Yes, but they DID post a price where you could see it before you got any food - i.e. above the buffet, otherwise you wouldn’t have seen it and wouldn’t have started the thread.
Presumably if someone objected to the practice, they would have the option to leave before filling their plate.
I can’t see how this would be illegal.
Well, if you just don;t like it, that’s Ok, but why did you take a whole plate?
Only time I heard of it being enforced was a dude who hung out with some of the guys I worked with. We were going to eat at one of the local “seafood buffet” places, and he claimed he had been banned for life as he had taken a whole plate of sushi and left the rice, eating only the salmon and shrimp. He knew full well he was going to do it too, and had even bragged about it.
Most buffets do not allow you to take your food in a doggie bag, although some will smile and nod if you ask about a piece or two of whole fruit “for later”. The Disney buffets are quite nice about that.
I see no problem with this. There are people out there with the mentality that they need to get over on businesses. They will take extra food at places like this out of sheer spite towards the owners. There are some folks who just don’t like Chinese people, and seem to take a lot of pleasure in messing with proprietors of these places.
Assholes like this ruin it for everyone, making prices higher for folks who play by the rules. I have seen other things along these lines. At Souplantation, I have seen a group of friends come in, and only one or two of them order food, the others saying that “we’re not going to eat, just hang out”. Of course this was bs, and the manager had to go through a lot of argument with these young people and they resumed the behavior every time the manager went away from the table. On another occasion, I saw a guy trying to fill “to go” containers after he had finished his meal, and the manager had to explain that he could not do this even though there is a sign right above the supply of to go containers stating the price to fill them. The guy played dumb and there was a big unpleasantness.
As someone who frequents these places, wtf is so hard to understand about this? What is so damn hard to understand about “all you can eat”? These places operate on the fact that your stomach has a limited capacity, and they can count on you taking only a certain amount of food that you can finish.
OTOH, last time we were in Hometown Buffet, my girlfriend took a BONE off a beef rib that she had FINISHED home for the dog, and the manager swooped in and demanded that she return the bone to her plate! 
Some people should understand the difference between “all you can eat” and “all you can pile on your plate.”
And since when does everything you don’t like have to be illegal?
Think about it this way: if they had a sign up saying “food taken from the buffet and thrown on the floor is not covered by our standard price and will cost $3 extra” would you think this was illegal or unfair? Now I appreciate there is a difference here in that throwing food away is deliberate wastage where just not liking something or accidentally taking too much is not deliberate. Nonetheless, most of the time they are going to enforce this rule where you reckless pile up your plate on the basis you may as well because it costs you nothing, and then waste it. This sign probably isn’t actually enforce much: it’s just to give people pause from being lazy greedy pigs.
Would you be OK with them simply increasing their prices by $3 and offering a $3 discount to those who finished their food? It’s exactly the same thing. Or is it purely just the phrasing you object to?
What about those burger joints which let you have it for free if you can finish the enormous burger. Aren’t they offering you a free burger and saying they’ll charge you if you don’t finish it?
It’s perfectly legal, as long as you know about it beforehand. That’s the deal they’re offering, and you either accept it or not.
As for the various exceptions you mentioned - the food being bad, or whatever - I’m absolutely positive that the owner is capable of making exceptions to his rule when they’re warranted.
I’ve only seen it at all-you-can-eat sushi places.
This happened to my husband and I last week at a sushi restaurant. We weren’t told before hand and it wasn’t printed on the menu. We had ordered about enough for each of us, but the tempura was gross and oily, so we didn’t finish it, and some of our tuna was still frozen in the middle, so we didn’t want to eat that. When we asked for the bill, she pointed to the tempura and tuna and said they charge $1 for each piece left over. I complained and she said it’s just how it works. I asked if we could take it and she refused. So, we sat there and peeled off the gross tempura and ate just the veg in the middle, and forced down the still frozen tuna.
I can see why they have this rule, but at the same time, they need to make sure it’s edible food before enforcing this.
Also, can you request a to go box and then throw your to go box away right in front of the restaurant manager/waiter’s eyes? Because I’d pay good money to do that.
So not only do they charge you for food you don’t finish, but they’ll charge you again for the same food when you have their soup tomorrow.
[Dilbert] It says all you can eat, not all that you do eat. [/Dilbert]
Then you should only take a small portion, until you try it and see if you like it. Especially at a buffet where you can go back and get more of the items you like.
Starting with only a small bit of a new food seems like something my parents taught me when I was about 5 years old.
I wonder. Let’s say your bill came to $20 with this extra charge. You tell the cashier that he can go pound sand and that here is $18 and they aren’t getting the extra two. You leave for your car.
Is this a civil matter, or could you be arrested for it?
When passing through Moscow (The Russian one) I talked to some fellow Brits who were harangued by their waitress for not emptying their plates even though it wasn’t an all you can eat buffet.
I doubt this rule is actually enforced in any sort of situation a reasonable person might encounter. More likely, the owner had some encounters with dumb-ass teens and eventually decided to create a rule that would discourage them or at least provide some recourse.
Because you bought and paid for it. You “own” it. If you wish to buy the food and flush it down the toilet that’s your desicion. I can understand this rule for buffet certainly, but off the menu? No dice.
I saw a sign like this once at a buffet, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. I am really non-confrontational, and it left me paranoid about trying even a small portion of something off the buffet, lest I dislike it, leave three bites, and get called out on it. It wasn’t the $2 I was worried about–it was being yelled at by my waiter for being a wasteful, greedy pig. I was uncomfortable enough that I never went back.
So from a business standpoint, it seems to me that it might be more practical just to out up signs that say “please take food in small portions to avoid waste: multiple trips to the buffet are encouraged!” and then ban assholes who really abuse the system.
If you dine with ~6 people or more, some places assess a mandatory 18% tip. There have been cases where people have been arrested for walking out on it. I haven’t heard of the $2 fee causing the same issue, as it’s less common, but I imagine it’s similar. When you dine you are making an implicit agreement based upon a sign posted or a line in the menu (which may be very tiny at the bottom).
The extra charge is to recoup lost revenue. Too many people don’t realize that the food on the buffet:
a) takes time to prepare - it’s not “instant” food
Unlike a “made to order” meal, where the individual ingredients of the meal can be slapped on the grill and assembled into a complete meal in a matter of minutes, foods on a buffet are prepared in large quantities, and those large quantities take a proportionately longer time to cook (especially since a lot of it is going to be cooked in ovens, not grilled/deep fried). An extreme example is prime rib (or any roasted meat). Prime rib takes several hours to cook properly, and so the kitchen is going to cook enough to meet the expected demand. There is going to be a certain point at which they do not cook any more, because it won’t be finished cooking before the restaurant/buffet line closes. If the buffet runs out because many people took more than they could eat, and it’s too late to prepare more, the place potentially loses business/revenue from those later customers who may have come specifically for the prime rib. You can’t sell food you don’t have.
If the restaurant runs out because they simply didn’t prepare enough, or because a particular night was unexpectedly busy, they’ll take the hit because it was their own error and/or unforeseen circumstances. Running out purely because people took too much food and then didn’t finish it is another thing entirely.
b) does not exist in unlimited quantities in the back of the restaurant
In some cases, when they run out, they run out. Again, if it’s because they didn’t have enough on hand to begin with, that’s their own fault and they’ll take the hit. But when they run out because people are taking too much and then throwing it away, that’s lost revenue through no fault of their own. You can’t sell what you don’t have.
c) many foods that you might see on a buffet cannot be reheated and served again, either for quality reasons or for health code reasons
Some foods simply can’t be reheated and served the next day, because the reheating results in a lower-quality product. Meat in particular. So when it’s getting toward closing time and something runs out, even if there’s time to cook more, you don’t always want to because you’re likely to end up with too much left over — leftovers that you can’t reheat and serve again tomorrow. Reheated vegetables are out of the question - they’re no good for anything, really. Health codes require that reheated foods be cooked to a certain temperature - in some cases this is a higher temperature than is required the first time something is cooked. For example, beef. In my state, rare beef (except ground beef, which must be “well done”/155 degrees F) can be served at 130 degrees F. But if the leftover beef is cooled and then reheated, it must be cooked to 165 degrees, which in most cases means “well done”. And you just can’t stick a well done prime rib on the buffet line, so the only thing you can do with leftover prime rib, really, is leave it cold and slice it thin to make roast beef sandwiches, which don’t have nearly the profit of a nice slab of prime rib on a dinner plate.
Why?