(bolding mine!)
THANK YOU, infinitely. I’ve been trying to remember that guy’s name for the last little while.
There’s a Dilbert strip which deals with this very scenario (leaving food over, and the all-you-can-eat buffet trying to charge extra)- however, Dogbert thwarts the manager by pointing out that it’s All You Can Eat, not All You Do Eat…
Isn’t the problem here the family’s not eating what they put on their plate, not that they are taking a large amount of food? The issue here is the wasting of food, not how much you are going to eat, or have ate or intend to eat.
Yes, and A.R. Cane was not wasting food. I think that was Revtim’s point.
I’m a big guy. When I’m really hungry, just to give you an example, I can eat a large pizza with a couple of toppings by myself. And the only reason I stop then is because I tell myself, “Enough!” Not because another slice doesn’t look good. No, I don’t eat that way all the time. And I’m not obese.
My son is a bit of a picky eater. As a result, we oversee what he piles on his plate at “All you can eat” buffets, and I’m the designated finisher if we overestimate. Never a problem.
But I think the point is that unless there’s wasteful activity going on, “All you can eat” covers both me (a guy who can really chow down on a given day) and my son (someone who doesn’t eat too much at all). Some people eat more than average, some people eat less. But “all you can eat” means “all you can eat.”
But I’m with the general consensus here regarding the OP. If “All you can eat” means to you that your $5.95 entitles you to waste as much food as you like, you’re being a jerk. After all, let’s not forget the starving children in China I was told so much about when I was a kid.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen signs like this, actually warning of consequences. But I do remember the Plainsman buffet having a ‘friendly reminder’ sign:
“Take all you want, but please, eat all that you take.”
I stand corrected.
My comments were regarding A.R. Cane’s situation. He was almost kicked out of an all-you-can-eat for just eating, not wasting anything. even sven seemed to think just eating all you can eat was disrespectful and assholish, or perhaps misunderstood was I was responding to.
I agree it was perfectly appropriate to kick out the wasters described in the OP. As I already said in a previous post, I cannot stand to see food wasted.
My best friend has the surname Cao. She’d be interested to hear this. She’s Vietnamese.
I’ll have to ask her about the origins of the name. As far as I’m aware, she’s 100% Vietnamese (but this is always a grey area in VN). There are many crossover names like Lam, and some that have been changed, like the Chinese Ng becoming the Vietnamese Ngo. Not sure about Cao though. I’ll have to ask her whether it’s connected to the Chinese name.
Except that he wasn’t. An employee muttered something after about the fourth plateful, whereupon Cane’s girlfriend unloaded fifteen tons of shit on the manager - which is what I read as being what Gabe considered the kicking-out offence, and I’d agree. Whole thing could’ve been handled with a little more decorum, know what I’m saying?
I took a brief look at the linked blog, and I must say I was way impressed by the entry that pretty much ignored the actual issue and instead ranted on about not ragging on the Mom 'cos she was, yanno, a heroic single mother and a proud example of the type, and whatever she did or said was gold. :rolleyes:
It’s wildly inappropriate for employees of an all-you-can-eat to mutter stuff like that to paying customers, of course Cane’s girlfriend took him or her to task for that. Do you actually feel the employee’s comment was appropriate?
Either it’s policy to kick people out after too many plates, which contradicts it being advertised as all-you-can-eat, or the employee took it upon him or herself to make a rude comment to a customer. In either case, the restaurant was in the wrong.
I feel the same way…exactly WHAT is the point of wasting food? And what kind of lesson does she teach her kids by allowing this? It’s like some of my daughter’s friends-they will open a can of coke, take a sip, and leave the can there…then open another one. I politely reminded one of them that I didn’t see the need to open a THIRD can, if she wasn’t going to drink the first one-she looked at me like I had 3 heads. Wasting food is offensive and foolish. The woman needs to realize that the restaurant owners work hard for their income, and stupidly throwing food away isn’t going to sit well. Her kids are probably ones who will grow up to be adults who act like spoiled brats :smack:
Ah I see. Sorry for misunderstanding.
Down here in Singapore, the resturants usually impose a ‘fine’ of about $3 to $5 for each 500 grams of wasted food.
TheLoadedDog writes:
> My best friend has the surname Cao. She’d be interested to hear this. She’s
> Vietnamese.
It’s also a common Chinese name, perhaps about the 40-th most common name in China:
http://www.chinastyle.cn/essential/chinese-names.htm
There’s nothing surprising about this. There’s probably not even any relation between the two names. There aren’t that many one-syllable words, so many of them are used in many languages. “Lee” is both a common English and a common Chinese name.
I subscribe to the ‘soup nazi’ school of customer service. I consider it a privilege to attend my establishment, people are more than welcome to eat somewhere else if they don’t like it. 
If by behind the Duck, you mean down the street, then yes. It’s over by the post office. Or, if you are at Alfredo’s, and you go straight down that tiny street (Houston) and take a right, you come out in front of Chinatown.
I like all you can eat buffets, and I can pack away some food - even though I don’t look like I can. I like bufets because I can have a taste of this and a taste of that. I saw a sign at one buffet that said “Take all you want, but please eat all you take”. To me, that’s reasonable. There is no reason to load up a stack of plates, pick at them, and then leave them. Nobody is going to run up and steal all the food. The cooks can make more if it runs out. It’s not a game where you gotta keep the other guy from getting any. So, I can see where the restaurant owner might get annoyed of a large share of that food is going into the trash.
The ones I’ve been at have the same policy.
So you’re backtracking from “almost kicked out”, then? :dubious:
Like SteveG1, I can stick the old food away. Unlike him, I look like I can. But I, personally, would consider it greedy to actually attempt to nosh all I can eat. YMMV. And even A. R. Cane himself said he thought the muttered comment was funny. It was the gf who chose to escalate. Yeah, I’d boot her for the hissy fit. Not Cane for enjoying some good old home cooking, even though I strongly doubt the U.S. military had been starving him.
I’m giving the benefit of the doubt that it was a just a rude comment. If his girl hadn’t thrown a fit, my guess is they would have been asked to leave if he went to get more food. “We said you had enough!” But since it may have been simply an extremely rude staffperson, and maybe nothing that would have been followed up on, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. Still very inappopriate.
Yeah, my M definitely V’s. I don’t think it’s rude to fully take advantage of the deal that a business is openly offering and advertising, and find it odd that anybody would feel that way. Do you also find it rude to, say, be on a flat rate cell phone plan and talk all you want? If not, is there a concrete reason why it’s a different situation, or just a gut feel type of thing?
Living in Las Vegas - buffet capitol of the world - I applaud the restaurant manager for kicking their butts out.
What I have seen here would make you sick, and not just children. Adults who don’t get the concept that you can go back for more. So they load up the plate with everything from mashed potatoes to apple pie, nibble at a few things and then shove the nearly full plate aside and go back again. Some grab things off the serving trays with their fingers and eat it there, smacking their lips and grazing through the buffet like the fat-ass, uncouth bores they are.
And regarding children - parents seem to think it is cute to let little Bobby get his own food. Bobby can’t reach everything, so he has his fingers grabbing stuff off of trays, leaves ice cream machines dripping because he can’t reach to turn it off and basically fills up his plate like any little kid would - too much and with nothing remotely healthy or good for him. Of course, once back at the table, little Bobby will then take 1/4 of a teaspoon of food and eat it and then go back and fill another plate while the parents chitchat and ignore the process.
The only time I could be accused of wasting food is if I take a (normal) portion of something and it simply tastes horrible. Doesn’t happen often, but at least I was clever enough not to put 5 pounds of it on my plate to begin with.
Your guess is worth whatever you choose to think it is - or whatever your audience may choose, as the case may be.
Heh. “Gut feel”. I’ll make a spoilsport attempt to stay on topic and not try to generalise too far. I said “greedy”, not “rude”; and I think most of us possibly feel some inhibition about overeating well past the point of feeling even slightly hungry, to the point where perhaps we’re having to force the darn stuff down. And the all-you-can-eat deal possibly has an element of this built in, and is offered accordingly. Once you get past the point of raw, naked greed and you’re still trying to shovel it down, I think the odd fishy look is well in order - and the gf’s go-straight-to-nuclear-option reaction is not. See, I think Cane could have said something like “Cut me some slack, dude, I haven’t seen real food in six months” and it would have all passed off harmlessly.