All-you-can-eat buffet restaurants don’t only offer unlimited food for their customers, you will be stunned by how they also offer unlimited crazy stories about people and their insane antics. You won’t even believe that people can do these tricks.
Let’s take a look at these stories from our Redditors that will give you a rollercoaster of emotions. You might have second thoughts before going into an all-you-can-eat buffet. Check these out!
1. Memories From Piled Plate Chaos
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. What stuck in my memory was that whenever they had finished with what they would eat, they would scrape their plate and use it again.
They scrape their plates onto the floor next to their chairs. So next to each chair was a 6-inch to 18-inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of baked potatoes, etc.
Which_spartacus
2. A Crab Leg Feast To Remember
I bus at a slightly nicer restaurant. On Fridays and Sundays, we offer a prime rib and crab leg buffet, a salad bar, hot and cold entrées, and a dessert bar. It's honestly pretty nice and our buffet runner keeps anyone from doing ungodly things to the buffet.
But the one incident that will always stand out to me was when this family of five came in. From the moment they came to the moment they left, they ate as many crab legs as they possibly could. Their server and I were clearing plates off as fast as we could. But every time we would return it seemed like another mountain of crab leg shells would appear in front of each member of that family.
I do not how they ate so much and I honestly can't recall if they are anything besides the crab. Piles upon piles of shells were left on the table after they left. It was truly a sight to behold.
There’s more, after I wiped down the table and came back with settings, I had to get another rag to wipe down the table again because something in the crab leg juice combined with our sanitizer and left a nice milky residue upon the table. Delicious.
When I leave this job I'll never be able to look at crab legs the same way.
ASuitofT51PowerArmo
3. Buffet Battle Royal
Not mine but I had a buddy who was more than 400 lbs and the dude could put away some food. He went to a casino buffet that was one of the higher-end ones that had crab legs and steak. On about his 4th or 5th plate stacked full of crab legs, the manager came out and gave him $250 in free slot play to leave the buffet.
So I linked this to my buddy who pointed out that there were two other dudes there and none of them was under 300 lbs. They finished a metric ton of food between them and he was putting them to shame.
The buffet was higher end so it was $50 a person, but they easily all ate probably 3-4 times that and he ate probably 8-10 times that worth in food. He then went on to win just over a hundred dollars with that free slot play as well. If you can’t beat the casinos at the games beat them at the bar or buffet.
Gosupanda
4. Dine And Dash Drama
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, 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.
We also found out from her son that she stole one of the managers' keycards and they would regularly come into the hotel and use the card to go swimming in the top-floor pool. Smart, I'll give her that, but still.
Valkrine10
5. Bizarre Food Ritual
My first job was as a dishwasher in an all-you-can-eat fried catfish buffet.
People are animals. Especially the ones that get far more food off the buffet than they can eat.
Then they take the leftovers and pile them on a plate or tray, cover them in ketchup and tartar sauce, and then pour their iced tea over the top of all that.
A lot of people did that got at least two plates like that a night.
sixpackshaker
6. Playful Dripping No More
I went as a customer to a buffet. I noticed a big chocolate fountain and thought to myself that it would be fun to try it.
As I was walking to the chocolate fountain, 3 little girls stepped in front of me, and all 3 of them just went hands deep in the fountain. The family was the first table by the fountain and all they did was laugh about how cute it was.
The employees turned it off immediately.
Lovelyyyrose1993
7. Blue Steaks, Lingering Seafood, and Salad Bar Woes
At one point, I and 2 other family members worked at a buffet (each in different sections) because small towns don't have a lot of job options for high school/college kids.
I worked in the bakery which was surprisingly low in horror stories other than the chaos that remained after a large group of children came through. My brother worked at the steak station. He got these regulars that would tip him pretty well if he would prepare blue steaks for them. The very idea of ordering blue steaks from a buffet makes me gag.
My cousin worked the salad bar. Management would require her to keep seafood items on the bar for long after the point where they'd be safe to consume. I think the record was chilled shrimp from Mother's Day that stayed for over a week and a half. They finally caved and let her toss them when a customer complained about the smell.
Natlach
8. Shirtbasket Saga
I watched a man at the buffet restaurant, walk up to the buffet without a plate, untuck his t-shirt, pull the hem up to form a basket, reach into the steam tray of chicken wings with his bare hand and just load up on hot wings in his makeshift shirtbucket.
The woman in the kitchen was like "Please sir, could you use a plate? Or just tongs?" Guy scoffed and looked at her like she'd asked him to don a tuxedo.
RoxyFurious
9. Pizza Splash Down
I worked at a pizza parlor that offered a lunch buffet of endless pizza. The lunch ran from 11 am - 3 pm. This gentleman comes in (I think he was homeless), serves up a sky-high plate of pizza, and just goes to town.
He stayed from the beginning to the very end to make sure he got his money's worth.
Well, his body didn't appreciate being stuffed like a pinata of pizza. He got up and waddled fast to the bathroom and the next thing I knew I was being told he had liquid crap trailing behind him to the bathroom and inside the bathroom.
I was informed by my boss about the incident, I told him I was just heading out for a break. I was not about to clean that up.
[deleted]
10. Crabby Customers
My parents owned an all-you-can-eat buffet and I was there every day of my life from 4 to 14 years old.
My favorite horror story is when a couple came in to eat. They loved the crab legs and every time my mom put some out, they took it ALL. Also, just a reminder, crab legs are expensive!
They forgot the other customers, they just took it and ate it all. So they’re there for maybe 2 hours now and it’s getting dark. They’ve eaten through at least a week’s stock of crab legs and my mom finally decides it’s enough. She stops putting it out in the buffet and brings individual plates to the customers who wanted it but couldn’t get any due to this couple.
Understandably, the couple is angry. They literally flipped the chairs at their table, flipped their plates, bowls, cups, etc, and completely trashed their area. Food was all over the floor, table, chairs. Sticky soda was dripping onto the carpet. They left in a hurry, but someone caught their license plate.
We called the cops and I think they said they charged them with something. I can’t remember the aftermath details clearly, because I was probably 8 or 9 years old. I just remember looking at the mess and feeling angry that my sister and I had to clean it up with our mom. It was a family-run business, so we didn’t have much help.
Anyway, that’s my horror story.
blooberries1
11. A Friend’s Disgusting Deception
My mom and I picked up a friend of hers and we went to a local Chinese food buffet. At this place, you could get a pound of food for $5 in a takeout container instead of dining in, so we did that.
We were browsing around the buffet line with our takeout containers, adding food. I noticed my mom's friend doing something disgusting. He was eating a chicken wing and hiding his face behind his takeout container. He took the chicken bone and put it back in the buffet tray.
I walked over to my mom and told her. She walked over towards him and now he was standing there eating a slice of watermelon right off the buffet and then putting the rind back in the tray. So my mom is like "What are you doing!?" He's like "Don't worry, I do this all the time! They never notice!"
We are panicking, worried that they're gonna call the cops because of him. We pretended to not know him.
One of the employees walked up to my mom and told her that they noticed what the guy was doing, and they noticed that we were also uncomfortable about it and didn't intend to blame us. But they warned her that if she didn't get him to pay for the food in his container and leave immediately, they'd be calling the police.
Mom told him that we needed to go and he just brushed it off like, "I don't care. They're not gonna do anything!" We walked up to the front, paid for our containers, apologized, walked out, and left him in there.
A minute later, we can see and hear him shouting with the staff. He throws his container on the ground and food splatters everywhere. He storms out, shouting insults as he leaves, and of course gives them a, "I'm never coming back!" To which they reply "You're not allowed in here anymore! We'll call the cops!"
So we're standing out by the car, waiting for him. Of course, we yell at him. We get in the car and the next thing you know, this dude starts pulling chicken wings and Chinese donuts out of his pockets and eating them.
We dropped him off at home and never spoke to him again.
A_Wild_Taka_Appears
12. Vegetable Vexation
I remember this particular happening. It was pretty disgusting and so hard to forget. We had a Chinese buffet shut down for a health code violation. They had discovered that an employee was cutting veggies while taking a crap.
To this day I still wonder if that means the dude brought a bucket into the kitchen or veggies into the comfort room and I honestly don't know which is worse.
darkagl1
13. Jiggly Jello Justice
I went to a buffet and the kid in front of me was slightly shorter than the buffet bar but had his hands in the yellow jello, just massaging it. I was so shocked and didn’t say anything.
Then his mom came by and snatched him away but didn't say anything while a guy came and made himself a bowl of jello. 10 yr-old me was too appalled to say anything. I haven't eaten jello since then.
EmmyTheSweet
14. Cookie Catastrophe
I work at a restaurant and we have cookies by the register, chips, and other stuff. Well, some lady came in with her uncontrollable 5-year-old son who grabbed everything in his path.
When they were paying I noticed the little boy grab a cookie off the counter and bite it through the saran wrap. The mother took it from him and tried to put it back on the stack. I told her "he just had that in his mouth, you're gonna have to pay for it" and at that exact moment, the kid grabbed the whole pile of cookies and slung them on the floor.
I tried to find the cookie he bit out of a stack of 5 or so and his mom got pissed and refused to admit that he did that saying things like "I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE A CHILDS TEETH MARKS, HE DIDN'T BITE ANY OF THEM!" So I ended up throwing away 5 cookies and saying "Of course, he didn't bite any of them, I'm an idiot!" And she angrily paid and left.
CMDRAaron
15. Salad Buffet Secrets
I worked at a buffet in the center city of Philly. I had a couple that would come in about twice a week that requested me. They would gorge themselves at the salad bar for about an hour, ask for large glasses of water with no ice, and then both would take the water into the bathroom.
They would come out a few minutes later with empty glasses, ask for the check, and leave. I finally put it together that they were bulimic after I walked into the women's bathroom and it smelled like vomit. Very polite folks and tipped well though.
Jessperk
16. Mac & Cheese Mischief
I was dining in at a buffet one evening, waiting patiently to get some Mac & Cheese. The kid in front of me plied his plate high and then started tapping the serving spoon to get all of the cheesy goodness free from the confines of the spoon.
Once he was satisfied with his handiwork, he licked the spoon clean. I didn't have any Mac & Cheese and haven't been back since on a buffet.
allhailkircules
17. The Unfortunate Irony
I didn't work at All You Can Eat, but my sister did.
The buffet itself was on the first floor, so you had to take either the stairs or the elevator to your seat.
Once there was a lady who was carrying a tray with a whole lot of stuff on it. Glasses, plates, and a whole lot more of junk. My sister asked the lady if she needed any assistance, to which the lady replied, “You assume because I'm fat, I need help?” My sister didn't react.
A few seconds later the lady fell down the stairs. There was food everywhere.
InfiniteLap
18. Binge And Purge
I had a co-worker who briefly managed a buffet. He had a lot of stories about customers who would dine to eat at their buffet. But the one thing I will never forget is this one disgusting fact.
He said that it was fairly common for people to gorge themselves on enormous amounts of food, then purge in the restroom and start eating again so that they could "get their money's worth.”
Obeyyourbrain
19. Gastronomic Games
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 is ready. We always warn customers that, if they leave food behind because they ordered too much, they will have to pay extra. Depending on what they left behind.
We have seen people try the weirdest stuff if it comes to not paying extra; people dumping food in their handbags, people shoving it in their mouths then going to the toilet and flushing it, putting hair on it and blaming us for it, etc.
And when we catch them doing it, they blame us for it and refuse to pay. Some people let it come down to the police to sort it out sometimes, there have been multiple occasions on which they were involved to solve the problem for just €5. I guess some people’s greed has no extend.
DemocraticDoge
20. Soup And Slice Sabotage
I had a college friend who worked at a Chinese buffet. All of their customers are doing normal stuff except this one customer who did something disgusting.
He said they caught a regular customer dipping his pizza in the Wonton soup bowl. He was actually in the queue and not at his table, and then eating it. Bite, dip, bite, dip, bite, and then dip again.
After the fourth time in a month he did it management finally kicked him out.
Ndkjr70
21. Hot Pot Confusion
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 that which 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 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 one of those awkward moments in a life that you cannot forget no matter how much you try.
imk
22. Cheese-induced Roar
I managed a buffet in a casino for a few months. Had this family come in, a couple with 2kids. I got called over to the table because the mom had thrown up on her table and wanted us to take it away and clean it up.
I asked if she was ok, and she said she always throws up when she eats cheese. She had gotten herself an enchilada. Enchiladas pretty much always have cheese. I told her I would have to call janitorial because none of my staff was trained to handle biohazards.
She "didn't understand why I couldn't just take it." Janitorial came in and couldn't clean up because she refused to move from the table. So janitorial left. She calls me back over and starts yelling at me, Dad starts yelling too. She wanted to keep eating after throwing up, which I thought was gross. I had them sit at another table so they could all keep eating. The Janitorial came back and cleaned the other table.
Finally, they go to leave and decide to make a huge scene in front of the whole restaurant and demand their money back. I refused. Dad gets in my face and starts shouting that I'm just a racist white lady and his wife makes loads more money than I do.
I called security and they stormed out, pulling pictures off the wall and shattering them on the floor, Dad also picked up a vase and broke it. The two kids are running around and banging on the walls. Security finally showed up after they ran off, I had to do a report, and they were put on the 86 list. I hate people.
release_the_hound
23. Cheese Flick
I was standing behind a woman at a buffet. She was getting some lasagna or something, basically, a cheesy pasta that when you lift the serving utensil, a lot of cheese hangs on.
I witnessed her lift her pasta, twirl all the excess cheese that was connected around her index finger (and there was a lot), clip it off with her thumbnail, and then fling it back into the pasta.
I knew I shouldn't have been at the buffet in the first place, but this solidified my stance to never go back.
TACObracommander
24. Rollercoaster Of Bizarre Incidents
I worked as a server at a Chinese buffet and 4 things came to mind instantly.
A middle-aged woman puked on her table and blamed it on giving herself the wrong insulin dose. The 4 mountains of food she destroyed probably contributed too. Profusely apologized and tipped me $1.
I tried to pick up a dirty plate off a table that had a big pool of hibachi sauce/grease on it. The customer stopped me and said, "That's the best part." Then proceeded to drink the sauce like it was the milk after a bowl of cereal.
A young mother complained to me because the crabmeat and cheese that we served on the buffet made her child sick and they threw up. Her child was an infant. Not even a year old. I'm no childcare expert but baked artificial crabmeat and mozzarella can't be good for a baby.
The restaurant was raided by the immigration one morning shortly before opening. The entire back of the house and one of our managers were deported. Back of the house was 1/2 Chinese and 1/2 Latin American.
Lewshis
25. Buffet Banditry
I was just a witness but I saw how a woman came in with about 5 kids and she 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 poured all the chicken nuggets on one plate so it was a huge mountain. She did the same to five other dishes and left 5 pans that were full or almost full before she came empty.
Needless to say, people were pissed, 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.
Roxan1930
26. Trashy Retrieval
The family was gone and I saw their dirty plates with napkins crumpled on top so of course I cleaned them up and bus the plates. 15 minutes later they came back and the mom started yelling at me in Spanish so I got my co-worker to translate and he said the mother was saying that her daughter's retainers were in the napkins and I had already thrown them away.
She kept complaining about how they were more than $250 so I had to dig through a huge trashcan full of a sludge of food and drinks for 15 minutes. Fortunately, I found them and the daughter thanked me and she seemed embarrassed that her mom made me dig through the trash.
m2toofly
27. The Tale Of Bottomless Appetite
At one point, I worked for a pizza place that used to have a day buffet that I would make pizzas for. One time two huge dudes come in 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 and each 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.
Mysticbooka
28. Coveted Cinnamon Rolls
There was a fairly expensive restaurant in Dallas in the 80s called. About $25 per person back then with food served to the table. It was really good stuff. It was known for its delicious serving of food.
But the one thing that they were famous for was cinnamon rolls. The owner said he had seen many, many women ruin expensive purses by hiding those rolls.
Man, I miss that place.
NightMgr
29. Pickle Boy
There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who wasn’t all there in the head. He was functional but very weird. 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. Picture a 6’2” 250lb dude with a baby face wearing silky underpants and a lace bra over ratty jeans and a stained Hawaiian shirt; that’s our guy.
He went from being able to hold a sort of normal conversation to just spouting conspiracy theory word salad. But the weirdest thing was his change of 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 I guess.
By the time his weirdness devolved to aggression and we had to kick him out, 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. He’d eat it all, and his face would be covered in ranch and pickle bits.
Then, he’d drink water straight from the pitcher he inevitably stole from the wait station, sliming it with pickle ranch slobber. Never a dull moment with that dude around!
cawatxcamt
30. Buffet Horror
I used to work in an all-you-can-eat buffet, I would usually be the one who cleaned up after people once closing hours passed. Essentially I was the de facto janitor of the place.
This one time I had to clean the bathrooms after the place closed. No problems in the female bathroom, but when I went into the male restroom the image was burned into my retina instantly.
An old man was lying on the floor, face down in a puddle of muck. Not just any sewage muck, but opaque, black muck. It had the color of motor oil. Smelled awful too, like a mix of fecal matter and rotting durian. Certainly didn't help that the liquid wasn't just smeared all over the floor, but spread across the walls too. There were hand prints across the wall, presumably when the geezer was trying to stand himself up.
I peered into the toilet, more of that brown liquid, along with chunks of corny crap. There's also this fluid in your digestion called chyme. It's the thing right before food turns into crap, the pulpy acidic liquid with partially digested food in it. I could see scraps of chicken breast and sauce mixed in there with the pulpy chyme.
As for the old guy? Well, turns out, he didn't merely faint. He passed away. I was in a room with a fresh, cold body in the stages of Algor mortis. He had his pants off, presumably, he craps himself but I don't know. The man emptied himself like one of those cement mixers you'd see in a cartoon.
Needless to say, I, like him, emptied my digestive contents, just from the opposite end that he did. After that, I quit.
Mediocre_Liar
31. Uncovering Sanitary Violations
The buffet in the city where I went to college got shut down thanks to an employee.
He found it odd that they made a busboy sign a non-disclosure form to work there, he found out it was because they were breaking just about every health and safety rule.
They were serving meat that had gone green, they would leave food out overnight, the freezer once broke down for three days and they kept serving from it despite it being in the danger zone. He wore a hidden camera and gave the news the footage. It made me so glad I never ate there.
[deleted]
32. Lingering Effects
My dad got food poisoning, salmonella, from a buffet restaurant. He wound up hospitalized for 17 days, he had nearly passed away. He has an inflammatory bowel disease now and has to take weekly injections of Humira, which can cause some nasty health problems.
I had long ago decided never to eat from buffets but the whole situation with my dad reinforced the heck out of that decision.
laikadeschain
33. 3 Men, 12 Plates Each, and an Unexpected Farewell
I witnessed a marvelous thing.
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. 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 unfolding in only 45 minutes or so, the manager greeted them at the counter. In his broken English, he simply said "You men. You no pay, but you no come back."
The guys gave each other and the manager a "Yeah fair enough" look and left.
Chilibreez
34. Lobster Lunacy
I was in China for a vacation at a new buffet. I made the mistake of going to week 1 but my relatives were dying to go.
There was a lobster station that served fresh steamed lobster. Any time a new tray came out people would swarm it. Before they made a rule about how many you can have, people just grabbed as many as they could.
This one table had about 2 dozen lobsters on the table for about 6 people. Some guy at the table would constantly bring back more and more and eventually, people got pissed because it was just sitting there not being eaten. At least not yet.
So a few people got in the group's face and started taking their lobsters. Within 3 minutes a full-on fight breaks out people are swinging hard and lobsters are flying over the place.
Edwadokun
35. Behind The Buffet
I did a project for a large municipality in the Midwest. Part of the area I worked in included the restaurant inspectors. I managed to get on the quarterly distribution list of the restaurants in the city that failed the inspections.
I continued to receive those emails long after that project ended. I learned a few things over the years reading those emails. The city has a serious rat problem, rat droppings routinely appear in food preparation areas of A LOT of restaurants. The same restaurants have a habit of appearing in those reports, often with a one-quarter gap in their violations.
Never, ever eat at buffet restaurants as those had the more frequent and egregious violations including food temperature, lack of hair nets by the cooks, poor sanitary conditions in the restrooms, "rodent infestations," etc.
UniqueConstraint
36. Closing Time Sparks Chaos
I worked at a pizza buffet for 2 years during college. One guy got super upset that we wouldn't make more dessert pizza when we were half an hour past closing time.
This guy comes in with his presumed wife and 2 children around 8:30. We close at 9. 9 pm rolls around, I was doing the dishes and taking the empty dishes back from the buffet and I see this guy, arms crossed and staring at me as I take the empty dessert pizza dish.
He says something to the effect of "When is the next one coming out, I never got any." I let him know that we close at 9 and we can't make anything past then because the oven gets shut off.
Luckily the manager overheard this and stepped in to back me up and I quickly scamper off to the back to continue the dishes. He seemed pissed, but it wasn't unheard of, as being a cheap pizza buffet, you don't exactly bring in the most affluent of folks.
About 5 minutes later, as I'm finishing up the plates, the same manager comes barreling through the back door, out of breath. He grabs 2 of the long wooden pizza pushers and says come with me. I have no idea what's going on, but I grab the pusher and follow him out the door.
I learned later on, that he started flipping out, throwing the register and a fishbowl. He grabbed a broom and swung that around, hitting the girl behind the counter. This bit we caught on camera.
As I exit from the back this guy is screaming and ranting unintelligibly. He was just asking for a fight. He walked up to the manager got all up in his face and kinda choked and pushed him back. He came at me next and I was close to taking a swing at his knees or something but the other manager had quickly gotten back up and he resumed harassing him.
After about 2 minutes of tip-toeing around a brawl, and his wife presumably screaming for him to get back in the car, he eventually gets in and they drive off. I won't forget the glossed-over look in his eyes as he came after me. Freaks me out to this day.
crazyfoot369
37. Questionable Practices
I worked at a restaurant in high school and we had a breakfast buffet every day and a seafood buffet on Friday nights. You'd see stuff dropped in the wrong containers, cheese sauce splattered everywhere,
People tasting things off the bar instead of at their seats. The leftover Friday fish fillets became fish chowder the next morning. The leftover chowder from Friday also became chowder the next day.
My understanding is that you are not allowed to save cream-based soups and foods from one day to the next. We would serve that stuff all weekend. We also often had nasty slippery shrimp we would bread and serve.
I handled so much shrimp daily there that I smelled like rotten fish nearly all the time, even after showering.
Carlweaver
38. Soup Sabotage
My wife and I went to a restaurant for a lunch date, unlimited salad and soup were 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.
Saberus_Terras
39. Soft Serve Struggles
We were waiting in line for the soft serve machine at a restaurant. 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, and doing everything but turning it to the right (which would have dispensed the ice cream).
She's 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, so thankfully they didn't keep serving it after that whole incident.
Leigh_Lemon
40. Explosive Situation
I was a busboy at a buffet restaurant. This morbidity overweight family, 2 parents, and 2 teenagers, all gigantic) came in after the noon hour when it was slow and were taking full advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet.
On my way to busing tables, I walk by the bathrooms and see the teenage son walk out of the men's room with a huge crap-eating grin on his round, pre-pubescent face. I immediately thought this couldn't be good and went to check on the restroom, as one of our responsibilities was to make sure that the restrooms were generally clean.
This guy had explosive diarrhea and had not even managed to hit the toilet. There was crap all over the toilet tank, the walls, and the floor. No lie. It looked like a hand grenade of crap went off in the stall. Bar-none is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in a bathroom.
I thought about cleaning it up, but instead, I went to tell my manager. He was a pretty hard-driving guy, but he took one look at it, locked the stall, and told me, "Yeah, you don't get paid enough to clean this up. We'll get the janitor to take off this tonight."
joecarter93
41. Salad Engineering
I worked at a restaurant where they had salad bars. You could get a single-serving 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 me and the sandwich guy 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, then added another ring. It took several minutes to build this thing, but by the time he'd finished, he had a tower of salad well over a foot tall, with multiple rings of cucumber slices containing it.
That salad was an engineering marvel. He carefully carried it back to his table, sat down, and then looked up guiltily as our manager walked out to him. The manager handed him a "free item" coupon, and said, "That is the most impressive salad I have ever seen. Your next one is on me."
Jef_Wheaton
42. Awkward Encounter
A family friend was once at a buffet restaurant and took his young son to the men’s room. While he was in there he heard two people having physical intimacy in one of the stalls.
He took his son back to the table and then went back to the bathroom to confront the two people for being so inappropriate at a family restaurant. Well, out walks two men, the restaurant manager and one of his employees. He filed a complaint with corporate but I don’t know what the outcome was.
Wilson-im-sorry
43. Kitchen Rescues
My uncle is a chef and is right now rotating around different carverys (what we Brits call buffets) trying to show them how to properly run the business and make actual edible food so people will come back and the place won't shut down.
He's told me of a few places that even he's not wanted to go into the cause of the state of the kitchen and he questions how they haven't ended someone yet. The most recent one is chefs just cutting off the rotten pieces of food and then serving it. He has had to fire multiple people on the spot for stuff like that
Xxluisfrewxx
44. Buffet Bully
We were at a buffet place in the UK and my partner who is quite skinny and small was looking at the desserts section.
He was taking too long to choose one when an impatient larger guy just came, grabbed him by the shoulders, and physically moved him out of the way.
The guy was just so rude. My partner was put off the rest of the meal and we ended up leaving.
super_pea
45. Roach Infestation
There was this local Chinese buffet that people loved to go to before. A lot of customers always fill up the place. But one time, we discovered that the restaurant was shut down.
It turns out, the authorities received multiple reports and picture evidence from customers of roaches around the food and in the restaurant.
The management hasn’t done anything about it. It is a bit of a puzzle piece because we don’t typically have roaches in Alaska.
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