That’s Not Part Of His Job Description
“My worst experience was when I was going to eat lunch with my boss and I had to serve him. I worked heat and air (HVAC) for my high school shop teacher. This man weighed approximately 700 pounds. His weight wouldn’t normally matter, but for this story it pertains. This dude could put away some food and as a high school student, I could rarely afford luncheons with the boss. I actually enjoyed the buffets as they were in my price range, but after I worked all morning and afternoon for this man, I didn’t appreciate his bossy attitude during lunch. He would have four plates in front of him, and then in the middle of face-stuffing, he would order me to refill his sweet and sour sauce, and other appetizers.
I understood that I worked for him, he signed my checks, and I understood that. But as an HVAC apprentice, my duties did not include getting him refills of rice and pudding, does it?”
“A Display Of True Gluttony”
“I call it the ‘All U Can Eat Chinese Choke N Puke.’ We had a pretty decent one here and we were regular visitors, so much we had become friends with the owners. They would even make stuff for us that’s not on the menu– real, authentic Chinese food. On any given night you would see the 400 pounders going in to graze, but this one day was different. It was like a wave of flab leading to a crescendo of huge. We’d never seen such an ocean of cellulite and fat like that in there before. This crowd made us look anorexic, and I weigh 210lbs.
And then IT staggered into the place. The guy was monstrous, being over 6 foot tall and about 6 foot wide. He had to sit on two chairs and still had overhang dripping down the sides. I named him ‘They’ because he was like an entire collective. His little entourage was with him and they sauntered up to the buffet and took their production line positions. They were bringing him two plates each. The look of sheer piggish joy on this fat mutant’s face was disturbing by itself, but seeing this clown eat was simply disgusting. I can eat and the friend I was with is an eating machine with the metabolism of a hummingbird. In the time it took each of us to finish two plates, Pizza the Hut wiped out six, and then he killed another six, with each one piled high, and he was just slamming it into his gaping pie hole. Then he had four plates of desserts. He had food stuck to his face, all over the circus tent of a shirt he was wearing, and all over the floor. He even fascinated the 400lbs regulars. I don’t know…maybe they were jealous because they couldn’t eat as much as he could.
Thankfully we never saw him at the restaurant again. That was a display of true gluttony in motion which put me off Chinese for the rest of the summer.”
He Was The Heavy Weight Champion For A Reason
“When I was about 13 years old, my wrestling team and I had been undefeated for a month straight at this point. Here in the midwest, wrestling is taken pretty seriously and so we were quite happy about our success as a team so far.
As a tradition, each week we would go undefeated, we would go to an all-you-can-eat buffet in town and stuff our faces. We thought this was appropriate because we otherwise had to maintain our weight to ensure we could make our weight-class at meets.
One instance, we had a good amount of us come together for this amazing meal. One of the more notable eaters on our team was, as you might imagine, our heavy-weight wrestler. He was more overweight than large in stature, but he was actually a fairly nimble wrestler. His name was Randy and he was a great guy.
This instance we had some non-wrestlers tag along and things got a little wilder than usual…at some point, we all were just impressed with how much Randy could eat that someone thought it would be great to throw up an eating challenge for him.
Someone went off to the dessert section, grabbed a full-sized plate for some ultimate challenge. When they came back, we saw a full-sized plate covered in a 5-inch tall soft-served ice cream cylinder and a few Rice Krispies stacked on top.
Now, finishing that food was not the challenge, though it would be somewhat impressive after Randy downed three full steaks. Instead, we wanted to time how quickly he could eat all this dessert food.
Randy was eager to please and grabbed the plate and asked someone to time him. He started to down this enormous plate of sugary treats as we were all staring at the stopwatch. Within only three minutes, Randy had consumed everything, a large grin spanned across his face with his momentary victory.
So yeah, when I saw Randy eat that large plate of ice cream and rice krispies within a few minutes after he ate a large dinner was probably the grossest thing I’ve seen at an all-you-can-eat-buffet, but it was a great memory from that wrestling season.”
“All You Can Eat” Would Be A Competition To Them
“Most of the people who would come to this restaurant would be morbidly obese and they’d eat obscene amounts of food. We were at a Chinese buffet one day and when we were seated at the table next to us had two 300+ lbs. women who had mastered the art of stacking food on the plate. I normally wouldn’t even pay attention to others but their plates were amazing. These were standard 8-inch plates and the food was piled on about 3 inches high.
Now, normally when someone would hear ‘3 inches high’ they would think of some sort of standard pile that is three inches in the middle and tapered down toward the edge, like a little hill of food. No. Their food was 3 inches high at the edge of the plate and tapered in maybe a half inch at the top of the pile, which was flat.
Our kids were toddlers at the time, so between us eating and feeding the kids we were probably there for 40 minutes. During that time, they cleaned off the plates that they had when we came in and had gone back twice, getting the same amount of food each time. Between the carbs and grease, there were easily 2500–3000 calories on each plate.
But that wasn’t as ‘disgusting’ as it was ‘impressive.’
‘Disgusting’ was an incident I saw at a little pizza buffet where I used to eat lunch now and again. They had the standard array of pizzas, and they also had dessert pizzas that had chocolate chips and sugar glaze drizzled over them. It was a serious sugar overload, but they tasted good.
I was there one day and an obese family came in, including a young boy who was probably 4 or 5 based on his height and the way he acted. He was morbidly obese. When they walked in, he went straight for the dessert pizza. When the mother said he should eat something else first, he started on a tantrum, so she quickly let him get that, but limited him to four of them, and told him he’d have to eat other pizza as well. Those four were probably 1,000 calories altogether. That family nearly cleaned the place out.”
They Weren’t Going Down Without A Fight
“In the early 80s, I quit one college and before I transferred to another, I tended bar at a supper club in east-central Wisconsin. Without bias, I have to assert this place had phenomenal food, its fried chicken in particular. It was amazing, I can’t describe it other than to say it was unlike other fried chicken and it was delicious. The recipe was developed at the club and passed from owner to owner. There was a rule that the written recipe could not be duplicated; two cooks were found with photocopies and were fired on the spot.
Jump to one Sunday, we had the weekly buffet running from brunch through dinner and I was tending bar with the manager. Later in the afternoon, we had a large family arrive. They appeared to be from the depths of the lower economic strata, but that didn’t bother me because I was too, and the buffet was very affordable for an all-you-can-eat affair. All of the family, including the little ones, went through the line at least twice. Some of the larger ones (some quite large, actually) went through three and four times for plate fillers. During the meal, one of the hostesses presented them with their bill according to the number of persons in their party. When they’d finished, the matron of the group came to the cash register at the bar and declared that they were NOT going to pay their bill as the food was inedible. My manager told her that if they tried to leave we’d have the sheriff’s department on the phone before they hit the door.
She then immediately ran into the kitchen and grabbed the owner, a Lithuanian immigrant who was a friend of our family. He was tall, thin and laconic, spoke slowly with a pronounced accent and had a blistering sense of humor. He heard the group clamoring on about how the food was terrible, that they were all feeling sick and were not going to pay. The hostess confirmed that they’d all been through the line multiple times. The owner just looked at the group and said normal people can tell the food is bad on the first plate, why did they have to go back to make sure? Then he told them to pay up.
I never saw that group come back in the time I worked there. There was no food flying or wasted per se; their dining area was a disaster with food scraps all over, a mess on the floor, that sort of thing, but the most disgusting part of this for me was their utter gall in assuming that we’d bow down to their complaint and allow them to defraud the restaurant. Sometimes people are the worst people.”
These Customers Left Quite The Surprise
“I worked at Old Country Buffet for two years during my last year of high school and my first year of college. I saw a lot of very large people come through, like people who sat on a chair and overflowed over the sides of the seat. There were also a lot of families with kids who were messy eaters. But one day, I was helping out busing tables one evening and had a group of four young people who were probably in their early 20s who wouldn’t let us take any of their dishes. So by the time they left, there were easily 20 or more plates on their table, plus silverware, cups, bowls, etc.
When they left, they were laughing and said over their shoulders, ‘Have fun!’ and I just figured they were poking fun at how we had to work and clean up people’s dirty plates and they didn’t….until I went to bus their table. They had shoved all the dishes to the inside (it was a booth), and as I started pulling stacks of dishes out, I noticed a giant puddle/pile of not-so-hot fudge.
Yup, they spilled an entire cup of fudge on the table and didn’t make any effort to clean it up. Instead, they hid it. And they didn’t even leave us a tip.”
She Was Back To Business In No Time
“All-you-can-eat buffets were my absolute favorite dinner outing when I was a child. I would pile my plate with fried crab rangoon, sugary rolls and make frequent stops to sneak in a dessert each time I went back up. All the dinner rules went out the window when we got to the buffet. As I was digging into something most likely sugary, I heard a woman screaming across the table from my family. I looked over and her husband’s face was bright red as he was squealed for air. He was choking. His wife was screaming for help and shouting for someone to call 911. The man’s face started to take on a bluish color. Luckily there happened to be a nurse that was dining at the restaurant and quickly came over to assist. She swung her arms around his abdomen and performed the Heimlich maneuver. Within less than a minute, the man was able to cough up his food and was coming to. His wife was weeping in relief as her husband’s face began regaining pigment.
The restaurant patrons started clapping, celebrating the victory of each breath the man was able to take. The waitress also came over to check in as the nurse asked the man some basic questions. The waitress saw that he was speaking and slipped the check on the table as she passed through. It was only a few minutes after the man regained consciousness, but the check made its way to the table almost immediately. My parents were appalled as we just had front row seats to a very traumatic scene of a man hanging on to his life. It was unbelievable that the staff was waiting for him to breathe so they could promptly deliver the check for their meals like it was the last box they needed to check for their service.
Everybody was disgusted at how swiftly the waitress brought the bill after the man suffered a near-death experience. Needless to say, the bill ended up being comped by the restaurant.”
They Weren’t The Only Ones Enjoying The Food
“My family and I were visiting Montreux for one of the first times before we moved over here. I couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9 years old at the time. We were walking along the promenade near the lake, and we all started to feel a little hungry. We came across this little restaurant called Paradise, which has now been replaced by a much newer, swankier restaurant. Paradise was one of those buffets that had everything. It wasn’t all you can eat, you had to weigh your food, but it has everything you could possibly want to eat, and they specialized in Lebanese food. Anyways, we got our food, sat down and began to tuck in. Just as we were finishing up, we all heard a sharp squawking noise. There were birds in the restaurant flying around pecking at the food! I’d never seen anything like it in my life. And the worst part? No one seemed to care. No one was doing anything about it. They were even going for the ice cream!
Anyways, I can safely say that was the first and last time we ever went out to Paradise. In fact, it’s put my family off buffet style restaurants ever since.”
Way To Ruin The Crab Legs For Everyone
“I was eating at a nice Japanese buffet which had a good variety of not only seafood but also other foodstuffs. It was rather expensive to get in, but there were no elementary-school children and the area was populated by local businessmen. So it was not the place you’d expect bad behavior. The restaurant prided itself on getting the top score in each and every health inspection. They held a ’99/100′ as a shameful score.
While getting some cucumbers, I noticed a businessman as he picked up a crab leg…licked it…then put it back. Then, apparently looking for the same leg, he searched through the pile, found a different one, broke it halfway open, then put it back when it didn’t break fully. Then he found another one; this time, it broke fully, and he took one bite before putting it back. At this time, the chef had come back to refill some dish or another and caught him red-handed.
Security escorted him out of the restaurant with no refund.”
There’s No Point In Wasting The Food
“I went to a monthly staff meeting at one of those all-you-can-eat places. A little girl stuck her hand in her pants and fiercely scratched her butt, first with one hand, then the other. She then went to the ice cream toppings area at the dessert bar and stuck both of her hands in the gummies and lifted them up with cupped hands and watched them fall. She did this over and over again until her mother went up to her and led her to the ice cream. The little girl did not want gummies on her ice cream and told her mother they were nasty. I reported this to the wait staff and they scrapped off a few gummies, put them in a bowl and said they were fine.
Five minutes later, they took the bowl and dumped the same gummies back on top.”
They Were Getting Their Money’s Worth, And Then Some
“There were two elderly ladies sitting at a next table, they were enjoying the all you can eat ethnic buffet. But they seemed to eat their food unusually fast because they got refills every ten minutes. That made me curious. So I kept an eye on them. They went to the buffet table to fill up their plates quite high. After they returned to their table, they ate two spoonfuls. Then they would casually look around the dining area. The next thing I noticed, they were using their spoons to shovel the remaining food on their plates into their opened purses sitting on their laps. Well they got caught by one of the servers and were forced to leave after paying. I thought about how gross that would be to eat food from a soiled purse.
I found out later that those ladies had plastic bags lining the inside of their purses.”
Something Just Wasn’t Right
“It was more pathetic than disgusting, but it apparently happens. We were having lunch at an Nepalese-Indian buffet one day. We ate there often because the food is really stellar. Everything is super-fresh and really well prepared, and the place is scrupulously clean. We noticed this group of young women come in, six of them, all 30-somethings. Five of them went up to the buffet line, but one hung back by the table, she looked like she was afraid to even sit down. I watched as someone brought her a plate of nothing but basmati rice and salad greens. Even then she only picked and obviously couldn’t wait to get out the front door. I couldn’t figure out what the score was until I overheard two of the waiters talking. Evidently, her religion prevented her from eating ethnic food in an Indian establishment. I guess she thought she would instantly turn into a Buddhist and would therefore be condemned for all eternity.
Evidently, it wasn’t against her religion to be rude to the Nepalese couple who own the place by insulting their food, and who, incidentally, aren’t even Buddhists.”