Great moments in dining


A man pickets a restaurant when they tell him to stop eating so much at their ‘all you can eat’ fish fry.

I must admit that the idea of stuffing yourself with food just to maximize your money’s return seems to me to be totally bizarre. I just don’t understand the mentality. Do such people see an ‘all you can eat’ sign as a challenge? Surely after awhile, the food just doesn’t taste good? Why sacrifice your sense of taste and even your health just because there is no marginal cost to the extra food that you eat? Is the purpose to boast to their friends about how much they were able to eat? Do they similarly stuff themselves when they eat at friends’ homes because the food is free?

I have little patience with the restaurants as well. I don’t know why these things are even advertised as ‘all you can eat’, which seems like deliberately encouraging people to gorge. This labeling may also discourage those who do not eat a lot, who will rightly suspect that they are subsiding the massive eaters. These meals should be labeled as a buffet with a flat fee.

Comments

  1. says

    hahaha, the best part is that it sounds like the restaurant cut him off more because of his unpaid tab than anything else.

    As far as “all you can eat”, I think that, regionally at least, that is going out of favor. I can think of multiple buffets around here which do not advertise themselves as “all you can eat”.

    I have a couple of friends who got told by a Chinese buffet that they wouldn’t put up with it anymore, but it wasn’t because of gluttony per se (in fact, one of the couple was a relatively skinny girl). They would go at the tail end of the lunch buffet (which was significantly cheaper), and then stay until the dinner buffet came out (which was pricier but had more expensive items), and gorge themselves on crab legs. After doing this a few times, the owner came out and was like, “Look, I lose money every time you do that. If you want crab legs, from now on you have to pay the dinner buffet price.” heh…

  2. Drivebyposter says

    He ate everything at an all you can eat buffet (for free so far) and is mad about it. Huh. That’s….some special thinking.

  3. Kevin says

    To be fair, he can easily burn 4,000 calories in a day (ran his stats through a burn calculator), so what he ate may in fact be right in line with a typical dinner for him. However, since they don’t mention the size of the pieces, we don’t actually know how much he ate.

  4. Tracey says

    When I was a kid, my parents would *only* take us to all-you-can-eat places (because they were cheap, not because we couldn’t afford to eat). Moreover, my mother wouldn’t let us eat breakfast or lunch on going-out day because she wanted to maximize her profits off the restaurant as several famished kids gobbled down food.

    Now that I’m an adult, I pass by the ‘all-you-can-eat’ places and think to myself that if it’s $6.99 to gorge yourself…they’re not feeding you prime rib and lobster, now are they? I’m also not at all surprised when those places consistently fail health inspections. When your margin of profit is that small, you don’t sweat the cleanliness or adequate staffing.

  5. Blondin says

    When your margin of profit is that small, you don’t sweat the cleanliness…

    Or clean the sweatiness…

  6. left0ver1under says

    Buffet restaurants can only offer “all you can eat” for either or both of two reasons:

    (1) they are expensive

    (2) low quality food

    Either way, do you really want to eat there?

    And considering the ease with which Hepatitis A and B can be transmitted, would you really want to eat at one? Yes, I know that HepB cannot be directly passed by food, but it can be passed by saliva and other bodily fluids (e.g. sneezing, unwashed utensils).

  7. says

    Yes, I know that HepB cannot be directly passed by food, but it can be passed by saliva and other bodily fluids (e.g. sneezing, unwashed utensils).

    Do you have any references documenting this type of food borne or aerosol transmission?

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