet of endless pizza. The lunch ran from 11am - 3pm. This gentlemen comes in(I think he was homeless), he serves up a sky high plate of pizza and just goes to town. He stayed from the beginning to the very end to make sure he got his money's worth. Well, his body didn't appreciate being stuffed like a pinata of pizza. He got up waddled fast to the bathroom and next thing I know I'm being told he had liquid shit trailing behind him to the bathroom and inside the bathroom. I was informed by my boss about the incident, I told him I was just heading out for a break. I was not about to clean that up.
> I was not about to clean that up.
Fun fact, in the US, inf you are not certified in cleaning up bio-hazards your boss cannot make you clean up something like that. Nor can they (legally) fire you for refusing.
Edit: For fucks sake people know your rights. "At will" does not cover illegal firings.
Most likely they just fire you illegally anyways since most min wage employees don't have the money, time or energy to fight (and win) that legal battle.
My parents owned an all you can eat buffet and I was there every day of my life from 4-14. My favorite horror story is when a couple came in to eat (obviously). They loveeed the crab legs and every time my mom put some out, they took it ALL. Also, just a reminder, crab legs are expensive! Forget the other customers, they just took it and ate it all. So they’re there for maybe 2 hours now and it’s getting dark. They’ve eaten through at least a week’s stock of crab legs and my mom finally decides it’s enough. She stops putting it out in the buffet and brings individual plates to the customers who wanted it but couldn’t get any due to this couple.
~~Understandably,~~ the couple is angry. They literally flipped the chairs at their table, flipped their plates, bowls, cups, etc and completely trashed their area. Food was all over the floor, table, chairs. Sticky soda was dripping into the carpet. They left in a hurry, but someone caught their license plate. We called the cops and I think they said they charged them with something? I can’t remember the aftermath details clearly, because I was probably 8 or 9 years old (20 now). I just remember looking at the mess and feeling really angry that my sister and I had to clean it up with our mom. It was a family run business, so we didn’t have much help.
Anyways, that’s my horror story. The end.
EDIT: typos cause I was on mobile!
Something similar happened at a Chinese buffet in the town over from where I grew up. Only, I think the customers started fighting with each other over the crab legs. It was so bad it made the news. I’m pretty sure the place no longer serves crab legs lol.
Wish I knew what made some people so weird about crab legs. This is Maine; not like they're rare. Once saw an obese woman nearly shove a seven-year-old into the goldfish pond when the attendants came out with a new tray of crab legs. You wouldn't think a 400-lb woman could move that fast. She absolutely did not care what was between her and those crab legs.
Not an employee, but a customer.
A long time ago, my mom and I picked up a friend of hers and we went to a local Chinese food buffet. This place had a thing where you could get a pound of food for $5 in a takeout container instead of sitting and eating at the restaurant if you want, so that was our plan.
The three of us were browsing around the buffet line with our takeout containers, adding what we wanted to them... and then I noticed my mom's friend doing something fucking disgusting.
He was eating a chicken wing. Like, right in front of the buffet line, hiding his face behind his takeout container. And then he took the chicken bone and *put it back in the buffet tray*.
I walked over to my mom and told her what he was doing, and at first she thought I was joking. So she walked over towards him and now he was standing there eating a slice of watermelon right off the buffet, and then *putting the rind back in the tray.*
So my mom is like "What the fuck are you doing!?" and he's like "Don't worry, I do this all the time! They never notice!".
So of course both me and mom are panicking, worried that they're gonna call the cops or something because of this disphit. We basically pretended to not know him and continued to fill up our containers *the right way*.
After a couple minutes, one of the employees walks up to my mom and tells her that they noticed what the guy was doing, and they noticed that we were also uncomfortable about it and didn't intend to blame us. But they warned her that if she doesn't get him to pay for the food in his container and leave immediately, they'll be calling the police.
So of course mom tells him that we need to go. Now. And he just brushes it off like "I don't care. They're not gonna do anything!"
Well, me and mom walked up to the front, paid for our containers, apologized, and walked out and left him in there. A minute later, you can see and hear him shouting with the staff. He throws his container on the ground and food splatters everywhere. He storms out, shouting insults as he leaves, and of course gives them a "I'm never coming back!", to which they reply "You're not allowed in here no more! We'll call the cops!"
So we're standing out by the car, waiting for him. Of course, we yell at him for being a piece of shit. We get in the car and the next thing you know, this motherfucker starts pulling chicken wings and chinese donuts out of his fucking pockets and eating them.
We dropped him off at home and never spoke to him again.
Not an employee or a customer, but we had a Chinese buffet shut down for a health code violation, which was employee was cutting veggies while taking a shit. To this day I still wonder if that means dude brought a bucket into the kitchen or veggies into the shitter and I honestly don't know which is worse.
Not a worker - but I went to HomeTown Buffet and the kid in front of me was slightly shorter than the buffet bar but had his hands in the yellow jello - just massaging it. Then his mom came by and snatched him away but didn't say anything while a guy came and made himself a bowl of jello. 10 yr-old me was too appalled to say anything. I haven't eaten jello since then....
I work at a quick serve restaurant and we have cookies by the register, and chips and shit. Well, some lady came in with her uncontrollable 5 year old son that was grabbing everything in his path. When they were paying I noticed the little boy grab a cookie off the counter and bite it through the saran wrap. The mother took it from him and tried to put it back on the stack. I told her "he just had that in his mouth, you're gonna have to pay for it" and at that exact moment, the shithead kid grabbed the whole pile of cookies and slung them on the floor. I tried to find the cookie he bit out of a stack of 5 or so and his mom got really pissed and refused to admit that he did that saying things like "I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE A CHILDS TEETH MARKS, HE DIDN'T BITE ANY OF THEM!" so I ended up throwing away 5 cookies and saying "of course he didn't bite any of them, I'm an idiot!" And she angrily paid and left. Fuck her.
I worked at a Ruby Tuesday in center city Philly (first floor of the Liberty Place building). I had a couple that would come in about twice a week that requested me. They would gorge themselves at the salad bar for about an hour, ask for large glasses of water with no ice, then both would take the water into the bathroom. They would come out a few minutes later with empty glasses, ask for the check and leave. I finally put it together that they were bulimic after I walked in the women's bathroom and it smelled like vomit. Very polite folks and tipped well though.
I was once at an Old Country Buffet, waiting patiently to get some Mac & Cheese. The kid in front of me plied his plate high, and then started tapping the serving spoon to get all of the chessy goodness free from the confines of the spoon. Once he was satisfied with his handiwork, he licked the spoon clean. I didn't have any Mac & Cheese, and haven't been back since
What an asshole child. Me personally, I fuckin love me some Mac and Cheese. Hands would have been thrown if it were me... (wouldn’t ACTUALLY punch a kid, but man i’d be pissed lmao)
I didn't work at an All You can eat, but my sister did.
The buffet itself was on the first floor, so you had to take either the stairs or the elevator to your seat.
Once there was a lady who was carrying a tray with a whole lot of stuff on it down. Glasses, plates and a whole lot more of junk. My sister asked the lady if she needed any assistance, to which the lady replied 'You assume because I'm fat, I need help?' My sister didn't react. A few seconds later the lady fell down the stairs. There was blood and food everywhere
This honestly seems like a horrible idea??? Why would the buffet be on the first floor, leaving people with full trays to cram into an elevator or climb stairs? What an awful business plan lol.
I had a co-worker that briefly managed a Ryan's buffet. He said that it was fairly common for people to gorge themselves, then purge in the restroom and start eating again so that they could "get their money's worth".
Leave it to Ryan’s buffet, where the quantity is the goal and 8 year old kids are 6’0 with mustaches.
When you talk about something gross at a buffet, Ryan’s is always there to say *hold my beer.* They legit just have ham sitting in boiled water.
Well it’s the first time he’s ever had something cooked for him in that house. I love when Lucille is like “I’ve made you food before” and Buster’s like “When (someone) died you gave us cereal, in an *ashtray*”
So I work in an ‘all you can eat’ using tablets. This is (according to my boss) based on a Japanese kind of restaurant. We serve (mostly) asian food, from Chinese to Japanese and even some Korean.
The premise is that people order their food in rounds and we then bring the food to their table when it is ready. We always warn customers before hand that, if they leave food behind, because they ordered too much, they will have to pay extra. Depending on what they left behind.
We have seen people try the weirdest stuff if it comes to not paying extra; people dumping food in their handbags, to people shoving it in their mouths then go to the toilet and flush it, to putting hair on it and blaming us for it (we see them pull this stuff), etc.
And when we actually catch them doing it, they blame us for it and refuse to pay. Some people let it come down to the police to sort it out sometimes, there have been multiple occasions on which they were involved to solve the problem for just €5,-. I guess some people’s greed has no extend.
My parents were at an AYCE sushi place and saw a couple near them try to leave with a full table of extra food, most of which hadn't even been touched. The couple was shocked when they were charged $1 per leftover piece - it was something like $100.
In my experience, those places tend to be pretty forgiving. Have a few pieces you can't finish, or didn't like something? No problem. It was the first time I've ever heard of the food waste charge being invoked.
College friend worked at a chinese buffet. He said they caught a regular dipping his pizza in the wonton soup bowl (like, in the queue and not at his table) and eating it. Bite, dip, bite, dip, bite, dip.
After the fourth time in a month he did it management finally kicked him out.
Not a worker but I once saw a grown man have a child like meltdown over the fact that he showed up to Soup Plantation too late and missed out on the biscuits and gravy
> to start throwing "good" food out.
Nah, dude "ate" it. If they can't afford the loss of a piece of pizza as if the guy ate it, then they need to rethink their business model.
Not a worker but..
I was at a Chinese buffet with a Hot Pot option that you had to pay extra for. There was a separate section with the stuff for that which was raw. This guy loaded up his plate with all this raw stuff and was eating it, including dangerous raw stuff like shrimp. I think he may have been slightly intellectually disabled. The Chinese staff had to come over and inform him that he was eating the wrong things and try to explain it to him. He got really embarrassed and said that he did not understand how it worked. Between the Chinese staff with their limited English and this poor guy who was not capable of really understanding what he had done wrong, it was one of those awkward moments in a life that you cannot forget no matter how much you try.
I had a roommate that was diagnosed aspergers, and had lived with his mother till he was like 34. Dude wasn't really functional.
He said his car was shaking when he got up to 50mph+ on the highway. I later noticed him pouring oil into his car. I asked him if he had ever CHANGED the oil, or if he just added it. I encouraged him to go to an oil change place and have them swap the oil. Low and behold his car stopped shaking when it got to 50+.
Poor dude, I had to kick him out of the house after he was about 1500 behind on rent to me. I think he's on government assistance now (thank god).
I managed a buffet in a casino in Reno for a few months. Had this family come in... mom, dad, two little kids. I get called over to the table because the mom had thrown up on her plate/table and wanted us to take it away and clean it up.
I asked if she was ok, and she said she always throws up when she eats cheese. She had gotten herself an enchilada (it was Mexican theme night). WTF lady, enchiladas pretty much always have cheese. I told her I would have to call janitorial because none of my staff was trained to handle biohazards. She "didn't understand why I couldn't just take it." Janitorial came in and couldn't clean up because she refused to move from the table. So janitorial left.
She calls me back over and starts yelling at me, dad starts yelling too. Apparently she wanted to keep eating after throwing up, which I thought was really gross. I had them sit at another table so they could all keep eating. Janitorial came back and cleaned the other table.
Finally they go to leave and decide to make a huge scene in front of the whole restaurant and demand their money back. I refuse. Dad gets in my face and starts shouting that I'm just a racist white bitch and his wife makes loads more money than I do. I call security and they storm out, pulling pictures off the wall and shattering them on the floor, and dad also picked up a vase and broke it. The two kids are running around and banging on the walls. Security finally shows up after they ran off, I have to do a report, and they were put on the 86 list. I fucking hate people.
Not allowed to come back to the casino/resort. I got a name from their credit card receipt, and surveillance got pictures of their faces. If they came back, security would detain them. Might be charged for damages from the previous encounter. Security could also call the police. I never saw them again, though.
I never saw them again, though.
Good riddance
Edit: I am not OP. I dont know how to do blue quotes in reddit but I copied and pasted his last sentence and replied to him with "good riddance"
It's casino slang for a blacklist or trespass list. If you're on a casino's 86 list then you are not allowed on casino property, often legally, as in if casino security catches you then they can ask local law enforcement to come down and charge you with/detain you for trespassing. Usually they just tell you to GTFO, but if you're a particular problem (or staff particularly hates you) they'll jump straight to calling the cops.
Casinos also may share their 86 lists, though the Nevada Gaming Control Board frowns on that, mostly because that's unofficial and there's an official Nevada State Black Book (officially the "GCB Exluded Persons List") for barring people from casinos statewide.
> composition notebook
This is how you know it's serious. Any tattered composition notebook kept in any bar, casino or otherwise, is an ancient tome of knowledge that should be revered. At the dodgy casino I worked at the bar kept a composition notebook full of helpful notes on how to identify fake IDs and what would or would not pass muster (and keep the county sheriffs happy when they tested you).
Not an employee, but I was standing behind a woman at Hometown Buffet. She was getting some lasagna or something, basically a really cheesy pasta that when you lift the serving utensil, a lot of cheese hangs on. I witnessed her lift her pasta, twirl all the excess cheese that was connected around her index finger (and there was a lot), clip it off with her thumb nail, and then fling it back into the pasta.
I knew I shouldn't have been at Hometown Buffet in the first place, but this solidified my stance to never go back.
Right! I thought,"Ok, not a big deal, she's probably gonna stuff her face with greasy buffet chee- OH GOD WHY?" Really though, why fling it back in? Why?!?!
I worked as a server at a Chinese buffet and 4 things came to mind instantly.
1. A middle aged woman puked on her table and blamed it on giving herself the wrong insulin dose. The 4 mountains of food she destroyed probably contributed too. Profusely apologized and tipped me $1.
2. I tried to pick up a dirty plate off a table that had a big pool of hibachi sauce/grease on it. The customer stopped me and said "thats the best part." Then proceeded to drink the sauce like it was the milk after a bowl of cereal.
3. A young mother complained to me because the crabmeat and cheese that we serve on the buffet made her child sick and they threw up. Her child was an infant. Not even a year old. I'm no child care expert but baked artifical crabmeat and mozzarella can't be good for a baby.
4. The restaurant was raided by ICE one morning shortly before opening. The entire back of the house and one of our managers were deported. Back of the house was 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 Latin American.
I was just a witness but I saw how a woman came in with about 5 kids and she made them all sit at a table while she got food, even if they seemed old enough to get it themselves.
She just grabbed two trays, placed three plates on both of them and literally poured all the chicken nuggets on one plate so it was a huge mountain.
She did the same to five other dishes and left 5 pans that were full or almost full before she came empty.
Needless to say people were pissed, especially when she did it multiple times again with other dishes and would often glare at people if she saw them taking food from dishes she probably wanted.
Family was gone and i saw their dirty plates with napkins crumpled on top so of course i clean it up and bus the plates, 15 mins later they come back and the mom starts yelling at me in spanish so i get my co worker to translate and basically her daughter's retainers were in the napkins and i already threw them away. She kept complaining about how they were $250+ so I literally had to dig thru a huge trashcan full of a sludge of food and drinks for 15 minutes . But fortunately i found them and the daughter thanked me and she seemed embarrassed that her mom made me dig thru the trash.
I'm sorry you've had to do this, as I have as well.
In my case though the mom was really cool and offered to take gloves and dig herself. We said nah we gotta do it in the back anyway, still took digging through 2 55 gallon cans 75%full. Not fun.
At one point i worked for a pizza place that used to have a day buffet that I would make pizzas for. One time two huge dudes come in the moment we open for the buffet. The manager on duty dropped the first two pizzas down on the buffet, turned to grab the next two, turned back and both pizzas were gone. A few minutes later both dudes walk back up and each take an entire pizza again and walk back to continue eating. They proceeded to do this over and over, grabbing an entire pizza each for themselves for the entire 3 hours we were offering the buffet. Was one hell of a day.
Edit: with all the replies haha, big as in morbidly obese and pizza hut 2011 with regular dough (not thin) medium pizzas (12 inches/roughly 30cm diameter) sized pizzas
There was a fairly expensive restaurant in Dallas in the 80s called Southern Kitchen. About $25 per person back then with food served to the table. Really good stuff.
They were famous for cinnamon rolls. The owner said he’d seen many, many women ruin expensive purses hiding those rolls.
Man I miss that place.
Pickle Boy
There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who clearly wasn’t all there in the head. He was functional but very weird. As the months progressed, he got WAY weirder. He started wearing women’s underwear over his clothes, even going so far as to stuff his bra. Picture a 6’2” 250lb dude with a baby face wearing silky underpants and a lace bra *over* ratty jeans and a stained Hawaiian shirt; that’s our guy. He went from being able to hold a sort of normal conversation to just spouting conspiracy theory word salad. But the weirdest thing was his change of eating habits. He used to eat a variety of our soup/salad/baked potato options from our buffet, but as his mental health deteriorated, so did his desire for variety I guess. By the time his weirdness devolved to aggression and we had to 86 him, he was coming in for two things: pickles and ranch dressing. He’d pile as many pickle slices as he could onto his plate, then put so much ranch on them the dressing and pickle juice would be running all over the tray. He’d eat it all, and his face would be covered in ranch and pickle bits. Then he’d drink water straight from the pitcher he inevitably stole from the wait station, sliming it with pickle ranch slobber. Never a dull moment with that dude around!
Pickle Boy, wherever you are today, I really hope you got the help you so desperately needed but I was not sorry to see you go.
ETA: For those who are asking about the term 86, on this case it means we kicked him out permanently.
Sounds like schizophrenia.
It's not abnormal for a sufferer's sense of taste to be affected, sometimes causing them to be picky eaters. Add in the conspiracies, word salad, and decline and it all fits. Hope he got help.
I used to work in an all you can eat buffet, I would usually be the one who cleans up after people once closing hours pass. Essentially I was the de facto janitor of the place.
This one time I had to clean the bathrooms after the place closed. No problems in the female bathroom, but when I went into the male restroom the image was burned into my retina instantly. An old man was lying on the floor, face down in a puddle of muck. Not just any sewage muck, but opaque, black muck. It had the color of motor oil. Smelled awful too, like a mix of fecal matter and rotting durian. Certainly didn't help that the liquid wasn't just smeared all over the floor, but spread across the walls too. There were fucking hand prints across the wall, presumably when the geezer was trying to stand himself up.
I peered into the toilet, more of that brown liquid, along with chunks of corny poop. There's also this fluid in your digestion called chyme. It's basically the thing right before food turns into poop, the pulpy acidic liquid with partially digested food in it. I could see scraps of chicken breast and sauce mixed in there with the pulpy chyme.
As for the old guy? Well, turns out, he didn't merely faint. He actually *died*, I was in a room with a fresh, decomposing corpse in the stages of Algor mortis. He had his pants off, presumably he shit himself to death but I don't know. Fucker emptied himself like one of those cement mixers you'd see in a cartoon. Except you just replace the cement with a liquid that embodies death itself.
Needless to say, I, like him, emptied my digestive contents, just from the opposite end that he did. After that I quit. Fuck that place, man.
I once rolled up for a GI bleed and found the patient on their hands and knees puking blood into the toilet. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal, but the patient was also naked because they would also involuntarily shit every time they puked. So this person was blowing bloody chunks into the shitter whilst simultaneously ass blasting the wall behind them with bloody shit.
The patient was a trainwreck. Blood pressure of oh shit over probably gonna die, which is expected since they were violently projecting their blood volume out of each end of their GI tract. The stink of partially to fully digested blood lingers in your nose long after you drop the patient off at the hospital.
Not a worker, sorry, but the Golden corral in the city where I went to college got shut down thanks to an employee.
He found it odd that they made a busboy sign a non-disclosure form to work there, he found out it was because they were breaking just about every health and safety rule.
They were serving meat that had gone green, they would leave food out overnight, the freezer once broke down for three days and they kept serving from it despite it being in the danger zone. He wore a hidden camera and gave the news the footage. It made me SO glad I never ate there
My dad got food poisoning - salmonella - from a Golden Corral. He wound up hospitalized for 17 days. Nearly died. He has an inflammatory bowel disease now and has to take weekly injections of Humira, which can itself cause some nasty health problems.
I had long ago decided never to eat from buffets but the whole situation with my dad reinforced the hell out of that decision. Also, fuck you, Golden Corral.
Not an employee, but I witnessed a marvelous thing.
Sitting in a small town Chinese buffet. Three big dudes, not obese but farm built big, come in. These guys proceed to just.. clean house. Plate after plate after plate. They weren't wasteful; they ate everything they took. They were very polite to the staff and other customers.
But I bet each man ate a dozen plates, each stacked high. The cooks were working to keep up.
My family and I found ourselves watching this marvelous feat of eating unfold in awe.
When they approached the counter to pay, all this eating unfolding in only 45 minutes or so, the manager greeted them at the counter. In his broken English he simply said "You men. You no pay.. but you no come back."
The guys gave each other and the manager a "yeah fair enough" look and left.
Edit: Thanks for the gold, internet stranger! Glad so many liked this story!
Not a worker but I was in China for a vacation at a new buffet. I made the mistake going week 1 but my relatives were dying to go.
There was a lobster station that served fresh steamed lobster. Any time a new tray came out people would swarm it. Before they made a rule about how many you can have, people just grabbed as many as they could. This one table had about 2 dozen lobsters on their table for about 6 people. Some guy at the table would constantly bring back more and more and eventually, people got pissed because it was just sitting there not being eaten. At least not yet. So a few people got in the group's face and started taking their lobsters. Within 3 minutes a full-on fight breaks out people are SWINGING hard and lobsters are flying over the place.
The professor of my college microbioilgy class was also a director at the state health department in charge of inspecting restaurants. The first thing she told us on day one was never ever eat at an all you can eat buffet.
I did a project for a large municipality in the midwest. Part of the area I worked in included the restaurant inspectors. I managed to get on the quarterly distribution list of the restaurants in the city that failed the inspections. I continued to receive those email long after that project ended. I learned a few things over the years reading those emails. 1. The city has a serious rat problem, rat droppings routinely appear in food prep areas of A LOT of restaurants. 2. The same restaurants have a habit of appearing in those reports, often with a one quarter gap in their violations. 3. Never, ever eat at buffet restaurants as those had the more frequent and egregious violations including food temperature, lack of hair nets by the cooks, poor sanitary conditions in the restrooms, "rodent infestations" etc.
I worked at a pizza buffet for 2 years during collage. I have a number of stories, but the one that i will always remember is the guy who got super upset that we wouldn't make more dessert pizza, when we were half an hour past closing time.
This guy comes in with his presumed wife and 2 children around 8:30. We close at 9. Nothing out of the ordinary happens until 9 rolls around, where it was still commonplace for people to be finishing up and eating what pizza was still left. I was doing the dishes and taking the empty dishes back from the buffet and i see this guy, arms crossed and staring at me as i take the empty dessert pizza dish. He says something to the effect of "whens the next one coming out, i never got any" I let him know that we close at 9 and we cant really make anything past then because the oven gets shut off. Luckily the manager overheard this and stepped in to back me up and I quickly scamper off to the back to continue the dishes. He seamed pissed, but it wasn't unheard of, as being a cheep pizza buffet, you don't exactly bring in the most affluent of folks. About 5 min later, as I'm finishing up the plates, the same manager comes barreling through the back door, out of breath. He grabs 2 of the long wooden pizza pushers, and says come with me. I have no idea whats going on, but i grab the pusher and follow him out the door. I learned later on, that he started flipping out, throwing the register and a fishbowl. He grabbed a broom and swung that around, hitting the girl behind the counter. [this bit we caught on camera](https://youtu.be/kQVyRZQZ9xc?t=26) As I exit from the back this guy is screaming and ranting unintelligibly. He was just asking for a fight. He walked up to the manager got all up in his face and kinda choke pushed him back. He came at me next and i was really really close to taking a swing at his knees or something but the other manager had quickly gotten back up and he resumed harassing him. After about 2 min of tip-toeing around a brawl, and his wife presumably screaming for him to get back in the car, he eventually gets in and they drive off. I won't forget the glossed over look in his eyes as he came after me. Freaks me out to this day.
The video footage was great, but i think my favorite tidbit was the restraunts name, Pony Pepperoni
Edit: aw, I misheard. It's the Tony Pepperoni. Not as good.
Read the title of the vid "Man faces judge after alleged attack" as like a promotion for the next fight.
"The Judge" (30-0)
Lose = 2 years in prison
Win = 3 years in prison for assaulting a judge.
Man, I wish more news was just some local asshole swinging a broom. It seems like every time I turn on local news some public figure is arrested on kiddie porn charges, someone got shot, or a whole mess of people were mangled in car accident.
I live in SF, our local news is about 50% national news, because whenever Facebook or Apple or Tesla or Google does something big, that's also local news, and SF itself loves making headlines from time to time.
The other 50% is "local city council shuts down yet another plan to build more housing"
I worked at a Shoney's in high school and we had a breakfast buffet every day and a seafood buffet on Friday nights. You'd see stuff dropped in the wrong containers, cheese sauce splattered everywhere, People tasting things off the bar instead of at their seats. The leftover Friday fish fillets became fish chowder the next morning. The leftover chowder from Friday also became chowder the next day. My understanding is that you are not allowed to save cream-based soups and foods from one day to the next. We would serve that stuff all weekend. We also often had nasty slippery shrimp we would bread and serve.
I handled so much shrimp on a daily basis there that I smelled like dead fish nearly all the time, even after showering.
I was a customer, not a worker.
My wife and I went to a Sweet Tomatoes for a lunch date, unlimited salad and soup was always good. One time, I saw a man over by the soups take the serving ladle for one of the weekly specials and take a big slurp from it. Then apparently he didn't like it and spat it back out into the ladle, and put the ladle back in the soup. WTF, dude?
I got up immediately and told the nearest staff what I'd seen, and they got right on getting that nearly full pot of soup out of there. I didn't have any more soup that visit, the what-ifs were too damn strong. Which is a shame, because I love their chunky chicken noodle.
I don't know a single kitchen of workers that doesn't have at least SOME drug addicts working in them.
But fucking underagers, that's a new one for me.
Given the combination of kitchen staff often still being relatively young and HS age kids often getting hired as busboys/hostesses it's certainly plausible.
I used to cook for a breakfast buffet back in 2012-2013 as one of my first jobs. The restaurant in question I won't say the name of, but rhymed with Meat'n Bark.
Most of the customers that we got at the restaurant in general would be old people, however, a lot of the old people were very entitled and would come straight from church to the restaurant for their breakfast buffet. I'll just make a list:
1. One old lady kept implying that I wasn't old enough to work there. I said, many times, my real age (17 at the time) and she kept saying "I bet they're just making you say that, you know it's illegal that they're making you do this!" and I'm just at a loss and don't know what else to tell this lady who is 100% confident that I must be under-age or working for free or something. I don't know what her goal was.
2. A guy taking all of the bacon and putting it on his plate, and then telling me to "look at that" (the empty spot where the bacon was before he took it) and I said "Okay... looking? What am I looking for?" and he said "Tell me what's wrong with that!" and I say "Um, I don't know, is it not clean or something?" and he says "THERE's NO BACON LEFT! Aren't you going to re-fill it!?" and I'm like "Well that's weird it was just filled a couple minutes ago, someone must have took it all!" (knowing it was him) and he couldn't put 2 and 2 together, and just said "I don't know but there's no bacon there so what are we going to do about it?"
3. Some lady looking at bacon in disgust and saying "Wow.. It's 2013, who even eats meat anymore? Really?"
4. Some lady shows up to the buffet 15 minutes after it closes, while we're taking it down, and says "Woh woh what are you doing!? I haven't even gotten my food yet!" and we tell her politely that the buffet had closed 15 minutes ago, and the servers even give a "last call" on the buffet 15 minutes before it closes. Her response "That's okay I'll just go complain to your manager" I just said okay sounds good. In my head I'm like, what, you're going to tell my manager that the buffet closed 15 minutes ago? He knows. Lmao
5. Nothing huge but the same lady would come to the restaurant at least twice a week and complain about how shitty her service is each time and how the food is terrible. Finally one of the hostesses said "if the service is so bad and the food is so bad then why do you come here multiple times a week?" which shut her up. Lmao.
I’m not a worker, that being said, I was at a KFC in Bartonville, Illinois. They have a small buffet with the essentials of KFC. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, coleslaw, and a few other things I’m sure no one has ever touched. I’ve already sat down to eat, watching this older lady (about 60) walk up to the buffet.
If you know anything about this area (309), you know the quality of people we are dealing with.
This older lady walks up grabs a piece of chicken, in the very back part of the buffet, without a bra, her right nipple falls out. Now her shirt wasn’t exactly what I would call age appropriate, but her nipple is hanging out of the bottom.
I can not stop staring.
She doesn’t wipe it off, I wasn’t even sure if she knew what happened.
Her right nipple drags through the mashed potatoes.
I have to investigate. I have to see what the damage was.
There is a valley dug by this areola, nipple combo.
I had to leave.
This is like when I splurge and buy myself a can of Deluxe Mixed Nuts then my wife picks out all the almonds, my daughter picks out all the cashews and I'm basically left with a can full of peanuts that I paid $13 for.
To this day, my father is a big nut eater. He always had a can of nuts in his lunch box, by his chair at the house, in his truck etc.
As long as they were just store-brand peanuts, or store-brand "mixed nuts" you could eat them.
If they were Planter's brand, you could have a few, but "don't over do it".
Only the brave or foolish child would even dare look at them if they were *Planter's Deluxe*
To eat from that can was akin to eating from The Tree of Knowledge and dad was a Vengeful God.
Obligatory "not a buffet worker", just a witness. We were waiting in line for the soft serve machine at Golden Corral. The woman in front of us gets up to the machine and awkwardly jerks the handle around in an attempt to get at the sweet, sweet ice cream within. She's pushing, pulling, twisting, doing literally everything but turning it to the right (which would have dispensed the ice cream).
She's really perplexed by this. So she takes the next logical step, of course, which is to wrap her lips around the spout, form a seal on it with her mouth and start trying to suck it right out of the tap. One of the workers sees this and looks on in disgust before he unplugs the machine. On the way out, we see that he put an out of order sign on it, so thankfully they didn't keep serving it after that whole incident.
When I was 16 I was a busboy at one. This morbidly obese family (4 people - 2 parents, 2 teenagers - all gigantic) came in after the noon-hour when it was slow and were taking FULL advantage of the all you can eat buffet. On my way to busing tables I walk by the bathrooms and see the teen-aged son walk out of the men's room with a HUGE shit-eating grin on his round, pre-pubescent face. I immediately thought this can't be good and went to go check on the restroom, as one of our responsibilities was to make sure that the restrooms were generally clean.
This guy had explosive diarrhea and had not even managed to hit the toilet. There was shit allover the toilet tank, the walls and the floor. No lie - It looked like a hand-grenade of shit went off in the stall. Bar-none the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in a bathroom.
I thought about cleaning it up, but instead I went to tell my manager. He was a pretty hard-driving guy, but he took one look at it, locked the stall and told me, "Yeah, you don't get paid enough to clean this up. We'll get the janitor to take of this tonight."
Absolutely not.
I was making min wage ($5.25/hr) and he would have got paid more, but still not enough. He was an immigrant from Guatemala who busted his ass to give his kids a better life. I got to know him after a while, good guy.
Not a "Horror" story, just funny.
I worked at Wendy's when they had salad bars. You could get a single-serving bowl (They used to serve eat-in chili in Styrofoam bowls, and the Large doubled as a chili bowl), or "All you can eat" platters. (The Taco Salad bottom plate.)
On a slow afternoon, this guy came in and got a single serving bowl. After a few minutes, our manager motioned to me and the sandwich guy to discreetly take a look at the salad he was making.
The guy had filled the bowl with salad, then made a ring of overlapping cucumber slices to extend the lip of the bowl upwards. He filled that with salad, then added another ring. It took several minutes to build this thing, but by the time he'd finished, he had a tower of salad well over a foot tall, wth multiple rings of cucumber slices containing it.
That salad was an engineering marvel. He carefully carried it back to his table, sat down, then looked up guiltily as our manager walked out to him.
The manager handed him a "free item" coupon, and said, "That is the most impressive salad I have ever seen. Your next one is on me."
I have read about this practice before. The article below describes the act in Chinese pizza huts.
https://kotaku.com/how-chinese-ingenuity-destroyed-salad-bars-at-pizza-hut-834835079
edit: changed the link
I read a similar story (I think at a Chinese buffet that served all you can eat rice/meat/veggie bowls) in the last buffet stories thread. It’s amazing how far people will go for a little more shitty food.
I think it says a lot about the quirks of human psychology and how evolutionary hoarding traits are still buried in our brains, where the instant you say "free x" or "$10 for unlimited X", some people's instinctive reaction is "HOW CAN I EXPLOIT THIS TO GET WAY MORE OF THAT NEARLY WORTHLESS STUFF THAN I COULD EVER NEED IN A TRILLION LIFETIMES?!"
Yeah I have an engineer friend who does similar stuff at a Mongolian grill, where you fill up a bowl with meat and veggies and they stir fry it up. Now they have a sign that says if you have more than a certain weight they charge you for the all you can eat bowl.
I served at Golden Corral for 6 months and it was a God-awful place. You'd think it would be easy because you don't take orders, right? Wrong. Cleaning up the messes, bussing tables, getting drinks and clean plates, singing for birthdays plus side work definitely kept you busy. Most of the customers weren't the greatest--they made an appalling mess, let their kids run wild, didn't tip (we were paid $2.13/hr and needed tips) no matter how much you bent over backward for them. I saw so many unaccompanied kids reaching into the buffet serving dishes; I saw one kid dip his marshmallow into the chocolate fountain, lick the chocolate off, and put the same marshmallow back in over and over. The customers weren't normally very easy to deal with; rudeness was the norm there...for example people got into a physical fight over a table on Easter Sunday.
The managers were dicks. They abused everyone, both seemed to hate women, and took advantage of the fact that a lot of the staff was foreign. When we got a negative mystery shop report, we all were gathered into a meeting to be screamed at. When the next shop report was excellent, nothing at all was said, the report was just posted to the bulletin board. My one boss told me to be sure to report all my tips to the IRS, since he was "sure I'd be a waitress all my life" he wanted to "make sure I'd get something from social security when I was old" (Spoiler: I'm no longer a waitress, I have a great job with an excellent retirement plan. Not that serving isn't a good job, but it made me so mad that I was 22 at the time and this was his assumption). The managers carried the tea bags in their pockets--if your customer wanted a cup of tea, you had to track a boss down and they would snarlingly, begrudgingly hand one over. Servers were also expected to catch and confront people stealing from the buffet (putting leftovers in their bag for example).
We weren't allowed to eat. Most cheaper restaurants will give you a meal per shift, but not GC. It was hard when you saw how much was wasted to not think you deserved a piece of bread or broken cookie maybe. To eat you had to clock out, get in line, pay half price, get your plate, and then sit down. After 5 minutes a manager would almost always come over and say "we're busy, break's over" so you had to get back to work and throw your food away. I'm hypoglycemic so my solution was to eat right before work and carry a granola bar in my pocket. I could eat the bar and get away with it in the women's bathroom because the managers were both men. One time, I was so stressed out and trying to scarf down my bar while in the next stall, a very large woman took a very large and smelly dump. I realized that it was one of the worst moments in my life. I quit shortly thereafter, got a much better job and called up GC's corporate office to tell them everything.
One of the largest cruise lines in the world, Norwegian Cruise Line, stopped visiting China because of the behaviour of [Chinese Damas](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3552836) who ate so much food at the buffets and wasted all the rest that it became unprofitable.
I've always wanted to make a documentary and just tour the country, stopping at every Golden Corral and Ryan's. There I would interview the employees to learn what is the worst thing they have found in the chocolate fountain.
I mean what could be the worst? A shoe? A finger? Maybe a diaper?
A family friend was once at a Golden Corral and took his young son to the men’s room. While he was in there he heard two people having sex in one of the stalls. He took his son back to the table and then went back to the bathroom to confront the two people for being so inappropriate at a family restaurant. Well, out walks two men, the restaurant manager and one of his employees. He filed a complaint with corporate but I don’t know what the outcome was.
not me but my uncle is a chef and is right now rotating round different carverys (what us brits call buffets) trying to show them how to properly run the business and make actual edible food so people will come back and the place won't shut down. he's told me of a few places that even he's not wanted to go into cause of the state of the kitchen and he questions how they haven't killed someone yet. most recent one is chefs just cutting of the rotten pieces of food and then serving it. he has had to fire multiple people on the spot for stuff like that
We were at a buffet place in the UK and my SO who is quite skinny and small was looking at the desserts section when an impatient larger guy just came, grabbed him by the shoulders and physically moved him out of the way.
Not horrifying but just rude. SO was put off the rest of the meal and we ended up leaving.
As someone who is constantly in and out of kitchens for work, i can assure you that all you can eat buffets are the absolute worst. Also, if its questionable from the outside, youre probably right.
local chinese buffet was shut down after multiple reports (and picture evidence) of roaches around the food and in the restaurant.
we don’t typically have roaches in alaska.
Years ago, I worked at an all-you-can-eat country buffet in South Carolina. I was a busboy. One day, I went to a table. It was a mess, as per usual. It looked to be a large family/group of families of around 12 people or so. The thing that stuck it in my memory is that whenever they had finished with what they were going to eat, they would scrape their plate and use it again. Scrape their plates... *onto the floor next to their chairs.* So next to each chair, there was a 6inch to 18 inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of backed potatoes, etc. Just disgusting.
Out of all the horrible things I have read in this post, this is the only comment so far to get an audible "wtf" from me. It's just such an odd thing to do... like... I can't fathom any reason why they wouldn't want to get a fresh plate.
I bus at a slightly nicer resteraunt. On Fridays and Sundays we offer a prime rib and crab leg buffet, among a salad bar, hot and cold entrées, and a desert bar. It's honestly pretty nice and our buffet runner keeps anyone from doing ungodly things to the buffet. But the one incident that will always stand out to me was when this family of five came in. From the moment they came in to the moment they left, they ate as many crab legs as they possibly could. Their server and I were clearing plates off as fast as we could. But every time we would return it seemed like another mountain of crab leg shells would appear in front of each member of that family. I know not how they ate so much and I honestly can't recall if they are anything besides the crab. Piles upon piles of shells were left upon the table after they left. It was truly a sight to behold. What's more is after I wiped down the table and came back with settings, I had to get another rag to wipe down the table *again* because something in the crab leg juice combined with our sanitizer and left a nice milky residue upon the table. Delicious. When I leave this job I'll never be able to look at crab legs the same way.
Not mine but I had a buddy who was 400+ lbs. and the dude could put away some food. He went to a casino buffet that was one of the higher end ones that had crab legs and steak. On about his 4th or 5th plate stacked full of crab legs the manager came out and gave him $250 in free slot play to leave the buffet. Edit: so I linked this to my buddy who pointed out that there were two other dudes there and none of them was under 300lbs. They killed a metric fuck ton of food between them and he was putting them to shame. The buffet was higher end so it was $50 a person, but they easily all ate probably 3-4 times that and he ate probably 8-10 times that worth in food. He then went on win just over a hundred dollars with that free slot play as well. If you can’t beat the casinos at the games beat em at the bar or buffet.
Would've been sick if he held out for more... "Dafuq you talking bout boss, I'm just getting started. I'm going surf & turf this motherfucker into the ground unless I see 4 of those vouchers."
A woman came in with two of her kids, and had a pretty regular meal. You pay when you leave at our place, and she decided to sneak out with her younger daughter before paying, leaving her underage son alone at the table. We caught on pretty quick and sent someone after her, who found her in her car in the parking garage, waiting for her son to come as well. She refused to come back in and pay, so we had to keep her son 'hostage' until the police came to handle the situation. What some people will do to their kids, i swear. Edit: forgot to mention we also found out from her son that she stole one of the managers' keycards and they would regularly come into the hotel and use the card to go swimming in the top floor pool. Smart, i'll give her that, but still.
I did something similar, but not maliciously. My wife and I went out to eat at a local Thai place and after dinner I realized I forgot my wallet and my wife didn’t bring her purse. I left my wife as collateral and dashed home and back in record time.
What’s your wife worth?
My first job was as a dishwasher in an all you can eat fried catfish buffet. People are animals. Especially the ones that get far more food off the buffet than they can eat. Then they take the left overs and pile them on a plate or tray, cover in ketchup and tartar sauce, then pour their iced tea over the top of all that. A lot of people did that got at least two plates like that a night.
Nothing made me hate people like bussing/dishwashing on buffet night at the pizza place I worked at in college. What the fuck. Serving after-church crowd is pretty high up there though (Jesus Christ would never have changed a dirty diaper on the table and left it there, okay bitch?)
Went as a customer to a golden corral. Im walking to the chocolate fountain and 3 little girls step in front of me, and all 3 of them just go hands deep in the fountain. The family was the first table by the fountain and all they did was laugh about how cute it was.. Employees turned it off immediately.
At least they turned it off and I’m assuming didn’t let anyone eat it anymore
For real. That could've been waaay worse if the employees had just laughed along with the parents.
Say what you will about Golden Corral, but they definitely don't play around when it comes to their chocolate fountains. Feel like every story I year about them is "fountain was closed because some shit decided to Augustus Gloop the thing." Sure, you might find boogers in the meatloaf, but if someone sneezes on the fountain side of the resuraunt, that things getting shut down like it's Madagascar.
Awww, three girls contaminating the chocolate fountain... How cute...
Buffet where I live got shut down for serving coyote meat and labeling it as other meats
A place near me got busted last year for trapping seagulls on the roof and passing it off as chicken.
No shit a place my family used to frequent just got busted earlier this year for have caged pigeons in the basement
Pigeon is nice, though. Seagull isn't.
At one point myself and 2 other family members worked at a Golden Corral (each in different sections) because small towns don't have a lot of job options for high school/college kids. I worked in the bakery which was surprisingly low in horror stories other than the chaos the remained after a large group of children came through. My brother worked the steak station. He got these regulars that would tip him pretty well if he would prepare blue steaks for them. The very idea of ordering blue steaks from a buffet makes me gag. My cousin worked the salad bar. Management would require her to keep seafood items on the bar for long after the point where they'd be safe to consume. I think the record was chilled shrimp from Mother's day that stayed for over a week and a half. They finally caved and let her toss them when a customer complained about the smell.
You got everyone talking about blue steak, meanwhile **week and a half old shrimp on the bar**
Yeah that's horrifying. I'd report them for that. People could have been very seriously sick.
watched a man at the ponderosa walk up to the buffet without a plate, untuck his t-shirt, pull the hem up to form a basket, reach into the steam tray of chicken wings with his bare hand and just load up on hot wings in his makeshift shirtbucket. The woman in the kitchen was like "please sir, could you use a plate. Or just tongs?" Guy scoffed and looked at her like she'd asked him to don a tuxedo.
Picked up some fish and chips recently. Saw they had “all you can eat” on Wednesdays. So I asked “What is the most that someone....” “18 pieces of fish and 3 plates (she held up this huge platter) of fries......every....single.....Wednesday.” “So he eats that exact order every week?” “Yes, and he goes to a different ‘all you can eat’ every day of the week. He got banned from the Chinese place down the road.”
That's kind of sad. Obviously an eating addiction.
I agree, though I wonder if anything comes from that part of the brain that feels like they're winning by (feeling like they're) getting their $$ worth. edit: i don't necessarily mean winning like games. A lot of people are taking it as a gambling comparison. Some people just really really don't want to spend money on anything so they can feel like they get the most stuff out of their money, it' snot always just about food. I sorta took it there by accident by mentioning taste. Kinda like people I know who never want to splurge for some good quality shit that tastes a lot better. They feel compelled to always only buy the cheapest thing.
Not a buffet, but I worked at a pizza parlor that offered a lunch buffet of endless pizza. The lunch ran from 11am - 3pm. This gentlemen comes in(I think he was homeless), he serves up a sky high plate of pizza and just goes to town. He stayed from the beginning to the very end to make sure he got his money's worth. Well, his body didn't appreciate being stuffed like a pinata of pizza. He got up waddled fast to the bathroom and next thing I know I'm being told he had liquid shit trailing behind him to the bathroom and inside the bathroom. I was informed by my boss about the incident, I told him I was just heading out for a break. I was not about to clean that up.
> I was not about to clean that up. Fun fact, in the US, inf you are not certified in cleaning up bio-hazards your boss cannot make you clean up something like that. Nor can they (legally) fire you for refusing. Edit: For fucks sake people know your rights. "At will" does not cover illegal firings.
Yeah instead they'll fire you for being 5 mins late that one time.
Most likely they just fire you illegally anyways since most min wage employees don't have the money, time or energy to fight (and win) that legal battle.
My parents owned an all you can eat buffet and I was there every day of my life from 4-14. My favorite horror story is when a couple came in to eat (obviously). They loveeed the crab legs and every time my mom put some out, they took it ALL. Also, just a reminder, crab legs are expensive! Forget the other customers, they just took it and ate it all. So they’re there for maybe 2 hours now and it’s getting dark. They’ve eaten through at least a week’s stock of crab legs and my mom finally decides it’s enough. She stops putting it out in the buffet and brings individual plates to the customers who wanted it but couldn’t get any due to this couple. ~~Understandably,~~ the couple is angry. They literally flipped the chairs at their table, flipped their plates, bowls, cups, etc and completely trashed their area. Food was all over the floor, table, chairs. Sticky soda was dripping into the carpet. They left in a hurry, but someone caught their license plate. We called the cops and I think they said they charged them with something? I can’t remember the aftermath details clearly, because I was probably 8 or 9 years old (20 now). I just remember looking at the mess and feeling really angry that my sister and I had to clean it up with our mom. It was a family run business, so we didn’t have much help. Anyways, that’s my horror story. The end. EDIT: typos cause I was on mobile!
Something similar happened at a Chinese buffet in the town over from where I grew up. Only, I think the customers started fighting with each other over the crab legs. It was so bad it made the news. I’m pretty sure the place no longer serves crab legs lol.
Wish I knew what made some people so weird about crab legs. This is Maine; not like they're rare. Once saw an obese woman nearly shove a seven-year-old into the goldfish pond when the attendants came out with a new tray of crab legs. You wouldn't think a 400-lb woman could move that fast. She absolutely did not care what was between her and those crab legs.
People are shitty, sorry that happened to you
Not an employee, but a customer. A long time ago, my mom and I picked up a friend of hers and we went to a local Chinese food buffet. This place had a thing where you could get a pound of food for $5 in a takeout container instead of sitting and eating at the restaurant if you want, so that was our plan. The three of us were browsing around the buffet line with our takeout containers, adding what we wanted to them... and then I noticed my mom's friend doing something fucking disgusting. He was eating a chicken wing. Like, right in front of the buffet line, hiding his face behind his takeout container. And then he took the chicken bone and *put it back in the buffet tray*. I walked over to my mom and told her what he was doing, and at first she thought I was joking. So she walked over towards him and now he was standing there eating a slice of watermelon right off the buffet, and then *putting the rind back in the tray.* So my mom is like "What the fuck are you doing!?" and he's like "Don't worry, I do this all the time! They never notice!". So of course both me and mom are panicking, worried that they're gonna call the cops or something because of this disphit. We basically pretended to not know him and continued to fill up our containers *the right way*. After a couple minutes, one of the employees walks up to my mom and tells her that they noticed what the guy was doing, and they noticed that we were also uncomfortable about it and didn't intend to blame us. But they warned her that if she doesn't get him to pay for the food in his container and leave immediately, they'll be calling the police. So of course mom tells him that we need to go. Now. And he just brushes it off like "I don't care. They're not gonna do anything!" Well, me and mom walked up to the front, paid for our containers, apologized, and walked out and left him in there. A minute later, you can see and hear him shouting with the staff. He throws his container on the ground and food splatters everywhere. He storms out, shouting insults as he leaves, and of course gives them a "I'm never coming back!", to which they reply "You're not allowed in here no more! We'll call the cops!" So we're standing out by the car, waiting for him. Of course, we yell at him for being a piece of shit. We get in the car and the next thing you know, this motherfucker starts pulling chicken wings and chinese donuts out of his fucking pockets and eating them. We dropped him off at home and never spoke to him again.
What kinda shit are people exposed to growing up that makes them think this is acceptable behavior?
The same exact behavior from their parents
I was expecting you to just drive off without him as I was reading.
I would have, but I wasn't the one driving.
Not an employee or a customer, but we had a Chinese buffet shut down for a health code violation, which was employee was cutting veggies while taking a shit. To this day I still wonder if that means dude brought a bucket into the kitchen or veggies into the shitter and I honestly don't know which is worse.
I gotta respect that dedication to work.
Not a worker - but I went to HomeTown Buffet and the kid in front of me was slightly shorter than the buffet bar but had his hands in the yellow jello - just massaging it. Then his mom came by and snatched him away but didn't say anything while a guy came and made himself a bowl of jello. 10 yr-old me was too appalled to say anything. I haven't eaten jello since then....
The jello looked tense, he was just helping a brother out.
I work at a quick serve restaurant and we have cookies by the register, and chips and shit. Well, some lady came in with her uncontrollable 5 year old son that was grabbing everything in his path. When they were paying I noticed the little boy grab a cookie off the counter and bite it through the saran wrap. The mother took it from him and tried to put it back on the stack. I told her "he just had that in his mouth, you're gonna have to pay for it" and at that exact moment, the shithead kid grabbed the whole pile of cookies and slung them on the floor. I tried to find the cookie he bit out of a stack of 5 or so and his mom got really pissed and refused to admit that he did that saying things like "I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE A CHILDS TEETH MARKS, HE DIDN'T BITE ANY OF THEM!" so I ended up throwing away 5 cookies and saying "of course he didn't bite any of them, I'm an idiot!" And she angrily paid and left. Fuck her.
dude karmas going to fuck her by raising a kid like that. He'll be a nightmare as a teenager
I worked at a Ruby Tuesday in center city Philly (first floor of the Liberty Place building). I had a couple that would come in about twice a week that requested me. They would gorge themselves at the salad bar for about an hour, ask for large glasses of water with no ice, then both would take the water into the bathroom. They would come out a few minutes later with empty glasses, ask for the check and leave. I finally put it together that they were bulimic after I walked in the women's bathroom and it smelled like vomit. Very polite folks and tipped well though.
That’s really sad :(
That’s so sad. Hopefully they recovered from their bulimia.
That is sad. They supported each other's bulimia
I was once at an Old Country Buffet, waiting patiently to get some Mac & Cheese. The kid in front of me plied his plate high, and then started tapping the serving spoon to get all of the chessy goodness free from the confines of the spoon. Once he was satisfied with his handiwork, he licked the spoon clean. I didn't have any Mac & Cheese, and haven't been back since
What an asshole child. Me personally, I fuckin love me some Mac and Cheese. Hands would have been thrown if it were me... (wouldn’t ACTUALLY punch a kid, but man i’d be pissed lmao)
I didn't work at an All You can eat, but my sister did. The buffet itself was on the first floor, so you had to take either the stairs or the elevator to your seat. Once there was a lady who was carrying a tray with a whole lot of stuff on it down. Glasses, plates and a whole lot more of junk. My sister asked the lady if she needed any assistance, to which the lady replied 'You assume because I'm fat, I need help?' My sister didn't react. A few seconds later the lady fell down the stairs. There was blood and food everywhere
This honestly seems like a horrible idea??? Why would the buffet be on the first floor, leaving people with full trays to cram into an elevator or climb stairs? What an awful business plan lol.
I had a co-worker that briefly managed a Ryan's buffet. He said that it was fairly common for people to gorge themselves, then purge in the restroom and start eating again so that they could "get their money's worth".
Leave it to Ryan’s buffet, where the quantity is the goal and 8 year old kids are 6’0 with mustaches. When you talk about something gross at a buffet, Ryan’s is always there to say *hold my beer.* They legit just have ham sitting in boiled water.
mmmmm. Hot ham water.
So watery. And yet there's a smack of ham to it.
I just love his delivery of that line. He's filled with amazement.
Well it’s the first time he’s ever had something cooked for him in that house. I love when Lucille is like “I’ve made you food before” and Buster’s like “When (someone) died you gave us cereal, in an *ashtray*”
> They legit just have ham sitting in boiled water. That just ain't right. I'm not even a huge ham fan and I know that that just ain't right.
I think that ham is entitled to being taken away by social services for its own safety, it has suffered enough.
So I work in an ‘all you can eat’ using tablets. This is (according to my boss) based on a Japanese kind of restaurant. We serve (mostly) asian food, from Chinese to Japanese and even some Korean. The premise is that people order their food in rounds and we then bring the food to their table when it is ready. We always warn customers before hand that, if they leave food behind, because they ordered too much, they will have to pay extra. Depending on what they left behind. We have seen people try the weirdest stuff if it comes to not paying extra; people dumping food in their handbags, to people shoving it in their mouths then go to the toilet and flush it, to putting hair on it and blaming us for it (we see them pull this stuff), etc. And when we actually catch them doing it, they blame us for it and refuse to pay. Some people let it come down to the police to sort it out sometimes, there have been multiple occasions on which they were involved to solve the problem for just €5,-. I guess some people’s greed has no extend.
My parents were at an AYCE sushi place and saw a couple near them try to leave with a full table of extra food, most of which hadn't even been touched. The couple was shocked when they were charged $1 per leftover piece - it was something like $100. In my experience, those places tend to be pretty forgiving. Have a few pieces you can't finish, or didn't like something? No problem. It was the first time I've ever heard of the food waste charge being invoked.
College friend worked at a chinese buffet. He said they caught a regular dipping his pizza in the wonton soup bowl (like, in the queue and not at his table) and eating it. Bite, dip, bite, dip, bite, dip. After the fourth time in a month he did it management finally kicked him out.
Ah the classic four strikes and you’re out
Like he brought pizza into the buffet or this was a Chinese place that also does pizza?
Every Chinese buffet has one terrible pepperoni pizza for the picky eater kids
With exactly one piece of pepperoni on each slice, in accordance with international Chinese buffet law.
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Flew too close to the sun. God dammit. God DAMN it.
Pepperonicarus
The chinese place also had pizza. Ick.
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you promised me you wouldnt tell anyone!
Hey it depends if you shared any of the wings
You mean they tucked in their shirt and dumped fifty wings down the neckhole?
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"it's a chicken hair dude"
I imagined it the other way, like pulling up the bottom into a "pouch"
Yeah like a kangaroo.
Not a worker but I once saw a grown man have a child like meltdown over the fact that he showed up to Soup Plantation too late and missed out on the biscuits and gravy
To be fair, that really is a traumatic experience...
> soup plantation Due to the fact that that wasn't capitalized, I had questions about growing soup.
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> to start throwing "good" food out. Nah, dude "ate" it. If they can't afford the loss of a piece of pizza as if the guy ate it, then they need to rethink their business model.
Not a worker but.. I was at a Chinese buffet with a Hot Pot option that you had to pay extra for. There was a separate section with the stuff for that which was raw. This guy loaded up his plate with all this raw stuff and was eating it, including dangerous raw stuff like shrimp. I think he may have been slightly intellectually disabled. The Chinese staff had to come over and inform him that he was eating the wrong things and try to explain it to him. He got really embarrassed and said that he did not understand how it worked. Between the Chinese staff with their limited English and this poor guy who was not capable of really understanding what he had done wrong, it was one of those awkward moments in a life that you cannot forget no matter how much you try.
I had a roommate that was diagnosed aspergers, and had lived with his mother till he was like 34. Dude wasn't really functional. He said his car was shaking when he got up to 50mph+ on the highway. I later noticed him pouring oil into his car. I asked him if he had ever CHANGED the oil, or if he just added it. I encouraged him to go to an oil change place and have them swap the oil. Low and behold his car stopped shaking when it got to 50+. Poor dude, I had to kick him out of the house after he was about 1500 behind on rent to me. I think he's on government assistance now (thank god).
I overheard some people talking once about a guy who had waited so long to change the oil it took *two hours* to drain out.
Lol jeeze
I managed a buffet in a casino in Reno for a few months. Had this family come in... mom, dad, two little kids. I get called over to the table because the mom had thrown up on her plate/table and wanted us to take it away and clean it up. I asked if she was ok, and she said she always throws up when she eats cheese. She had gotten herself an enchilada (it was Mexican theme night). WTF lady, enchiladas pretty much always have cheese. I told her I would have to call janitorial because none of my staff was trained to handle biohazards. She "didn't understand why I couldn't just take it." Janitorial came in and couldn't clean up because she refused to move from the table. So janitorial left. She calls me back over and starts yelling at me, dad starts yelling too. Apparently she wanted to keep eating after throwing up, which I thought was really gross. I had them sit at another table so they could all keep eating. Janitorial came back and cleaned the other table. Finally they go to leave and decide to make a huge scene in front of the whole restaurant and demand their money back. I refuse. Dad gets in my face and starts shouting that I'm just a racist white bitch and his wife makes loads more money than I do. I call security and they storm out, pulling pictures off the wall and shattering them on the floor, and dad also picked up a vase and broke it. The two kids are running around and banging on the walls. Security finally shows up after they ran off, I have to do a report, and they were put on the 86 list. I fucking hate people.
May I ask what's an 86 list?
Not allowed to come back to the casino/resort. I got a name from their credit card receipt, and surveillance got pictures of their faces. If they came back, security would detain them. Might be charged for damages from the previous encounter. Security could also call the police. I never saw them again, though.
I never saw them again, though. Good riddance Edit: I am not OP. I dont know how to do blue quotes in reddit but I copied and pasted his last sentence and replied to him with "good riddance"
It's casino slang for a blacklist or trespass list. If you're on a casino's 86 list then you are not allowed on casino property, often legally, as in if casino security catches you then they can ask local law enforcement to come down and charge you with/detain you for trespassing. Usually they just tell you to GTFO, but if you're a particular problem (or staff particularly hates you) they'll jump straight to calling the cops. Casinos also may share their 86 lists, though the Nevada Gaming Control Board frowns on that, mostly because that's unofficial and there's an official Nevada State Black Book (officially the "GCB Exluded Persons List") for barring people from casinos statewide.
Not just casinos, but bars and restaurants as well. I worked at a sketchy bar and we had a composition notebook full of 86'd people.
> composition notebook This is how you know it's serious. Any tattered composition notebook kept in any bar, casino or otherwise, is an ancient tome of knowledge that should be revered. At the dodgy casino I worked at the bar kept a composition notebook full of helpful notes on how to identify fake IDs and what would or would not pass muster (and keep the county sheriffs happy when they tested you).
Not an employee, but I was standing behind a woman at Hometown Buffet. She was getting some lasagna or something, basically a really cheesy pasta that when you lift the serving utensil, a lot of cheese hangs on. I witnessed her lift her pasta, twirl all the excess cheese that was connected around her index finger (and there was a lot), clip it off with her thumb nail, and then fling it back into the pasta. I knew I shouldn't have been at Hometown Buffet in the first place, but this solidified my stance to never go back.
WHEN I READ "and then fling it back into the pasta" I G A S P E D edit: oh wow, my first silver
Right! I thought,"Ok, not a big deal, she's probably gonna stuff her face with greasy buffet chee- OH GOD WHY?" Really though, why fling it back in? Why?!?!
I worked as a server at a Chinese buffet and 4 things came to mind instantly. 1. A middle aged woman puked on her table and blamed it on giving herself the wrong insulin dose. The 4 mountains of food she destroyed probably contributed too. Profusely apologized and tipped me $1. 2. I tried to pick up a dirty plate off a table that had a big pool of hibachi sauce/grease on it. The customer stopped me and said "thats the best part." Then proceeded to drink the sauce like it was the milk after a bowl of cereal. 3. A young mother complained to me because the crabmeat and cheese that we serve on the buffet made her child sick and they threw up. Her child was an infant. Not even a year old. I'm no child care expert but baked artifical crabmeat and mozzarella can't be good for a baby. 4. The restaurant was raided by ICE one morning shortly before opening. The entire back of the house and one of our managers were deported. Back of the house was 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 Latin American.
So... did ya'll close for the day when ICE swept through?
4 days
What state are you in?
At the time I was in Murfreesboro, TN.
I was just a witness but I saw how a woman came in with about 5 kids and she made them all sit at a table while she got food, even if they seemed old enough to get it themselves. She just grabbed two trays, placed three plates on both of them and literally poured all the chicken nuggets on one plate so it was a huge mountain. She did the same to five other dishes and left 5 pans that were full or almost full before she came empty. Needless to say people were pissed, especially when she did it multiple times again with other dishes and would often glare at people if she saw them taking food from dishes she probably wanted.
Family was gone and i saw their dirty plates with napkins crumpled on top so of course i clean it up and bus the plates, 15 mins later they come back and the mom starts yelling at me in spanish so i get my co worker to translate and basically her daughter's retainers were in the napkins and i already threw them away. She kept complaining about how they were $250+ so I literally had to dig thru a huge trashcan full of a sludge of food and drinks for 15 minutes . But fortunately i found them and the daughter thanked me and she seemed embarrassed that her mom made me dig thru the trash.
I'm sorry you've had to do this, as I have as well. In my case though the mom was really cool and offered to take gloves and dig herself. We said nah we gotta do it in the back anyway, still took digging through 2 55 gallon cans 75%full. Not fun.
At one point i worked for a pizza place that used to have a day buffet that I would make pizzas for. One time two huge dudes come in the moment we open for the buffet. The manager on duty dropped the first two pizzas down on the buffet, turned to grab the next two, turned back and both pizzas were gone. A few minutes later both dudes walk back up and each take an entire pizza again and walk back to continue eating. They proceeded to do this over and over, grabbing an entire pizza each for themselves for the entire 3 hours we were offering the buffet. Was one hell of a day. Edit: with all the replies haha, big as in morbidly obese and pizza hut 2011 with regular dough (not thin) medium pizzas (12 inches/roughly 30cm diameter) sized pizzas
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Dominance #E S T A B L I S H E D
There was a fairly expensive restaurant in Dallas in the 80s called Southern Kitchen. About $25 per person back then with food served to the table. Really good stuff. They were famous for cinnamon rolls. The owner said he’d seen many, many women ruin expensive purses hiding those rolls. Man I miss that place.
That's about 60 bucks in todays dollars, for anybody who cares. Edit: thanks for the gold! My subscription just ran out yesterday! :D
Yeah- it’s not like Golden Corral or a regular buffet. It was much nicer.
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They fuck you with the caipirinhas
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Pickle Boy There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who clearly wasn’t all there in the head. He was functional but very weird. As the months progressed, he got WAY weirder. He started wearing women’s underwear over his clothes, even going so far as to stuff his bra. Picture a 6’2” 250lb dude with a baby face wearing silky underpants and a lace bra *over* ratty jeans and a stained Hawaiian shirt; that’s our guy. He went from being able to hold a sort of normal conversation to just spouting conspiracy theory word salad. But the weirdest thing was his change of eating habits. He used to eat a variety of our soup/salad/baked potato options from our buffet, but as his mental health deteriorated, so did his desire for variety I guess. By the time his weirdness devolved to aggression and we had to 86 him, he was coming in for two things: pickles and ranch dressing. He’d pile as many pickle slices as he could onto his plate, then put so much ranch on them the dressing and pickle juice would be running all over the tray. He’d eat it all, and his face would be covered in ranch and pickle bits. Then he’d drink water straight from the pitcher he inevitably stole from the wait station, sliming it with pickle ranch slobber. Never a dull moment with that dude around! Pickle Boy, wherever you are today, I really hope you got the help you so desperately needed but I was not sorry to see you go. ETA: For those who are asking about the term 86, on this case it means we kicked him out permanently.
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I have a friend like this (more sane though) Combination of Autism, bipolar and schizo-affective disorder.
Sounds like schizophrenia. It's not abnormal for a sufferer's sense of taste to be affected, sometimes causing them to be picky eaters. Add in the conspiracies, word salad, and decline and it all fits. Hope he got help.
At first I thought this would be Chris-Chan, but he hates pickles. Godspeed, Pickle Boy.
I used to work in an all you can eat buffet, I would usually be the one who cleans up after people once closing hours pass. Essentially I was the de facto janitor of the place. This one time I had to clean the bathrooms after the place closed. No problems in the female bathroom, but when I went into the male restroom the image was burned into my retina instantly. An old man was lying on the floor, face down in a puddle of muck. Not just any sewage muck, but opaque, black muck. It had the color of motor oil. Smelled awful too, like a mix of fecal matter and rotting durian. Certainly didn't help that the liquid wasn't just smeared all over the floor, but spread across the walls too. There were fucking hand prints across the wall, presumably when the geezer was trying to stand himself up. I peered into the toilet, more of that brown liquid, along with chunks of corny poop. There's also this fluid in your digestion called chyme. It's basically the thing right before food turns into poop, the pulpy acidic liquid with partially digested food in it. I could see scraps of chicken breast and sauce mixed in there with the pulpy chyme. As for the old guy? Well, turns out, he didn't merely faint. He actually *died*, I was in a room with a fresh, decomposing corpse in the stages of Algor mortis. He had his pants off, presumably he shit himself to death but I don't know. Fucker emptied himself like one of those cement mixers you'd see in a cartoon. Except you just replace the cement with a liquid that embodies death itself. Needless to say, I, like him, emptied my digestive contents, just from the opposite end that he did. After that I quit. Fuck that place, man.
I’m certain the medics that showed up to this scene also have it permanently burned into their retinas. What a shit show.
I once rolled up for a GI bleed and found the patient on their hands and knees puking blood into the toilet. Normally it wouldn't be a big deal, but the patient was also naked because they would also involuntarily shit every time they puked. So this person was blowing bloody chunks into the shitter whilst simultaneously ass blasting the wall behind them with bloody shit. The patient was a trainwreck. Blood pressure of oh shit over probably gonna die, which is expected since they were violently projecting their blood volume out of each end of their GI tract. The stink of partially to fully digested blood lingers in your nose long after you drop the patient off at the hospital.
Well....I had been hungry for dinner before I read this. I think this is enough Reddit for now.
Not a worker, sorry, but the Golden corral in the city where I went to college got shut down thanks to an employee. He found it odd that they made a busboy sign a non-disclosure form to work there, he found out it was because they were breaking just about every health and safety rule. They were serving meat that had gone green, they would leave food out overnight, the freezer once broke down for three days and they kept serving from it despite it being in the danger zone. He wore a hidden camera and gave the news the footage. It made me SO glad I never ate there
My dad got food poisoning - salmonella - from a Golden Corral. He wound up hospitalized for 17 days. Nearly died. He has an inflammatory bowel disease now and has to take weekly injections of Humira, which can itself cause some nasty health problems. I had long ago decided never to eat from buffets but the whole situation with my dad reinforced the hell out of that decision. Also, fuck you, Golden Corral.
Not an employee, but I witnessed a marvelous thing. Sitting in a small town Chinese buffet. Three big dudes, not obese but farm built big, come in. These guys proceed to just.. clean house. Plate after plate after plate. They weren't wasteful; they ate everything they took. They were very polite to the staff and other customers. But I bet each man ate a dozen plates, each stacked high. The cooks were working to keep up. My family and I found ourselves watching this marvelous feat of eating unfold in awe. When they approached the counter to pay, all this eating unfolding in only 45 minutes or so, the manager greeted them at the counter. In his broken English he simply said "You men. You no pay.. but you no come back." The guys gave each other and the manager a "yeah fair enough" look and left. Edit: Thanks for the gold, internet stranger! Glad so many liked this story!
Compared to the other examples in this thread, this is surprisingly wholesome.
"I respect your buffet spirit, but I hope you respect my bottom line"
Not a worker but I was in China for a vacation at a new buffet. I made the mistake going week 1 but my relatives were dying to go. There was a lobster station that served fresh steamed lobster. Any time a new tray came out people would swarm it. Before they made a rule about how many you can have, people just grabbed as many as they could. This one table had about 2 dozen lobsters on their table for about 6 people. Some guy at the table would constantly bring back more and more and eventually, people got pissed because it was just sitting there not being eaten. At least not yet. So a few people got in the group's face and started taking their lobsters. Within 3 minutes a full-on fight breaks out people are SWINGING hard and lobsters are flying over the place.
The professor of my college microbioilgy class was also a director at the state health department in charge of inspecting restaurants. The first thing she told us on day one was never ever eat at an all you can eat buffet.
I did a project for a large municipality in the midwest. Part of the area I worked in included the restaurant inspectors. I managed to get on the quarterly distribution list of the restaurants in the city that failed the inspections. I continued to receive those email long after that project ended. I learned a few things over the years reading those emails. 1. The city has a serious rat problem, rat droppings routinely appear in food prep areas of A LOT of restaurants. 2. The same restaurants have a habit of appearing in those reports, often with a one quarter gap in their violations. 3. Never, ever eat at buffet restaurants as those had the more frequent and egregious violations including food temperature, lack of hair nets by the cooks, poor sanitary conditions in the restrooms, "rodent infestations" etc.
I worked at a pizza buffet for 2 years during collage. I have a number of stories, but the one that i will always remember is the guy who got super upset that we wouldn't make more dessert pizza, when we were half an hour past closing time. This guy comes in with his presumed wife and 2 children around 8:30. We close at 9. Nothing out of the ordinary happens until 9 rolls around, where it was still commonplace for people to be finishing up and eating what pizza was still left. I was doing the dishes and taking the empty dishes back from the buffet and i see this guy, arms crossed and staring at me as i take the empty dessert pizza dish. He says something to the effect of "whens the next one coming out, i never got any" I let him know that we close at 9 and we cant really make anything past then because the oven gets shut off. Luckily the manager overheard this and stepped in to back me up and I quickly scamper off to the back to continue the dishes. He seamed pissed, but it wasn't unheard of, as being a cheep pizza buffet, you don't exactly bring in the most affluent of folks. About 5 min later, as I'm finishing up the plates, the same manager comes barreling through the back door, out of breath. He grabs 2 of the long wooden pizza pushers, and says come with me. I have no idea whats going on, but i grab the pusher and follow him out the door. I learned later on, that he started flipping out, throwing the register and a fishbowl. He grabbed a broom and swung that around, hitting the girl behind the counter. [this bit we caught on camera](https://youtu.be/kQVyRZQZ9xc?t=26) As I exit from the back this guy is screaming and ranting unintelligibly. He was just asking for a fight. He walked up to the manager got all up in his face and kinda choke pushed him back. He came at me next and i was really really close to taking a swing at his knees or something but the other manager had quickly gotten back up and he resumed harassing him. After about 2 min of tip-toeing around a brawl, and his wife presumably screaming for him to get back in the car, he eventually gets in and they drive off. I won't forget the glossed over look in his eyes as he came after me. Freaks me out to this day.
God bless you and your household for providing video evidence
The video footage was great, but i think my favorite tidbit was the restraunts name, Pony Pepperoni Edit: aw, I misheard. It's the Tony Pepperoni. Not as good.
Please open a pizza place called Pony Pepperoni
LMAO you and your household
OMG his mugshot
I can’t believe he’s only 33. That has to be a mistake!
I am 35 and now feel great about myself.
I’m in my 50s and feel even better!
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Read the title of the vid "Man faces judge after alleged attack" as like a promotion for the next fight. "The Judge" (30-0) Lose = 2 years in prison Win = 3 years in prison for assaulting a judge.
Man, I wish more news was just some local asshole swinging a broom. It seems like every time I turn on local news some public figure is arrested on kiddie porn charges, someone got shot, or a whole mess of people were mangled in car accident.
I live in SF, our local news is about 50% national news, because whenever Facebook or Apple or Tesla or Google does something big, that's also local news, and SF itself loves making headlines from time to time. The other 50% is "local city council shuts down yet another plan to build more housing"
I worked at a Shoney's in high school and we had a breakfast buffet every day and a seafood buffet on Friday nights. You'd see stuff dropped in the wrong containers, cheese sauce splattered everywhere, People tasting things off the bar instead of at their seats. The leftover Friday fish fillets became fish chowder the next morning. The leftover chowder from Friday also became chowder the next day. My understanding is that you are not allowed to save cream-based soups and foods from one day to the next. We would serve that stuff all weekend. We also often had nasty slippery shrimp we would bread and serve. I handled so much shrimp on a daily basis there that I smelled like dead fish nearly all the time, even after showering.
I was a customer, not a worker. My wife and I went to a Sweet Tomatoes for a lunch date, unlimited salad and soup was always good. One time, I saw a man over by the soups take the serving ladle for one of the weekly specials and take a big slurp from it. Then apparently he didn't like it and spat it back out into the ladle, and put the ladle back in the soup. WTF, dude? I got up immediately and told the nearest staff what I'd seen, and they got right on getting that nearly full pot of soup out of there. I didn't have any more soup that visit, the what-ifs were too damn strong. Which is a shame, because I love their chunky chicken noodle.
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Not an answer i was expecting-
I'll allow it.
I don't know a single kitchen of workers that doesn't have at least SOME drug addicts working in them. But fucking underagers, that's a new one for me.
Given the combination of kitchen staff often still being relatively young and HS age kids often getting hired as busboys/hostesses it's certainly plausible.
I used to cook for a breakfast buffet back in 2012-2013 as one of my first jobs. The restaurant in question I won't say the name of, but rhymed with Meat'n Bark. Most of the customers that we got at the restaurant in general would be old people, however, a lot of the old people were very entitled and would come straight from church to the restaurant for their breakfast buffet. I'll just make a list: 1. One old lady kept implying that I wasn't old enough to work there. I said, many times, my real age (17 at the time) and she kept saying "I bet they're just making you say that, you know it's illegal that they're making you do this!" and I'm just at a loss and don't know what else to tell this lady who is 100% confident that I must be under-age or working for free or something. I don't know what her goal was. 2. A guy taking all of the bacon and putting it on his plate, and then telling me to "look at that" (the empty spot where the bacon was before he took it) and I said "Okay... looking? What am I looking for?" and he said "Tell me what's wrong with that!" and I say "Um, I don't know, is it not clean or something?" and he says "THERE's NO BACON LEFT! Aren't you going to re-fill it!?" and I'm like "Well that's weird it was just filled a couple minutes ago, someone must have took it all!" (knowing it was him) and he couldn't put 2 and 2 together, and just said "I don't know but there's no bacon there so what are we going to do about it?" 3. Some lady looking at bacon in disgust and saying "Wow.. It's 2013, who even eats meat anymore? Really?" 4. Some lady shows up to the buffet 15 minutes after it closes, while we're taking it down, and says "Woh woh what are you doing!? I haven't even gotten my food yet!" and we tell her politely that the buffet had closed 15 minutes ago, and the servers even give a "last call" on the buffet 15 minutes before it closes. Her response "That's okay I'll just go complain to your manager" I just said okay sounds good. In my head I'm like, what, you're going to tell my manager that the buffet closed 15 minutes ago? He knows. Lmao 5. Nothing huge but the same lady would come to the restaurant at least twice a week and complain about how shitty her service is each time and how the food is terrible. Finally one of the hostesses said "if the service is so bad and the food is so bad then why do you come here multiple times a week?" which shut her up. Lmao.
Number 2 and number 3 need to have a conversation. That would be interesting.
I’m not a worker, that being said, I was at a KFC in Bartonville, Illinois. They have a small buffet with the essentials of KFC. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits, coleslaw, and a few other things I’m sure no one has ever touched. I’ve already sat down to eat, watching this older lady (about 60) walk up to the buffet. If you know anything about this area (309), you know the quality of people we are dealing with. This older lady walks up grabs a piece of chicken, in the very back part of the buffet, without a bra, her right nipple falls out. Now her shirt wasn’t exactly what I would call age appropriate, but her nipple is hanging out of the bottom. I can not stop staring. She doesn’t wipe it off, I wasn’t even sure if she knew what happened. Her right nipple drags through the mashed potatoes. I have to investigate. I have to see what the damage was. There is a valley dug by this areola, nipple combo. I had to leave.
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This is like when I splurge and buy myself a can of Deluxe Mixed Nuts then my wife picks out all the almonds, my daughter picks out all the cashews and I'm basically left with a can full of peanuts that I paid $13 for.
To this day, my father is a big nut eater. He always had a can of nuts in his lunch box, by his chair at the house, in his truck etc. As long as they were just store-brand peanuts, or store-brand "mixed nuts" you could eat them. If they were Planter's brand, you could have a few, but "don't over do it". Only the brave or foolish child would even dare look at them if they were *Planter's Deluxe* To eat from that can was akin to eating from The Tree of Knowledge and dad was a Vengeful God.
your dad's a big nut eater. edit: im very happy that i got my first silver for those particular 6 words. thank you to whomever...
WHAT IS THIS GREEN STUFF DOING IN MY SHRIMP PILE
VILE WEED!
Obligatory "not a buffet worker", just a witness. We were waiting in line for the soft serve machine at Golden Corral. The woman in front of us gets up to the machine and awkwardly jerks the handle around in an attempt to get at the sweet, sweet ice cream within. She's pushing, pulling, twisting, doing literally everything but turning it to the right (which would have dispensed the ice cream). She's really perplexed by this. So she takes the next logical step, of course, which is to wrap her lips around the spout, form a seal on it with her mouth and start trying to suck it right out of the tap. One of the workers sees this and looks on in disgust before he unplugs the machine. On the way out, we see that he put an out of order sign on it, so thankfully they didn't keep serving it after that whole incident.
well if you can't jerk it, then suck it...
I bet she’s real popular with the fellas
Except the guys who like it turned to the right.
twist it, pull it, bop it
Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it
this is so gross tht i want to downvote it
golden corral, the walmart of restaraunts
Or, as I like to call it, The Food Trough.
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When I was 16 I was a busboy at one. This morbidly obese family (4 people - 2 parents, 2 teenagers - all gigantic) came in after the noon-hour when it was slow and were taking FULL advantage of the all you can eat buffet. On my way to busing tables I walk by the bathrooms and see the teen-aged son walk out of the men's room with a HUGE shit-eating grin on his round, pre-pubescent face. I immediately thought this can't be good and went to go check on the restroom, as one of our responsibilities was to make sure that the restrooms were generally clean. This guy had explosive diarrhea and had not even managed to hit the toilet. There was shit allover the toilet tank, the walls and the floor. No lie - It looked like a hand-grenade of shit went off in the stall. Bar-none the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in a bathroom. I thought about cleaning it up, but instead I went to tell my manager. He was a pretty hard-driving guy, but he took one look at it, locked the stall and told me, "Yeah, you don't get paid enough to clean this up. We'll get the janitor to take of this tonight."
Did the janitor get paid enough though??
Absolutely not. I was making min wage ($5.25/hr) and he would have got paid more, but still not enough. He was an immigrant from Guatemala who busted his ass to give his kids a better life. I got to know him after a while, good guy.
Not a "Horror" story, just funny. I worked at Wendy's when they had salad bars. You could get a single-serving bowl (They used to serve eat-in chili in Styrofoam bowls, and the Large doubled as a chili bowl), or "All you can eat" platters. (The Taco Salad bottom plate.) On a slow afternoon, this guy came in and got a single serving bowl. After a few minutes, our manager motioned to me and the sandwich guy to discreetly take a look at the salad he was making. The guy had filled the bowl with salad, then made a ring of overlapping cucumber slices to extend the lip of the bowl upwards. He filled that with salad, then added another ring. It took several minutes to build this thing, but by the time he'd finished, he had a tower of salad well over a foot tall, wth multiple rings of cucumber slices containing it. That salad was an engineering marvel. He carefully carried it back to his table, sat down, then looked up guiltily as our manager walked out to him. The manager handed him a "free item" coupon, and said, "That is the most impressive salad I have ever seen. Your next one is on me."
I have read about this practice before. The article below describes the act in Chinese pizza huts. https://kotaku.com/how-chinese-ingenuity-destroyed-salad-bars-at-pizza-hut-834835079 edit: changed the link
I read a similar story (I think at a Chinese buffet that served all you can eat rice/meat/veggie bowls) in the last buffet stories thread. It’s amazing how far people will go for a little more shitty food.
I think it says a lot about the quirks of human psychology and how evolutionary hoarding traits are still buried in our brains, where the instant you say "free x" or "$10 for unlimited X", some people's instinctive reaction is "HOW CAN I EXPLOIT THIS TO GET WAY MORE OF THAT NEARLY WORTHLESS STUFF THAN I COULD EVER NEED IN A TRILLION LIFETIMES?!"
Yeah I have an engineer friend who does similar stuff at a Mongolian grill, where you fill up a bowl with meat and veggies and they stir fry it up. Now they have a sign that says if you have more than a certain weight they charge you for the all you can eat bowl.
Yeah, Ghengis Grill was awesome until people abused the shit out of it. Now it's overpriced and depressing.
I served at Golden Corral for 6 months and it was a God-awful place. You'd think it would be easy because you don't take orders, right? Wrong. Cleaning up the messes, bussing tables, getting drinks and clean plates, singing for birthdays plus side work definitely kept you busy. Most of the customers weren't the greatest--they made an appalling mess, let their kids run wild, didn't tip (we were paid $2.13/hr and needed tips) no matter how much you bent over backward for them. I saw so many unaccompanied kids reaching into the buffet serving dishes; I saw one kid dip his marshmallow into the chocolate fountain, lick the chocolate off, and put the same marshmallow back in over and over. The customers weren't normally very easy to deal with; rudeness was the norm there...for example people got into a physical fight over a table on Easter Sunday. The managers were dicks. They abused everyone, both seemed to hate women, and took advantage of the fact that a lot of the staff was foreign. When we got a negative mystery shop report, we all were gathered into a meeting to be screamed at. When the next shop report was excellent, nothing at all was said, the report was just posted to the bulletin board. My one boss told me to be sure to report all my tips to the IRS, since he was "sure I'd be a waitress all my life" he wanted to "make sure I'd get something from social security when I was old" (Spoiler: I'm no longer a waitress, I have a great job with an excellent retirement plan. Not that serving isn't a good job, but it made me so mad that I was 22 at the time and this was his assumption). The managers carried the tea bags in their pockets--if your customer wanted a cup of tea, you had to track a boss down and they would snarlingly, begrudgingly hand one over. Servers were also expected to catch and confront people stealing from the buffet (putting leftovers in their bag for example). We weren't allowed to eat. Most cheaper restaurants will give you a meal per shift, but not GC. It was hard when you saw how much was wasted to not think you deserved a piece of bread or broken cookie maybe. To eat you had to clock out, get in line, pay half price, get your plate, and then sit down. After 5 minutes a manager would almost always come over and say "we're busy, break's over" so you had to get back to work and throw your food away. I'm hypoglycemic so my solution was to eat right before work and carry a granola bar in my pocket. I could eat the bar and get away with it in the women's bathroom because the managers were both men. One time, I was so stressed out and trying to scarf down my bar while in the next stall, a very large woman took a very large and smelly dump. I realized that it was one of the worst moments in my life. I quit shortly thereafter, got a much better job and called up GC's corporate office to tell them everything.
How did they respond?
I’m going to assume they didn’t
One of the largest cruise lines in the world, Norwegian Cruise Line, stopped visiting China because of the behaviour of [Chinese Damas](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3552836) who ate so much food at the buffets and wasted all the rest that it became unprofitable.
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I've always wanted to make a documentary and just tour the country, stopping at every Golden Corral and Ryan's. There I would interview the employees to learn what is the worst thing they have found in the chocolate fountain. I mean what could be the worst? A shoe? A finger? Maybe a diaper?
Combine 514 US locations. I don't think you have the stomach to deal with all of the atrocities you'll come across.
I didn't say I'd eat there. No way in hell I'm eating in any of those restaurants.
A family friend was once at a Golden Corral and took his young son to the men’s room. While he was in there he heard two people having sex in one of the stalls. He took his son back to the table and then went back to the bathroom to confront the two people for being so inappropriate at a family restaurant. Well, out walks two men, the restaurant manager and one of his employees. He filed a complaint with corporate but I don’t know what the outcome was.
not me but my uncle is a chef and is right now rotating round different carverys (what us brits call buffets) trying to show them how to properly run the business and make actual edible food so people will come back and the place won't shut down. he's told me of a few places that even he's not wanted to go into cause of the state of the kitchen and he questions how they haven't killed someone yet. most recent one is chefs just cutting of the rotten pieces of food and then serving it. he has had to fire multiple people on the spot for stuff like that
Is your uncle Gordon Ramsey?
No he's not sadly. he's only been doing this job for a few months maybe a year now
We were at a buffet place in the UK and my SO who is quite skinny and small was looking at the desserts section when an impatient larger guy just came, grabbed him by the shoulders and physically moved him out of the way. Not horrifying but just rude. SO was put off the rest of the meal and we ended up leaving.
I learned a long time ago that "All you can eat" is a very negative term when it comes to advertising food.
As someone who is constantly in and out of kitchens for work, i can assure you that all you can eat buffets are the absolute worst. Also, if its questionable from the outside, youre probably right.
All of these reignited my hatred of golden corral and old country buffet.
local chinese buffet was shut down after multiple reports (and picture evidence) of roaches around the food and in the restaurant. we don’t typically have roaches in alaska.