The restaurant is probably more concerned about bad publicity from someone getting sick than actual litigation. Still BS though. No doubt some goober of a restaurateur did it then others jumped on the bandwagon, and now it has reached a critical mass where you are unusual for allowing canine bags than for not allowing them.
Especially #2, even in top-drawer restaurants. My girl friend couldn’t finish her Valentine’s Day meal once (a long time ago); the the restaurant did it up in a fancy aluminum foil swan.
Common now for restaurants to give you a container to put the leftovers in yourself. That gives them deniability if there’s a problem later.
In general I go for the food, but I want it to be a pleasant experience also. My wife never finishes a restaurant meal, if she couldn’t take the food home to enjoy the rest of it without the experience I wouldn’t want that experience again.
I live alone. To buy, prepare, cook, eat alone, and then do dishes is not what I like to do.
Except for snacks, I eat every meal outside the home.
The main reason is I hate eating alone! If I am dining solo, at least there are other people eating and it gives me an appetite.
I don’t understand this statement. What kind of later problem would be deniable based on who put the leftovers in the container?
I think I’m buying both the food and the experience.
I agree that the restaurant has a right to have a policy where they won’t wrap up extra food for people to take home. But I think it’s a stupid and wasteful policy.
I also think they have to be pretty careful to make that policy known, since it’s not the norm. If I somehow missed it, and asked to have leftover food wrapped up to take home to be told they wouldn’t do so, my response would be “Ah, in that case, I’m not finished”, and then I’d take my sweet fucking time sitting there at the table until I felt like I was hungry enough to want to finish my meal. We’ll see how much they like their policy when it means their table turnover time goes way up.
I went out with my daughter and grandchild to an all you eat Chinese restaurant and I wanted to bring home the food I didn’t finish and I wasn’t allowed and it wasn’t for health reason. The time next I will bring my own container and bring home the food I paid for.
You paid for “all you can eat,” not all you can carry.
You’re paying for it all. If you can’t finish your meal, you should be able to take whatever you want. Whenever any business claims that some inconvenience to you is for your convenience or safety, I call bullshit. However, I do not know the real reason these restaurants would not want you to take food home. In the U.S. this has become really ingrained into the culture, especially thanks to such places as Cheesecake Factory where the portions are impossibly huge and they send you home with food in shopping bags. Maggiano’s, an Italian chain in the D.C. area, now has pricing so that an extra entree to take home is built in.
I have been to a couple of places where they will not fill “to go” orders because they say the quality of the food suffers when it is not served promptly and they want to maintain their reputation. I can buy that, but that’s different than leftovers.
That does’t mean you’re not paying for the food, it just means that you are not paying for an infinite amount of food. That’s why it’s “all you can eat,” not “all you can carry.”
If the price you’re paying is for a specific portion of food, I don’t see why the restaurant cares what you do with it—eat it there, share it, take the leftovers home to eat later, give them to your dog, or throw them out.
If it’s an “all-you-can-eat” or “unlimited portions” kind of deal, then what you’re paying for is the amount of food you, personally, can eat at one sitting, and there’s nothing unreasonable about the restaurant enforcing that.
You can’t sue for personal injury in New Zealand. A restaurant could conceivably lose its health certification and be forced to close it somebody got food poisoning from a doggy bag, but personal litigation isn’t an option.
I guess I’m buying the experience, but what I’m really buying is:
- Someone else is making decisions about what to cook tonight. All I have to do is choose which dish I want to eat.
- Someone else is doing the actual cooking.
- Someone else serves the food and actually brings it to me while I sit in my ass and suck down booze, which ALSO someone else brought to me. Without me having to go buy it.
- Someone else is going to clean up after my lazy ass.
While I do care about ambiance – I don’t like loud, noisy restaurants because I have hearing damage and can barely understand anything anyone says to me in busy, noisy places – I don’t care what color the walls are or how fancy the furniture is or how condescending the servers are. That’s not the part of the experience for me. For me, it’s all about #1 I love the food there and 2, I don’t have to plan, shop, cook, or clean up.
So this business about doggy bags. I don’t really know how this applies in NZ, but I understand (from threads on this board) that the US is known for whopping huge portions served in restaurants. I am tiny and do not eat large meals, ever, so generally what most people consider a fair portion, I consider to be horribly wasteful. I was raised by farm-background types who firmly believe that, if they don’t get at least five pounds of food on their plate for $10 or less (and $10 is pushing it as “too fancy for my tastes”), they are getting ripped off. I think this attitude is ridiculous as all the things I listed above are worth money to me. The prices in restaurants aren’t just covering the cost of the food – it’s covering all that service. *That *is the value for me. So if I can’t finish the meal and I can’t take the leftovers home to have for lunch tomorrow, then that’s just wasteful to me. If they’re going to forbid doggy bags, then I hope the portions are more reasonable so that a given person can finish their meal in one sitting.
If their policy allowed this, everyone would load up one last giant plate and then “suddenly get full” and have to take it home, every time. Even if you legitimately got full and didn’t want the rest of the food to go to waste, allowing this opens the door to them losing a huge amount of money to people having a full meal at home as part of their buffet purchase. I don’t blame them in the slightest for enforcing this policy in an “all you can eat” setting.
Has this ever happened?
It’s barely even conceivable. It would have to involve a scenario in which the food was OK at the restaurant but somehow not OK after it left the restaurant, due to the restaurant’s malfeasance, to a criminal standard. I hesitate to say it’s impossible, but I really struggle to see how that could occur.
I seriously doubt it; in this instance, I think it’s just the restaurant being dicks.
It certainly seems to me that if I pay a specific amount of money for a specific meal, that I do indeed own it and am entitled to do whatever I please with it, including bringing the leftovers home. (unless, of course, it is a buffet, which is an entirely different situation). If a restaurant refused to provide take-home boxes, I wouldn’t patronize them again.
I’d bring a couple plastic containers to bring home the unfinished food that I purchased. I bought it and it’s my food.
all you can eat buffets being the exception. You are paying for food that can be eaten at that time. Not food you want to eat tomorrow.
Small Portions is how I control my weight. I often take excess food home from restaurants. I would be very unhappy if it had to be left behind and thrown out. I hate seeing any food wasted.
The food.
I bought it; I own it. In any dining establishment other than fast food, there’s an excellent chance my dinner will allow me to eat lunch the next day as well. (As in, the jambalaya I ordered on Monday.) I calculate accordingly…a dish that costs $x may be too rich for my blood if it’s just dinner, but if I’m paying $x over two meals that’s a different thing. Buffets excepted, I don’t think I’d patronize a restaurant that wouldn’t let me take the leftovers home.
(Since huge portions specifically in the US have been mentioned, just an anecdotal note: I found the portions in the UK and Ireland to be just as big as in the US when we visited a few years back.)
The food. Even when “and we’ll eat out” is part of the plan, it wouldn’t be in the plan if there wasn’t this stupid part of me, somewhere near the center, which screams “feed me! Now!” at very specific times.
Doggie bags are unusual in Spain; normally you can get one only in places that offer takeaway, but it’s always possible to ask. A few months back, we ate at a very posh restaurant. It didn’t look child-friendly at all, and yet there were several families with children, there turned out to be both a children’s menu and the possibility to ask for half portions, and they provided doggie bags for dogs and plastic throwaway tuppers for the humans.
When getting foreign visitors to the US one of the things we’d use to teach them was about the possibility of asking for half-portions, about doggie bags (if they were going to stay in a place where they made sense), and about raising the tip to account for the cost of half-portions being lower than that of portions (no reason to stiff the waitress only because the “regular” portions are sized for teenage truck drivers).
I used to eat at a Chinese buffet after going to the movies. After a few times, the matriarch told me to load up a couple of containers (they did takeout as well) because “you’re really not eating your money’s worth!” - but yes, that’s the kind of establishment where I would never have even considered asking for a doggie bag, because “all you can eat” means “all you can eat in here, not in your whole life”.
Someone could claim they broke a tooth on something in the food, or they got food poisoning, or they didn’t get their own food back, or who knows what. Anyone can go sue a restaurant with some kind of claim like that. Making you pack your own leftovers more clearly puts the responsibility for the food in your hands.