All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Horror Stories

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mattstaff
Feb 1, 2020 4:00 PM EST

Someone on AskReddit asked for buffet workers to share the very best and worst of their horror stories. The following snapshots of meals and adults having full-fledged childlike tantrums would make anyone's stomach turn. Buffets just have a knack for bringing out the insanity buried deep within people. 

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  • 01
    Text - which_spartacus • 179d S 1 Award 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. The thing that stuck it in my memory is that whenever they had finished with what they were going to eat, they would scrape their plate and use it again. Scrape their plates... onto the floor next to their chairs. So next to each chair
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  • 02
    Text - I bus at a slightly nicer resteraunt. On Fridays and Sundays we offer a prime rib and crab leg buffet, among a salad bar, hot and cold entrées, and a desert 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 in to the moment they left, they ate as many crab legs as they possibly could. Their server and I were clearing
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  • 03
    Text - 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 know 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 upon the table after they left. It was truly a sight to behold. What's more is after I wiped down the table and came back with settings, I had to get another rag to wipe down the table again because so
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  • 04
    Text - Gosupanda • 179d 3 1 Award Not mine but I had a buddy who was 400+ Ibs. 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.
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  • 05
    Text - Valkrine10 • 179d 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 quick 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 situat
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  • 06
    Text - sixpackshaker • 179d 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 left overs and pile them on a plate or tray, cover in ketchup and tartar sauce, 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.
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  • 07
    Text - lovelyyyrose1993 • 179d Went as a customer to a golden corral. Im walking to the chocolate fountain and 3 little girls step in front of me, and all 3 of them just go 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.. Employees turned it off immediately.
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  • 08
    Text - Vismungcg • 179d 3 2 Awards Buffet where I live got shut down for serving coyote meat and labeling it as other meats
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  • 09
    Text - natlach • 179d At one point myself and 2 other family members worked at a Golden Corral (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 the remained after a large group of children came through. My brother worked the steak station. He got these regulars that would tip him pretty well if he would prepare blue steaks for them. The very idea
    via u/Tristanmemes123
  • 10
    Text - RoxyFurious • 179d watched a man at the ponderosa 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.
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  • 11
    Text - Odogogod • 179d Picked up some fish and chips recently. Saw they had “all you can eat" on Wednesdays. Sol asked “What is the most that someone..." "18 pieces of fish and 3 plates (she held up this huge platter) of fries..every..single..Wednesday." "So he eats that exact order every week?" "Yes, and he goes to a different 'all you can eat' every day of the week. He got banned from the Chinese place down the road."
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  • 12
    Text - AnonymousCrime2 • 180d Not a buffet, but I worked at a pizza parlor that offered a lunch buffet of endless pizza. The lunch ran from 11am - 3pm. This gentlemen comes in(l think he was homeless), he 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 waddled fast to the bathroom and next thing I know I'm being told he ha
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  • 13
    Text - darkag|1 • 179d Not an employee or a customer, but we had a Chinese buffet shut down for a health code violation, which was employee was cutting veggies while taking a shit. To this day I still wonder if that means dude brought a bucket into the kitchen or veggies into the shitter and I honestly don't know which is worse.
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  • 14
    Text - EmmyTheSweet • 179d Not a worker - but I went to HomeTown 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. 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...
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  • 15
    Text - jessperk • 179d I worked at a Ruby Tuesday in center city Philly (first floor of the Liberty Place building). 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, 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
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  • 16
    Text - allhailkircules • 179d 3 1 Award I was once at an Old Country Buffet, 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 chessy 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
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  • 17
    Text - InfiniteLap • 180d I didn't work at an 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 down. 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 l'm fat, I need help?' My sister didn't react. A few seconds later the lady fe
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  • 18
    Text - DemocraticDoge • 179d So I work in an ʼall you can eat' using tablets. This is (according to my boss) 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 before hand that, if they leave food behind, because they ordered too much, they will have to pay extra. Depending on what they left be
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  • 19
    Text - ndkjr70 • 180d College friend worked at a chinese buffet. He said they caught a regular dipping his pizza in the wonton soup bowl (like, in the queue and not at his table) and eating it. Bite, dip, bite, dip, bite, dip. After the fourth time in a month he did it management finally kicked him out.
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  • 20
    Text - Roz-Boy • 180d Not an employee, but once I saw someone using their shirt as a bag and filled it with bbq chicken wings.
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  • 21
    Text - Zenkikid • 180d Not a worker but I once saw a grown man have a child like meltdown over the fact that he showed up to Soup Plantation too late and missed out on the biscuits and gravy
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  • 22
    Text - • 180d pm_me_nothing Worked in a buffet restaurant for a few weeks a while back. It was fairly common to see people do disgusting things like sneeze in the food or just poke their fingers in things like sauces to taste them. Even saw one guy literally drop a slice of pizza on the floor and after awkwardly looking around, he put it right back. Brought it up a couple of times, but the restaurant wasn't doing well, and we were told that we couldn't accept the losses to start throwing "good"
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  • 23
    Text - 1 Award Not a worker but.. 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 really embarrassed and
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  • 24
    Text - TACObracommander • 180d Not an employee, but I was standing behind a woman at Hometown Buffet. She was getting some lasagna or something, basically a really 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 thumb nail, and then fling it back into the pasta. I knew I shouldn't have been at Hometown Buffet in the firs
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  • 25
    Text - roxan1930 • 179d 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 literally 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, espec
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  • 26
    Text - m2toofly • 179d Family was gone and i saw their dirty plates with napkins crumpled on top so of course i clean it up and bus the plates, 15 mins later they come back and the mom starts yelling at me in spanish so i get my co worker to translate and basically her daughter's retainers were in the napkins and i already threw them away. She kept complaining about how they were $250+ so I literally had to dig thru a huge trashcan full of a sludge of food and drinks for 15 minutes . But fortuna
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  • 27
    Text - mysticbooka • 180d 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 take an entire pizza again and walk back to continue eating. They proceeded to do this over and over, grabbing an en
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  • 28
    Text - NightMgr • 180d 1 Award There was a fairly expensive restaurant in Dallas in the 80s called Southern Kitchen. About $25 per person back then with food served to the table. Really good stuff. They were famous for cinnamon rolls. The owner said he'd seen many, many women ruin expensive purses hiding those rolls. Man I miss that place.
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  • 29
    Text - UmbralApocrypha • 179d Not a worker, sorry, but the Golden corral 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
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  • 30
    Text - chilibreez • 179d S 3 Awards Not an employee, but 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 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
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  • 31
    Text - grwrnotashowrthought • 180d The professor of my college microbioilgy class was also a director at the state health department in charge of inspecting restaurants. The first thing she told us on day one was never ever eat at an all you can eat buffet.
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  • 32
    Text - edwadokun • 179d Not a worker but I was in China for a vacation at a new buffet. I made the mistake going 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 their table for about 6 people. Some guy at the table would constantly bring back more an
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  • 33
    Text - carlweaver • 179d I worked at a Shoney's 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
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  • 34
    Text - Indoorsman7 • 179d Back when Golden Corral had just introduced their chocolate fountain, I was eating there (not a worker). When I was done eating and going for dessert, while I was approaching the chocolate fountain I was interested in trying, I watched a kid sneeze directly into it. No attempt to cover his mouth, and his parents didn't seem to care either. I was no longer interested in trying the chocolate fountain.
    via u/Tristanmemes123
  • 35
    Text - Leigh_Lemon • 180d Obligatory "not a buffet worker", just a witness. We were waiting in line for the soft serve machine at Golden Corral. 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, doing literally everything but turning it to the right (which would have dispensed the ice cream). She's really perplexed by this. So she takes the next logical step, of course
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customer service retail gross cringe ridiculous disgusting food
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