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Buffet Workers Share The Most Disturbing Things They’ve Ever Seen Customers Do

Photo: Shutterstock.com

Buffets always seem like a great idea at the time- so much food for so little money. And then you eat way too much and wonder what you’re doing with your life. And if that weren’t enough, the way some people behave at a buffet may just make you reconsider coming back for that reason alone. The people who work at buffets certainly have their fair share of weird, wacky, and even charming stories about customers…

Imagine having to deal with people who take all the food from the buffet, make massive messes on the floor, and even do weird things like dunk their fingers in the soup. And those are just a few of the many issues that buffet workers have to deal with on the daily. These servers didn’t hesitate to dish on the craziest and most shocking things they’ve seen on the job…

It’s Not A Takeaway Buffet

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Biswarup Ganguly

I used to manage a KFC with a buffet. On Tuesdays, we had senior citizen discounts, so we would have livers and gizzards on the buffet. One day, we just couldn’t keep the gizzard pan full, which made no sense. There were only maybe six people in the dining room, so unless they were big-time gizzard eaters, one full pan should have lasted a while….

I had the buffet worker put a fresh pan out and then watched as a woman walked up and filled a plate with an overflowing pile of gizzards. As I kept watching, though, I saw her take the plate and dump all the gizzards in her purse. I went to her table to confront her and said that the all you can eat buffet does not allow for takeout. Reddit User: HotsauceMcGuyver

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Karma At The Chinese Restaurant 

Photo: creativecommons.org/Infrogmation

My biggest story was at an all you can eat Chinese place. A rather rotund customer arrived and wedged herself into a booth. She didn’t want to get up from the table, so she made the waiters bring her food. What ensued was utter karma for her being a rubbish person to the staff and acting like she owned the place.

When she was finished eating, she could not physically get up or get out of her booth due to her being so stuffed, large in general, and wedged in. I was told by her waiter that the look in her eyes when she had to ask for help deprecatingly was priceless. The manager eventually had to call the fire department to come to remove the table from the floor to get her out. Reddit User: [redacted]

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It Really Was All You Can Eat

Photo: creativecommons.org/Dani Lurie

Years ago, I was working as a server and busser at an all you can eat seafood buffet. One night, a guy and his wife came in and stayed for over 5 hours. The husband ate so much that the kitchen couldn’t keep up. He was taking the entire warming trays from the buffet table to his table. A whole tray at a time of fried shrimp.

When closing time eventually came, the guy wouldn’t leave. He just kept eating more and more. Twice he actually grabbed some of the plastic lobsters we used to decorate the buffet and tried to eat them. A few other employees and I actually had to physically remove him from the restaurant at that point. The guy ended up suing the restaurant owner for false advertising. RedditUser: kind2311

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Pickles And Ranch Please

Photo: creativecommons.org/Shane Becker

There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who clearly wasn’t all there in the head. 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. But the weirdest thing was his change in 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. By the time his weirdness devolved to aggression and we had to refuse service to 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 that the dressing and pickle juice would be running all over the tray. RedditUser: cawatxcamt

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Samples For Your Dog

Photo: Pxfuel

I used to work at Whole Foods, and a woman came in with her small dog and put it in the child part of her cart. She goes to the buffet section, and as she’s looking, she starts to take small bits with her hands and gives them to her dog to sample. She continues letting the dog lick her hand clean of various foods and puts her fingers back in to grab more from the open tray.

Then she decides what she wants to eat and goes to get a box to fill it, but the dog starts whining because she stopped feeding it, so she picks it up and straight up puts it on the counter to eat out of the tray like a bowl. It happened relatively quickly, and no staff saw it, but a customer came upfront and told us a woman had a dog too close to the food. Reddit User: vadermonkey

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Salad Engineering

Photo: Creative Commons/JeepersMedia

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. On a slow afternoon, this guy came in and got a single serving bowl. After a few minutes, our manager motioned to the sandwich guy and me to discreetly take a look at the salad he was making.

The guy had filled the bowl with salad, and then made a ring of overlapping cucumber slices to extend the lip of the bowl upwards. He filled that with salad, and then added another ring. It took several minutes to build this thing. That salad was an engineering marvel. The manager handed him a ‘free item’ coupon and said, “That’s the most impressive salad I’ve ever seen. Your next one’s on me.” Reddit User: Jef_Wheaton

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No Self-Control

Photo: Pxhere

We have this huge buffet with a separate dessert buffet that’s presented with fireworks and dry ice every weekend night. This one time, we had a hotel guest who kinda resembled Jabba the Hutt in size. She started with four eggs, munched down two plates of fries, ate three steaks, six pancakes, and downed seven Cokes with that.

She then proceeded to wait for the dessert to be set up. It usually starts at seven, and we use ‘do not cross’ tape as a fun prop for the kiddos. Once the fireworks and ice were removed, she went all in. This woman was taking full cakes to her table, dipping everything in our chocolate fountain, and literally pushing kids out of her way to get to some sweets first. Reddit User: fudgepunch

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A Little Bit Obsessed With Pizza

Photo: creativecommons.org/Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

At one point, I worked for a pizza place that used to have a day buffet I would make pizzas for. One time, two huge dudes came at 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. Each one takes an entire pizza again and walks 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. It was one heck of a day trying to keep up with their pizza eating. Reddit User: mysticbooka

Steer Clear Of The Chocolate Fountain 

Photo: creativecommons.org/BinaryApe

I worked at a buffet for about four years. The buffet I worked at had a chocolate fountain, and half of my time on the clock was spent trying to keep customers from sticking their fingers and other non-food items into the fountain. I distinctly remember one woman with a cast on her arm who came up and started to dip some strawberries into the fountain.

Next thing I know, she manages to stick most of her cast under the fountain so that the thing is basically coated with chocolate. Instead of trying to alert a staff member so the fountain could be closed down, she proceeded to walk back to her table and eat her dessert casually. I can’t even keep track of the number of times we had to close down the chocolate fountain to replace the chocolate. Reddit User: Cursedknightartorias

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Revenge Of The Unhappy Customer

Photo: Flickr/Sevananda Natural Foods Market

I was a cook for a grocery co-op. We had a breakfast and lunch buffet every day. We had one regular who would come in, take a bowl, and put in his breakfast food of potatoes, eggs, and biscuits, then covered it with a thin layer of grits. After a few days of watching him do this, I confronted him at the register and told the cashier to weigh his cup and charge him for it.

He wasn’t very stoked, but he realized he had been found out. The very next morning, he came in and made a B-line for the coffee, and he grabbed a box. I thought I had struck a nerve with him and he learned a lesson. He dumped his whole cup of coffee in the fresh-off-the-grill pan of scrambled eggs. Somehow he convinced the store manager that it was just an accident. Reddit User: [redacted]

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Working In The Mess Hall 

Photo: Flickr/Richard Sprague

I worked at a Christian campground during the summers in my teen years in the mess halls. We would get different groups ranging from 10 to over 1,500 people in size. So naturally, we would prepare food in accordance with the size of the groups. I watched a 350-pound fellow bring a big 5-gallon bucket into the buffet line.

 I thought nothing of it until I watched him pour an entire tray of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, all of the gravy, and rolls into this thing. I was actually frozen in time watching this happen. He was the last one to go through the line. The best part is he just walked back to his room with his Jim Baker Bucket as if it were just a normal Sunday. Reddit User: Kingjoker776

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All You Can Eat Pancakes

Photo: Creative Commons/garretkeogh

Every year right after Christmas, my work has all you can eat pancakes. Now normally people order it, get the first full stack, and barely take a bite out of the next round. But last year, I was working an overnight Saturday shift, and I had a group of 8 teenagers come in. They wanted to see how many they could eat. They made it to 100 pancakes.

One kid alone ate 23. They made me take a picture of them with all the plates stacked up. It became a local legend. Groups of teenagers kept coming in and trying to beat them. I think one group may have eaten 100 and a half. The cooks weren’t very happy about it, and I only made like $13 as my tip that night, but it was pretty fun to watch them scarf down the pancakes. RedditUser: SydtheKyd1016

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The Buffets In South Carolina  

Photo: creativecommons.org/mattbuck4950

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 in my memory is what happened whenever they had finished with what they were going to eat.

They would scrape their plates and use them again. But the thing was that they would scrape their plates onto the floor next to their chairs. So, next to each chair, there was a 6- to 18-inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of baked potatoes, etc. It was disgusting and so unnecessary. Talk about having bad table manners. Reddit User: which_spartacus

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Waiting For The Expensive Meat 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

So, I worked at a Brazilian churrascaria, which is one of those places where you sit at a table and servers come by with various roasted meats on a stick and then carve off portions for you. The genius of the churrascaria is the massive salad bar that you get before the meat comes along, which fills you up, so you don’t eat too much expensive meat.

But we had this one family (mom, dad, six kids) that had figured out ‘the system’ and would just sit at their table waiting for the meat. Everyone hated them because they would always ask for more portions than you were supposed to give at a single time. They particularly targeted the more expensive cuts like picanha and tenderloin and avoided the less expensive stuff like chicken. The managers had an ongoing war with them. Reddit User: hairybrains

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Violating The Sandwich Rules

Photo: creativecommons.org/Ron Dollete

Not technically a buffet, but I feel that he kind of violated the rules to make it a buffet. The local eccentric walked in. I can’t remember what sandwich he ordered, but the crucial part was that he wanted everything on it. Now maybe that’s not absurd, you think. Who doesn’t like a bevy of veggies on their sandwich for free, right?

Every cheese, all of 3 or 4 kinds of peppers, guac, salsa, and every single sauce: ranch, mayo, oil and vinegar, BBQ sauce; literally everything on display went into his sandwich. The guy proceeded to take it to his booth; he scooped out all the drippy innards in his hands and gobbled it all in his mouth. That was the worst thing I’d seen in the realm of an eatery. Reddit User: Artifex_Nox

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Eating All The Cream Puffs

Photo: Creative Commons/thehoneybunny

I noticed that the plump couple near us each obtained a heaping plate of cream puffs. I mean all of the puffs. Both 12″ plates neatly stacked as if to be served at an all you can eat buffet. Now, no normal person could eat all this, especially after an assumed three main courses, but these winners had a plan in mind.

They proceeded to suck the cream from each puff, discarding the carrier pastry on another plate, each crumpled and squeezed like old toothpaste. Of course, you would hide the evidence, right? Nope. Left their table looking like competitive eating took place. As an artful centerpiece, the once-neat stack was now a disgusting pile of cream-less puffs overflowing from a single plate. Reddit User: Onlypostwhenangry

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An Interesting Choice Of Drink  

Photo: creativecommons.org/jonolist

At a Chinese buffet a few months back, this big dude was at a booth with his mom. I look over and see him with his half-full glass of fountain pop, something orange, I think FANTA, and he proceeds to take the soy sauce bottle and start pouring it into the pop. And not just a drizzle, which would have been odd enough.

But he fills up the rest of that cup and stirs it up with his chopstick. What I thought may have just been a weird way to waste the restaurant’s resources before leaving turned out to be his next meal. He sat there and drank that whole thing. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw at a buffet in my life. Reddit User: SudoDarkKnight

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Buffets In The ’90s

Photo: Shutterstock.com

I worked at a Sunday buffet in high school in the late ’90s. It was $7 a person. We essentially charged customers, brought drinks, and then bussed the table. My favorite was the lady who would come in by herself, ask for four glasses of milk, and wave you down whenever she finished one for a refill. She would eat about five plates of our macaroni and cheese…. 

She would then go to the bathroom. After that, she’d come back and would sit and drink milk and eat macaroni for another hour or two, then leave a hand full of change for the tip. We all drew straws whenever she came in for who got to clean up the mess. From that point on, I would just drop a gallon of milk on her table every time she came in. Reddit User: PaperStreetSoap

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No Excuses At The Carving Station 

Photo: Flickr/Leigh Caldwell

I worked at an Old Country Buffet. They have a carving station, which I was never trained on. They threw me on a busy weekend night and just gave me a rough estimate of how thick the meat should be. They never gave me safety gloves to keep me from cutting myself. Just made me put on latex gloves and handed me these giant knives.

There’s a bunch of entitled old people waiting for their slices of meat, and I knick myself with one of the knives. I go to set the knives down to try and take care of the issue. I immediately start getting yelled at by the customers and my boss nearby for trying to leave the carving station. So I finish serving meat to these people with a bleeding finger. Reddit User: Toadstool_Daydreams

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Cutting The Customers Off

Photo: Creative Commons/howie221

My parents owned an all you can eat buffet, and I was there every day of my life from 4 to 14. My favorite horror story is when a couple came in. They loved the crab legs, and every time my mom put some out, they took them all. So they’re there for maybe two hours now. They’ve eaten through at least a week’s stock of crab legs, and my mom finally decides that’s enough.

She stops putting it out in the buffet and brings individual plates to the customers who want it but couldn’t get any. The couple is angry. I remember they literally flipped the chairs at their table, flipped their plates, bowls, cups, and completely trashed their area. Food was all over the floor, table, and chairs. Sticky soda was dripping into the carpet. They left in a hurry, but someone caught their license plate number. Reddit User: blooberries1

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When You Can’t Move Your Wheelchair 

Photo: creativecommons.org/jackcast2015

I worked at a casino buffet in the South. I worked at the steak station, so I served a lot of rare steaks. A giant woman in a wheelchair rolls up and picks her steak. I put it on the griddle for about 8 seconds on each side, and she asks for it on the plate. She goes to leave but has two plates on her lap and a plate in each hand…

So she couldn’t wheel herself back. She called for her mullet-sporting son to come wheel her back to the table. He was wearing a shirt with Dale Earnhardt’s number that said, “God needed a driver.” The south is something else. I’m so glad I no longer work there; working the buffet is one of the worst jobs you could ever have. Reddit User: [redacted] 

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Finding The Pizza Hut Loophole 

Photo: Wikipedia

I used to work at a Pizza Hut, which served buffet at lunch. We had a rule that employees could take from the buffet at the end of a shift. One time, we had a new guy join who my manager really disliked. The manager was notoriously horrible to everyone, and you could tell right away that she had it in for the new guy.

Anyway, the end of his four-hour shift comes during peak lunch, when every new pizza that comes out is immediately picked apart by the customers. The manager hands him a box and says, “Help yourself to the buffet, my dear.” He strolls up not to the buffet, but to the cutting table and slides two whole fresh pizzas into his box, then waltzes out. He didn’t come back in. Reddit User: Tangocon

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No Thanks For Saving A Life 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I was once the bartender at a hotel that had a ‘smorgasbord’ all you can eat buffet. A waitress ran into the bar and asked me to help her with a guest. When I ran into the dining room, an enormous lady was gasping and wheezing at her table for one. She must have been 300 pounds plus and was choking on some food.

I reached around from behind her, lifted her up, and performed a Heimlich maneuver on her. She heaved and spat out a huge chunk of half-chewed chicken right onto the carpet. She promptly sat down, took a few breaths, and went back to shoveling food into her mouth without so much as a “thank you.” I went back to the bar and watched her eat for another hour. She tipped the waitress a dollar. Reddit User: pizzaforce3

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Dine And Dash 

Photo: Pexels/VisionPic.net

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 quickly and sent someone after her, who found her in her car in the parking garage.

She was 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. I forgot to mention we also found out from her son that she stole one of the managers’ keycards, and she would regularly come into the hotel. Reddit User: Valkrine10

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Trying To Get Out Of Paying 

Photo: Creative Commons/Kristoffer M.C.

So I work in an ‘all you can eat’ using tablets. This is 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’s ready. We always warn customers beforehand about if they leave food behind.

If they order too much, they’ll have to pay extra. We’ve seen people try the weirdest stuff when it comes to not paying extra; people dumping food in their handbags, people shoving it in their mouths then going to the toilet to flush it, putting hair on it and blaming us for it. And when we actually catch them doing it, they blame us for it and refuse to pay. Reddit User: DemocraticDoge

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An Error In Translation

Photo: creativecommons.org/mike warren

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 it that 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 a mess. Reddit User: imk

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All The Chicken Nuggets Were Gone 

Photo: Creative Commons/magzalez

I was just a witness, but I saw how a woman came in with about five kids, and 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 emptied five pans that were full or almost full before she came. Five must be her number. Needless to say, people were annoyed, 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. Reddit User: roxan1930

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You’re Not Welcome Here Anymore 

Photo: Creative Commons/rocor

I was sitting in a small-town Chinese buffet. Three big dudes, not obese but farm-built big, come in. These guys proceed to just clean the house. They have 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 unfolded in only 45 minutes), the manager greeted them at the counter. In his broken English, he simply said, “You men. You no pay but you no come back.” Reddit User: chilibreez

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The Soup Fiasco 

Photo: Pxhere

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.

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 strong, which is a shame, because I love their chunky chicken noodle. Please don’t do this if you don’t like the soup; think about the rest of us. Reddit User: Saberus_Terras

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No Bacon At The Breakfast Buffet

Photo: Flickr/Steve Snodgrass

I used to cook for a breakfast buffet. 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. A guy was taking all of the bacon and putting it on his plate and then telling me to “look at that…”

I said, “Okay…looking? What am I looking for?” and he said, “Tell me what’s wrong with that!” and I said, “Um, I don’t know, is it not clean or something?” And he says, “There’s no bacon left! Aren’t you going to refill it!?” and I’m like, “Well that’s weird, it was just filled a couple minutes ago. Someone must have taken it all!” He couldn’t put two and two together. Reddit User: TrentonJ

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Messing With The Ice Cream Machine 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I was 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.

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. Reddit User: Leigh_Lemon

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Endless Supply Of Buffalo Wings

Photo: Creative Commons/MoHotta18

I used to work at Buffalo Wild Wings, and they would do a Monday night special of endless wings and fries for $15. I once served a dude who came in by himself and ate 75 wings over the course of about an hour. It helped that he asked for no fries with the order, but still, 75 whole wings. I wasn’t sure whether I should be impressed or not.

Also, every week, without fail, I’d get at least one table who would try to “split” the all you can eat. Like just order one order and feed several people with it. That’s not how any of this works. You have to wonder about some people and their intelligence. Our signs clearly state the amount per person. Read it next time. Reddit User: ddeevv

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Out Of House And Home 

Photo: Creative Commons/Erich Ferdinand

A friend and I walked into a buffet that serves pizza, fried chicken, and other Southern staples. This one huge lady was sitting at one of those large round tables by herself. The table was covered in empty plates: at least 5 or 6. He and I finished eating and started walking past the lady, who was at the buffet again.

That’s when she yells across the room to the manager standing by the door, “Where’s the freaking chicken?” We’re all kind of in shock that she would say that with families around, but he yells back, “You ate it all!” People started to burst out laughing as we exited. She most likely had eaten them out of house and home that day. Reddit User: galacticfish

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Cook Faster

Photo: Creative Commons/tö

While I was wasting years and thousands of dollars in an attempt to get a college education, I worked at a Chinese restaurant. The owners were awesome people and would feed us at the end of the shift. Anyway, they had a buffet on the weekends, and they had this one lady who had become one of their regulars there…. 

This lady could pack away the groceries. When she showed up, the Chinese servers would rush into the kitchen and yell, “She here! She here!” and the owners, who were also the cooks, would yell, “Oh no! Cook faster! Cook faster!” and then make a big show of cooking extra quickly. Then the entire restaurant staff would watch her eat with great amusement. Even by our American buffet standards, that lady could eat! Reddit User: [redacted]

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The Use Of The Ziploc Bag 

Photo: Flickr/Bill Selak

My friend worked at one of those Mongolian BBQ places where you load up a bowl with various meat/veggies/sauces and they fry it up on a big flat griddle thing (this was while he was going to school). One of his coworkers spotted a little old lady who had taken a big gallon Ziploc bag and wrapped the edges over her purse top.

She had done this so she could fill up her bowl and simultaneously shovel a bunch of meat into her purse. Apparently, she’d come in and do this with some regularity, and none of the employees cared because they all hated their boss with a passion. I’ve got to admit that I admire the idea; it’s an easy way to get a few pounds of beef/pork/sausage/chicken for the cost of a lunch bowl. Reddit User: greenbuggy

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Time For The Shrimp Bonanza 

Photo: Flickr/Paul Sableman

I worked in a Red Lobster during the all you can eat shrimp bonanza. It was always horrible because the managers sucked and ensured each new dish would take 10-15 minutes to come out, so people “got tired and left,” keeping their food costs down. This meant you’d have tables there for 2+ hours that would tip you worse since they’re cheap and “things took too long…”

I had three very very large guys come in around 3 pm. Plate after plate of fried shrimp. It was insane. They gorged themselves on biscuits dipped in ranch or blue cheese as they waited for the shrimp. Around 7 pm, one got up to go to the bathroom. Around 7:20, the ambulance came, since he had a heart attack in the bathroom. Reddit User: PorkRollAndEggs

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No More Gummy Bears For You 

Photo: Creative Commons/vonnivice

At a Golden Corral once, there was this family sitting near us, and we were all sitting by the dessert bar. The kid was about 6 or 7 and wanted some gummy bears. So he went to the dessert bar, grabbed the serving spoon of gummy bears, and started eating off it like the bears were cereal, double-dipping several times.

The parents were laughing and told him to stop, so he spit a mouthful of gummy bears out on the spoon and put it back. The parents thought it was hilarious. I told a food attendant what happened so she could replace the gummy bears with fresh ones because the parents definitely weren’t going to. They got mad at me for “trying to get them kicked out.” Reddit User: Elephant_Kisses2

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It Was Finger Licking Good 

Photo: Creative Commons/rich_bruchal

I went to a somewhat nice buffet with my dad last year for my birthday. It was supposed to be better than regular places like Old Country Buffet, so I was pretty excited since I hadn’t been to a buffet since I was a kid. I start piling up my plate and head over to the wings. Some guy is standing there looking at them…

And then I see him run his finger across one of the wings, gathering up some of the sauce and licking his finger to taste it. He decided it wasn’t to his liking and moved on like it was normal to do that. I was so grossed out that I decided not to get anything from that area where they just have heated up food and instead went to get some steak off the grill directly from the cook. Reddit User: -eDgAR-

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Please Call The Manager 

Photo: Creative Commons/ohdearbarb

I’ve got two buffet stories. The first: a family of five comes in and buys one plate, and they all sit in the back room. We keep seeing the lady go back and forth, so we look on the video camera to see she’s serving everyone her food on napkins, and she was just the runner. They threatened to call the owner when we asked her to leave. The manager on duty said, “Please do…”

Next up, a family of four comes in, and the dad is so rotund that when he sits down, on two chairs with one butt cheek per chair, he pulls the table towards him, forcing the wife and kids to adjust to the now moved table. That man ended up eating so much he threw up in the bathroom later. Reddit User: [redacted]

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The Two For One Disaster

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I worked at a buffet in a casino years ago. The business wasn’t great, as the price for dinner was like $25 Mon-Thurs and $32 on weekends. Someone had the bright idea to put a two for one coupon in the local paper. We noticed a bit of a bump in business, but then one Friday, the whole city came in. These coupons had an expiration date.

And it turned out everyone decided to use it on the very last day of the promotion. Friday night was prime rib night. Any functional piece of equipment capable of heating food was cooking prime rib. Steamer, deep fryer, tilt skillet, wok, every pan, and every square inch of the grill, all covered with varying states of cooked/cooking prime rib/rib-eye steaks. Reddit User: godofgainz

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