"Haunts Me To This Day": 58 Moments Workers From All-You-Can-Eat Establishments Can't Forget

I don't work at a buffet, but *I was that guy*.

I'd been backpacking on the Appalachian Trail for a couple months (it's a 2,100 mile hiking trail that runs from Georgia to Maine, along the US Appalachian Mountain range). Been eating nothing but ramen & instant oatmeal since Gatlinburg. I was getting hungry, OK? I was having dreams about meat.

So my friend and I hiked down from the trail to this tiny town, Catawba, Virginia, that only has one restaurant, the Homeplace All You Can Eat Fried Chicken.

We walk in. We sit down. A waitress brings us a platter of fried chicken and a basket of homemade biscuits. And whenever we start running low, she *brings another platter.*

It's not like most buffets, where the food's bad and watery and sugary but at least it's unlimited. No. It's the *best fried chicken* I've ever tasted. Crisp and juicy and greasy and just perfect.

Me and my pal gorge on fried chicken. Eat at least 5lbs each. I'm starting to feel very uncomfortable, so when the waitress shows up with the next platter, I wave her off. She clears the table.

And then she comes back carrying a blackberry cobbler.

So we polish off the cobbler (it would have been impolite not to), pay our bill, grab our backpacks from the foyer & stand on the porch, contemplating the 1,500' climb back up to the trail. And it becomes obvious that there is no conceivable way we are climbing back up to the trail tonight.

So I go back inside and ask the hostess if there's anywhere to camp here in town, and she tells me, "you're welcome to sleep in the gazebo out back." Apparently, this happens *all the time.*

I have taken two things from reading this thread: (1) Buffet restaurants are disgusting; (2) I wish I was at a buffet restaurant right now.

Chinese buffet: a man and wife come up to the seafood section and take every piece of snow crab in the tray. They overloaded three plates forming a twisted mountain of crab legs, claws, and carapace bits over 8 inches tall.

Nothing else, just every crab bit in the house. Then they sat down in silence, staring at each, and feasting. I mean how shellfish can you be?!

I watched a fight break out between a customer and a manager at an all you can stack restaurant.(You pay for a plate, and you can take as much as you can stack on a single plate) Anyway this guy had his plate stacked about 12+inches high with food. As he was reaching for a serving spoon he dropped his plate. He demanded another and the manager got pissed and told him he shouldn't have stacked it so high. He refused to give the man a refund, he pointed to a sign that said something about paying for dropped food. Apparently wasn't the first time this had happened.

Pizza Buffet.

Dude came in for lunch buffet and ate a pretty good amount. Fell asleep in his booth for a few hours then ate buffet again for dinner.

A few years back when Golden Corral first got the chocolate fountains, I went there and was going to try it out. As I was walking up to the fountain and I started to contemplate what I was going to have, a toddler takes his drink and just pours that into the fountain and ruins it. So anyways, the manager comes over and is going ballistic because they had just set it up for the day and now they would completely have to replace the chocolate. Shortly after, this man comes up and decides he wants some chocolate brownies, but he can't as the machine is being purged in the back of the place, so what does he do? The guy just puts his tray down and leaves the restaurant, goes to the toddler's family's car and slashes their tires. He was never caught after that.

That man was a different kind of devoted that the world needs.

I was at a buffet, a pretty good one, they had this delicious king crab legs. I wanted some so looked over to see that they were out. And I looked around to see this big guy waiting. I think"oh, he has the patience I dont have" so I leave with the intent to come back. I catch the sight of him taking all from the recently refilled crab dish, I was mad but he waited so you know. I check back for the crab legs again to see that gluttonous greedy waiting for the crabs again. Just that kind of inconsideration doesn't disgust me so much as angers me.

All you can eat prime rib special. First round you got prime rib, veggies, mashed potatoes. Subsequent plates just prime rib. Guy did 8 plates.


Lady came in with two small kids. Said she wouldn't pay for two kids because they wouldn't be eating. We were curious where the kids went at one point and found she was feeding them under the table like dogs.

My little brother nearly got kicked out of a Ryans steakhouse. When he was like 12 he had a crazy high metabolism and put away like 5 steaks from their buffet at once. Went to get a 6th one and the guy grilling them up forbid him from getting another one. Manager was called, my dad got pissed, brother got his 6th and 7th steak. Was a good night.

Not an employee -- but one time at an Izzy's I saw this surrealistically obese man, hard to believe he could even walk, circling the buffet same time as I was, so I couldn't help but check out his technique. He loaded his plate with mountains of all the high carb stuff, a Matterhorn of macaroni salad, that kind of thing. Then he got another plate that he loaded up with jojo potato wedges, went over to the dessert bar and drowned the potatoes in chocolate syrup. That's when we made eye contact, and it was the saddest thing I've ever seen. Eyes sunk deep in his fat, and they were fairly crying out "Don't judge me. I can't help it." Haunts me to this day.

7 years of pizza buffet experience. I've seen salad bowls full of ranch. I've seen huge gluttonous Southern Baptist preachers with a stack of pizza because they're too fat and lazy to make that many trips. We had a regular who came in 2 times a week. We called him "belly shirt guy" who would stack a whole pizza on each plate per trip on top of unlimited pasta. His gut hung down below his shirt. Great turn around for him though because he started eating salads every trip. By the time I left the man has lost a good 75 lbs and actually looked healthy.

Once witnessed a man eat 4 plates of food piled high (I'm talking southern food, so it was all fried foods) claim he was having a heart attack and clutch his chest, then let the biggest, most foul smelling fart I have ever experienced.


After he laughed about it, he continued to go back and eat two more plates of entrees, and a plate of desserts.

When I worked at Olive Garden someone had SIXTEEN (16) bowls of the never ending pasta. They threw up in the lobby. They also weren't huge, before you ask.

I don't work there, but I was once a customer at a Golden Corral in Florida and a morbidly obese guy came in. He was as wide as the table at which he was sitting. He pulled out a bath towel and tucked it in like a napkin. This dude came to play.

Went to a pizza buffet and the table next to us was a couple with a really chubby kid that looked around 10 or 11. He proceeded to put down plate after plate of food. Later I went to the bathroom and he was in the stall puking his poor adolescent guts out. The saddest part was seeing him on my way out working on another plate.

Still think about that every time I go to a buffet almost 20 years later.

I was at a Chinese buffet and a chubby dude was just quietly eating his food when all of a sudden his chair just fell apart under him and he fell straight to the floor.

That dude...was me. Talk about embarrassing. The whole restaurant was full of cheap furniture. The replacement chair was wobbly. I was there with my little Asian friend. He got a good laugh out of it.

Edit: ha ha...loving the replies! Either heartfelt support or calling me a disgusting fatso.

Once my husband took me out with some people from his lab to a local BBQ place's All-You-Can-Eat Rib Night. I don't like ribs so I ordered off the menu but everyone else got the ribs, and they decided to have a rib-eating contest. I don't remember how much the winner ate but it was really impressive. While this group of people was snarfing ribs like a pack of starving wolves, a waiter came over with another plate and asked who needed more. A waiter who was departing replied, 'Just throw them at the table, someone will eat them.' It was one of the funniest things I ever heard.

Been working in a chinese buffet for 6 years, here's my top:

-Kid putting chocolate pudding in his plate, licked the big spoon used for pouring it (the one used by everybody), and put it back in the pudding... I saw him and had to change everything.

-Guy about 18 years old at the ice cream counter, didn't have time to react and puked in the ice cream cans and on the floor. Looked at it, said nothing, and just walked away back to his table.

-Drunk dudes coming it around 6PM, they ate full plates in like 20 minutes, and puked everything under their table. We had to move every client out of this big section (capacity of about 60 places) because the smell was so bad. I was the one that had to put a mask on to clean everything.

-Extremely fat guy brought a big bag of candies (kind of smarties), took it out of his pocket, put a on of em on his desserts, and put the candy bag back in his pocket. I was his waiter and I think he told me about 4 times that we should have these candies in the buffet so he wouldn't have to bring his own.

-Old lady putting a plate full of chicken wings in her purse (probably to bring back home or something)... no bags nothing, just bare chicken wings directly in there.

-A regular client asking me where was the coffee flavored cake (we have a rotation for desserts, so that cake wasn't there that day). I told him and he asked me if I could get some for him in the back store. After he insisted like 3x, I finally gave up and grabbed a piece in the fridge and gave him.

-We charge the drink (2.50$) but it's all you can drink. We see plenty of people drinking about 10 full glasses of Pepsi and they complain when I bring the bill and we charge them 2 bucks and a half for it. Some even insisted to talk to my manager.

-We serve take-outs, and someone came to get his order. He looked at the buffet and asked me ''do you think I could grab something to eat real quick?'' while smiling. We often get this asked as a joke, so naturally I play their game and answered ''yes of course!''. The guy literally walked over there, took an entire egg from our salad bar, ate it in one bite, then came back to pay his take-out... I had no idea what to say, and he just left like that.


I probably have more but those are the most obvious one. We have to deal with puke at least once a week (usually kids though). I don't even care anymore and find these situations rather funny.


EDIT: Just thought of another one! We have an employee who does omelettes and eggs on demand, and one guy came and asked my coworker for eggs over. Naturally she asks ''1 or 2?'', and the guy answered ''8''. She initially thought it was a joke, but the guy wasn't laughing at all. She finally did all 8 eggs for him, and he ate them all in like 2 minutes.

Witnessed a family of 4 at a Yo Sushi create multiple mountainous stacks of those lil plates on their table. Some were *chin height*. Plot twist though, they wasted a disgusting amount of it (I don't think they really understood how it worked) and were actually shocked when the waiter took a literal ten minutes counting everything up and handed them a £400 bill. Was a definite *did that just happen* moment.

Not a worker but a patron. When I was 14 I ate 7 platefulls of clams. Not just filling the surface area either, but piled high. I got so sick from the bad quality asian buffet clams that I was throwing up clams out my nose. That was the most disgusting act of gluttony that I ever participated in.