I’m almost certain that’s a Miller Genuine commercial. :dubious:
I say if you offer it, honor it. If you find out ‘oops’ ya can’t, then change your policy.
I’m almost certain that’s a Bud Light Real Men of Genius commercial. :dubious:
I say if you offer it, honor it. If you find out ‘oops’ ya can’t, then change your policy.
I try and follow these rules:
*Eat what you take (things like the tails of shrimp are optional, of course).
Don’t take anything home, unless it’s the fortune cookie. Maybe, just maybe a whole peice of fruit. It is OK to ask for the bones for your dog, but ask.
Don’t be a Pig. Yes, it is all you can eat, but it is not fair to eat an entire tray of your fave. Make sure others get a fair chance. *
I very rarely see the gluttonous behavior othesr here talk about. Of course around there are many many good buffet places, mostly “Asian”. The only thing I marvel at is someone paying the price for the buffet and eating hardly anything but a half-plate of fruit.
I think if you are taking “all you can eat” to the extreme, you are contributing to the obesity issues that surround us. It’s fine to eat until you are satisfied, but it is quite unhealthy to be stuffing yourself full on a regular basis (I would say weekly or more often). Eat slowly and savior the taste of the food. Give your stomach time to register the fact that you are eating food. If you start feeling full, it means it is time to stop eating. Why do you think your stomach gives you that feeling? For God’s sake, don’t keep eating until you feel bloated. That means you have eaten more food that you need. It is not healthy to eat until you get a bloated feeling.
As for businesses advertising “all you can eat”, it should be all you can eat. Otherwise, just advertise that it is just a buffet with no mention of the “all you can eat” part. That way, people know it is a buffet style restaurant but not a feedlot. My family’s Chinese buffet restaurant does this. I have not seen a customer clean out the buffet tables and they understand that it is not all you can cram down. Sometimes people don’t finish off all their food that they take but it is fine because it is typically small amounts. This helps to keep our prices low.
Buffet just means it’s set out on tables and you get the food there. Many limit the trips to one or two. They won’t let you take any of the food out of the restraunt either. They shouldn’t because you paid for a meal, not two. It doesn’t mean you get to eat endlessly. Many places have a steak meal with buffet. You get a steak cooked for you, and the less expensive side dishes are at a buffet. They will send the steak and maybe a roll home with you. Most buffets around here now claim all you can eat, and if you advertise it, you have to honor it. On rare occasions you see a glutten, but that’s part of the package when advertising all you can eat.
The worst buffet experience I had was when the Badger football team came in to frolic through the food. Think of an Animal House party at a buffet. They were trashing the place, and it wasn’t after a game in a restaurant by the stadium. There were full size plates of ice cream piled over a foot high, until it was gone. A couple gluttens is one thing, a group of 20 to 25 is another. Had they been fifteen minutes earlier, I would have demanded my money back, because all the food was gone.
I once actually saw a woman not content to eat five plates of food for seven bucks, but who also had a huge purse with Ziplock bags which she was stealthily stuffing with various items.
Totally agree. If you use the exact phrase, AYCE, well, you’ve stated very clearly what the customer is paying for. If you don’t want to run a feeding trough then don’t advertise yourself as one.
A couple of people mentioned something like this in the thread, and I suspect it’s a regional thing. I’ve never, ever seen a buffet restaurant that wasn’t “All You Can Eat” or which limited trips.
I’m generally in agreement with the majority of the posters here - yes, it’s all you can eat in a reasonable amount of time (i.e., one “meal” worth - 90 minutes sounds reasonable, but I’d be willing to up it to 2.5 hours for long business lunches or big family dinners). No, you shouldn’t take huge servings of everything all at once, leave some for the other patrons. Please keep food waste to a minimum. If you want to try the octopus, but then discover it’s way too spicy, fine. I’m not going to insist you eat it. But that’s why you should take only one octopus, not pile your plate with something you’re not sure you’ll like. You can always go back and get more of the things you do like.
The Chinese buffet near me put up notices that “excess waste” will be charged a per pound rate - the same per pound rate that you pay if you visit the buffet with a to-go box for carryout. Seems reasonable to me. My kids have occasionally left quite a bit of food (of the “this octopus is too spicy” variety) and they’ve not charged us, so it’s obviously up to the manager’s discretion, which I appreciate. My guess is that any leftovers taken home will also be charged this rate, which I think is fair.
I’m a fan of AYCE, even though the food quality of the feedlots like Old Country Buffet are rather appallingly low. I’ve never found the same to be true of Indian buffets. I think the food just works better with the buffet style - meat chunks in flavorful sauces don’t get stale or nasty for sitting around, and the predominant flavor is never salty grease.
But I really like them for going to with kids. It’s sort of a restaurant training ground for us. You get to stand up and walk around and work out the wiggles, you don’t have to wait for the kitchen to cook your food, but you still have to chew with your lips closed and speak in reasonable tones and try not to spill things. It’s like a restaurant with training wheels. And the fact that there is so much to choose from and always a chance for another plate means that my kids are more likely to try something new. If the octopus is nasty, there’s always noodles waiting for your next course, y’know?
I personally find it sad that a business would need to instruct its patrons on the difference between “you can have seconds if you like” and “you must not stop until you’ve emptied the buffet line, the stockroom, the walk-in cooler, and the basket of mints as you squeeze your fat ass through the exit door,” but such is the world we live in, I guess.
Then again, when someone brings a plate of brownies in to my workplace and leaves them out, I’ve never felt the urge to start double-fisting them into my cheeks like a chipmunk storing nuts and then use my outstretched shirt to carry the rest of the spoils back to my cubicle.
It’s funny— I’ve never thought of myself as unusually well-mannered, but simply by behaving the same way throughout my life (with a bare minimum of decorum), each year I seem more and more urbane, simply in comparison to the atrocious habits of others around me. That’s my theory of cultural relativity, anyway, which has yet to be falsified.
(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go bathe myself. With water and soap.)
There used to be a Sizzler’s here in town a long time ago. They advertised an AYCE Shrimp dinner. My BIL and I went to check it out. My BIL is a pretty big guy, so after the 5th plate, the waitresses gathered around to watch.
After plate number 7, the manager came over, and wanted to know if he was going to continue, so that they could cook more shrimp to have on hand.
The cooks finally came out to watch at plate number 9, when BIL finally gave up.
Oh god - I humbly apologize for my aunt. We seriously cannot take her anywhere. :rolleyes:
I can’t remember seeing a buffet restaurant that had a stated rule on how many visits you could make. However, buffet does not mean the same thing as all you can eat, so when the “All you can eat” sign is absent in a buffet restaurant, you should not be indignant if the owner says “you’re eating too much, you have to leave.”
ETA: I like the motto from the Indian restaurant mentioned by Full Metal Lotus:
“Enjoy all you want, but please do not take more than you need”
All these horror stories are great, but for each one of these gluttons there’s 50 people like me who are stuffed after the second plate and never manage to stay long enough for a drink refill.
I think a restaurant should have the right to ask a customer to leave who is obviously abusing the practice…loading up the plate with crab legs, leaving half of them uneaten while they go load up on bread, then leaving that untouched while they load up on pizza…etc.
We’ve gone to AYCE places (with a teenaged boy, it’s practically self-defense for your wallet) and I’ve always taught the kids if they like something, they can go back for more, but not to overload just because it looks good.
This happened to me recently. I was going out with several friends and they insisted on the Chinese buffet. I thought it was a terrible idea (I don’t even like Chinese food in the first place), but I went for the sake of agreeability.
First of all, for an Asian restaurant, there was very little vegetarian fare. The noodles were unremittingly vile, and you know how good pizza is at a Chinese buffet. How do you screw up rice? But somehow, it was like a pile of flavorless starch. I wound up with salad and fresh fruit, because that was literally all I could eat. They made more than their money’s worth off me, but hey, I got to see part of life that I don’t normally get to experience, the phenomena that **Vinyl Turnip ** described so well. Really an eye-opener.
Never again will I get talked into Chinese buffet. Maybe I’d try Indian, based on WhyNot’s description, which sounds much more appetizing.
There’s a local Asian buffet here that does all-you-can-eat but issues a waste charge for all plates that still have food on them.
I was fine with that, but then I discovered the food tasted terrible 
What a sad lunch it was.
There’s a restaurant I wandered into on the Canada side of Niagra Falls that has a good approach to the issue: if you can eat a seventy-ounce steak, the sides, and a slice of cheesecake in one hour, it’s free. If not, you have to pony up the forty or fifty dollars the meal costs.
I wasn’t anywhere close to being able to try, but it seemed a fair challenge.
At the all you can eat I get about five plates. I don’t like everything mixed together or cold, so I have a couple tablespoons of maybe three items at a time or two slices of beef. 
They always make money on me.
But your family DOES have to pay the coroner when they come to pick up your body from the parking lot, right?
Dear Christ, a 70 ounce steak?
I ate a 24 ounce steak once with sides (I think it was mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables) and a coke and I felt like I was going to die. EDIT: Oh, and a small sundae too, it was my birthday after all.
I think merely looking at a 70 ounce steak would send my stomach into convulsions.