On a recent trip with my wife to visit my youngest daughter, we ate at a breakfast buffet. When we were being seating, the waitress informed us that they did have bacon on the buffet and if there wasn’t any when we got there, they were cooking more. Then the waitress told us that someone had “stolen” from the bacon from the buffet. My wife was looking at the buffet as we were being seated and she saw a man getting practically all the bacon and putting it in a to-go container. I thought it was funny that she said he had stolen the bacon instead of taking the bacon. It made it sound like he hadn’t paid for it.
Soon we were at the buffet. There was plenty of other food to eat. The container for the bacon only had crumbs. They had link sausage and sausage patties if you wanted pork. They had CFS (country fried steak) if you wanted beef. They had all your traditional breakfast foods and I easily filled up my plate. But breakfast that morning didn’t seem complete without bacon.
Later, they brought more bacon. The bacon stealer was still in the restaurant. He had another to-go container and filled it up with more bacon almost as soon at they brought it out. Our table was right next to the station where the wait staff was located. They were going crazy that this man was taking all the bacon. I went back to the buffet and was able to find one piece of bacon. My wife was getting mad at the bacon stealer too. He was standing next to our table when my wife started complaining about him. I nodded toward him so she would know that he was there. She said she didn’t care. I didn’t either. It was about that time that I started eating my one piece of bacon. While I was eating it, I announced, “Man! This is good bacon! I wish I had some more!”
I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules about buffet etiquette. When buffets are working the way they are designed, they don’t usually run out of anything. I have experienced a couple of exceptions. I would sometimes visit a lunchtime pizza buffet at a restaurant that didn’t have their timing down right for when to start putting pizza on the buffet. It seemed like every time we would go, everyone would be waiting on the edge of their seats and even standing around the buffet waiting like vultures for any pizza. They would bring out a pizza cut into 10 slices with 20 people waiting for food. Was it proper to take more than one slice? Who knows. Eventually a reasonable amount of pizza would finally make it to the buffet about the time that everyone’s lunch hour was over.
The worst cases seem to be crab legs on a Chinese buffet. Just like with the pizza, everyone is lurking around the buffet waiting for fresh crab legs. Because of the way they come connected, it’s easier to grab a lot of crab legs and not feel so guilty. And with Chinese buffets, there is always the fear that they might actually run out of crab legs. With our recent experience, it seems like bacon was the crab legs of the breakfast buffet.