I worked at Wendy's when they had salad bars. You could get a single-serving bowl (they used to serve eat-in chili in Styrofoam bowls, and the Large doubled as a chili bowl), or "all you can eat" platters. (The Taco Salad bottom plate.)

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, 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, 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."

Picked up some fish and chips recently. Saw they had “all you can eat” on Wednesdays.

So I asked “What is the most that someone--”

“Eighteen pieces of fish and three plates 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.”

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 they caught him doing it for the fourth time in a month, management finally kicked him out.

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 entire pizza each for themselves for the entire 3 hours we were offering the buffet. It was really quite a performance.

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.

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, 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.

There was this man who used to come into our restaurant who clearly 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 86 him, 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 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!

Pickle Boy, wherever you are today, I really hope you got the help you so desperately needed. But I was not sorry to see you go.

I worked at a pizza buffet for 2 years during college. I have a number of stories, but the one that I will always remember is the guy who 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. Nothing out of the ordinary happens until 9 rolls around, where it was still commonplace for people to be finishing up and eating what pizza was still left. 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's the next one coming out? I never got any." I let him know that we close at 9 and we cant really 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 seamed mad, but it wasn't unheard of, as being a cheep 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 whats going on, but I grab the pusher and follow him out the door. I learned later on that the customer started flipping out, throwing the register and a fishbowl. He grabbed a broom and swung that around, hitting the girl behind the counter.

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 choke-pushed him back. He came at me next and I was really really close to taking a swing at his knees or something before the other manager came and saved me. I won't forget the glossed over look in his eyes as he came after me. Freaks me out to this day. And all over some pizza.

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 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,

Went as a customer to a Golden Corral. I'm 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.

I managed a buffet in a casino in Reno for a few months. Had this family come in... mom, dad, two little kids. I get called over to the table because the mom had thrown up on her plate/table and wanted us to take it away and clean it up.

I asked if she was okay, and she said she always throws up when she eats cheese. She had gotten herself an enchilada (it was Mexican theme night). WTF lady, 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. Apparently she wanted to keep eating after throwing up, which I thought was really gross. I had them sit at another table so they could all keep eating. 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 refuse. Dad gets in my face and starts shouting that I'm just a racist and his wife makes loads more money than I do. I call security and they storm out, pulling pictures off the wall and shattering them on the floor, and dad also picked up a vase and broke it. The two kids are running around and banging on the walls.

Security finally shows up after they ran off, I have to do a report, and they were put on the 86 list. I hate people.

I worked as a server at a Chinese buffet and 4 things came to mind instantly.

1. 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.
2. 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 "thats the best part." Then proceeded to drink the sauce like it was the milk after a bowl of cereal.
3. A young mother complained to me because the crab meat and cheese that we serve on the buffet made her child sick and they threw up. Her child was an infant. Not even a year old. I'm no child care expert but baked artificial crab meat and mozzarella can't be good for a baby.
4. The restaurant was raided by ICE 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.

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 first place, but this solidified my stance to never go back.

A buffet near where I live just got shut down for serving coyote meat and labeling it as other meats.

At one point myself and two 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 that 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 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.

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" food out.

My parents owned an all you can eat buffet and I was there every day of my life from 4-14. My favorite horror story is when a couple came in to eat (obviously). They loveeed the crab legs and every time my mom put some out, they took it ALL. Also, just a reminder, crab legs are expensive! Forget 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 into 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 (20 now). I just remember looking at the mess and feeling really 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.

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 just a bit dim. 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 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.

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....

I used to manage a KFC with a buffet. On Tuesdays, we had senior citizen discount so we would have livers and gizzards on the buffet. Typically, they went pretty well but not insanely fast. One day, we just couldn't keep the gizzard pan full which made no sense. There were only maybe six people in the dining room so unless they were big time gizzard eaters, one full pan should have lasted a while.

I had the buffet worker put a fresh pan out and then watched as a woman walked up and filled a plate with an overflowing pile of gizzards. No big deal if she's actually eating that. It's her buttthat will feel the pain later.

As I kept watching, though, I saw her take the plate and dump all the gizzards in her purse. I went to her table to confront her and said that the all you can eat buffet does not allow for takeout. She screamed at me and said I was accusing her of lying and stealing. I pointed out that her purse was wide open and I could see the quart-size ziploc bag filled with gizzards. I grabbed the bag and threw them out while she screamed about never coming back and calling the manager (me) and calling the BBB.

Surprisingly, I never saw her again.

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.

I used to work at a buffet in a hotel.

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 situation. What some people will do to their kids, I swear.

Forgot to mention 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.

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, there was a 6 to 18 inch pile of chicken bones, crab legs, mashed potatoes, remnants of backed potatoes, etc.

Just disgusting.

Not a buffet worker but I was on holiday in the Caribbean and at the hotel there was an all you can eat buffet. I had finished my dinner and went up to the dessert station where it had self serve ice cream, and was in a queue behind two people.

The person at the front was by observation a mid 30’s Floridian woman. I myself was British and so was the person directly in front of me. Anyway, she gets a bowl, and takes the little ice cream scoop and LICKS it. Then scrunches up her face, goes to the chocolate flavor and DOES THE SAME THING AGAIN. At this point I’m just like, nah I’ll pass. The person behind already left and the one in front of me just muttered “you pig.”

She then turns to us with a confused expression, and says, “What, there’s water to wash it in anyway.”

So that’s how I lost my faith in humanity, don’t worry, I’d lost my faith in Floridians long before.

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 I'm fat, I need help?' My sister didn't react.

A few seconds later the lady fell down the stairs. There was blood and food everywhere.

I served at Golden Corral for 6 months and it was a God-awful place. You'd think it would be easy because you don't take orders, right? Wrong. Cleaning up the messes, bussing tables, getting drinks and clean plates, singing for birthdays plus side work definitely kept you busy.

Most of the customers weren't the greatest -- they made an appalling mess, let their kids run wild, didn't tip (we were paid $2.13/hr and needed tips) no matter how much you bent over backward for them. I saw so many unaccompanied kids reaching into the buffet serving dishes; I saw one kid dip his marshmallow into the chocolate fountain, lick the chocolate off, and put the same marshmallow back in over and over. The customers weren't normally very easy to deal with; rudeness was the norm there. For example people got into a physical fight over a table on Easter Sunday.

I used to cook for a breakfast buffet back in 2012-2013 as one of my first jobs. The restaurant in question I won't say the name of, but rhymed with Meat'n Bark.

Most of the customers that we got at the restaurant in general would be old people, however, a lot of the old people were very entitled and weird. I'll just make a list:

One old lady kept implying that I wasn't old enough to work there. I said, many times, my real age (17 at the time) and she kept saying "I bet they're just making you say that, you know it's illegal that they're making you do this!" and I'm just at a loss and don't know what else to tell this lady who is 100% confident that I must be under-age or working for free or something. I don't know what her goal was.

A guy taking all of the bacon and putting it on his plate, and then telling me to "look at that" (the empty spot where the bacon was before he took it). I said "Okay... looking? What am I looking for?" And he said, "Tell me what's wrong with that!" So I say, "Um, I don't know, is it not clean or something?" and he says, "THERE'S NO BACON LEFT! Aren't you going to re-fill it!?" And I'm like "Well that's weird it was just filled a couple minutes ago, someone must have took it all!" He couldn't put 2 and 2 together, and just said, "I don't know but there's no bacon there so what are we going to do about it?"

Some lady shows up to the buffet 15 minutes after it closes, while we're taking it down, and says, "Woah, woah what are you doing!? I haven't even had my food yet!" and we tell her politely that the buffet had closed 15 minutes ago, and the servers even give a "last call" on the buffet 15 minutes before it closes. Her response: "That's okay, I'll just go complain to your manager." I just said okay sounds good. In my head I'm like, what, you're going to tell my manager that the buffet closed 15 minutes ago? He knows.

Nothing huge but the same lady would come to the restaurant at least twice a week and complain about how crappy her service was each time and how the food is terrible. Finally one of the hostesses said, "If the service is so bad and the food is so bad then why do you come here multiple times a week?" That shut her up.

My wife and I went to a Sweet Tomatoes for a lunch date, unlimited salad and soup was 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. WTF, dude?

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 bloody strong. Which is a shame, because I love their chunky chicken noodle.

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 furious, 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.

While I was wasting years and thousands of dollars in the attempt to get a college education I worked at a Chinese Restaurant. The owners were awesome people and would feed us at the end of the shift.

Anyway, they had a buffet on the weekends and they had this one woman who was a regular. This lady could pack away the groceries.

When she showed, the Chinese servers would rush into the kitchen and yell, "She here! She here!" And the owners, who were also the cooks, would yell, "Oh no! Cook faster! Cook faster!" and then make a big show of cooking extra quickly.

Then the entire restaurant staff would watch her eat with great amusement.

Even by our American buffet standards, that lady could eat!

I bus at a slightly nicer restaurant. 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 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 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 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.

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 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 on a daily basis there that I smelled like dead fish nearly all the time, even after showering.

A long time ago, my mom and I picked up a friend of hers and we went to a local Chinese food buffet. This place had a thing where you could get a pound of food for $5 in a takeout container instead of sitting and eating at the restaurant if you want, so that was our plan.

The three of us were browsing around the buffet line with our takeout containers, adding what we wanted to them... and then I noticed my mom's friend doing something disgusting.

He was eating a chicken wing. Like, right in front of the buffet line, hiding his face behind his takeout container. And then he took the chicken bone and put it back in the buffet tray.

I walked over to my mom and told her what he was doing, and at first she thought I was joking. So 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!?" And he's like, "Don't worry, I do this all the time! They never notice!"

So of course both me and mom are panicking, worried that they're gonna call the cops or something because of this loser. We basically pretended to not know him and continued to fill up our containers the right way.

After a couple minutes, one of the employees walks up to my mom and tells 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 doesn't get him to pay for the food in his container and leave immediately, they'll be calling the police.

So of course mom tells him that we need to go. Now. And he just brushes it off like, "I don't care. They're not gonna do anything!"

Well, me and mom walked up to the front, paid for our containers, apologized, and walked out and left him in there. A minute later, you 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 an, "I'm never coming back!", to which they reply, "You're not allowed in here no more! We'll call the cops!"

So we're standing out by the car, waiting for him. Of course, we yell at him for being a piece of crap. We get in the car and the next thing you know, this idiot 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.

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 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.

My biggest story was at an all you can eat Chinese place. A rather rotund customer arrived and wedged herself into a booth. Besides being a grade-A nightmare to begin with, she had the gall to request the waitstaff brig her food since she didn’t want to get up from the table. I was bussing tables and watching from afar so I didn’t get directly involved. What ensued with utter karma for her being a crappy person to the staff and acting like she owned the place.

When she was finished eating, she could not physically get up or get out of her booth doing her being so stuffed and wedged in. I was told by her waiter that the look in her eyes when she had to deprecatingly ask for help was priceless. The manager eventually had to call the fire department to come remove the table from the floor to get her out. All the while she continued complaining and was a terrible customer. Didn’t leave a tip either because of “poor service” or something. I didn’t care too much because it’s a funny memory that gets me through the week to this day.