All You Can Eat Chinese Restaurant Row

chinese restaurant charges extra for wastage All You Can Eat Chinese Restaurant Row

We all love pigging out at a good ‘All You Can Eat’ Chinese buffet, but sometimes however, things don’t always go as we planned. As anyone who eats out regularly is probably painfully aware of – if something seems too good to be true, then that’s usually because it is!

One customer, Beverley Clark, found that lesson out the hard way when she took her son and niece for an all you can eat buffet meal at the Kylin Buffet in South Shields.
This particular restaurant warns customers that if they do not finish the food on their plates then they will be asked to pay a £20 ‘wastage’ charge.

Clark was outraged when staff at the restaurant kept coming up to check if they had eaten all their food, she said she was warned that she was liable to the charge when her son Sam, 10, and niece, Toni, 6, left one spring roll, a piece of prawn toast and two onion rings on their plates.

Clark said in the Daily Mail, that she felt it was terrible customer service and wanted to warn other members of the public about her experience. In the end, she waited until the staff weren’t looking, wrapped the four items into a napkin and smuggled them out of the restaurant in her handbag!

Whilst you can completely understand why places with an ‘All You Can Eat’ offer have to have some kind of policy in place to protect them from people who just go over the top and waste loads of food just because they think that it is ‘free’. A little bit of common sense should be deployed in situations like this, it really doesn’t make people feel good if you are hassling them every five minutes trying to catch them out in order to land extra charges on their bill!

I can see why the Clark family would be a little peeved, I mean it’s not like they heaped mountains of food onto their plates and then left it lying there, it was only a couple of items left behind by young children, who, are notorious for not finishing all that they put on their plates. The restaurant really should have cut them some slack, instead they have lost what could have been a regular customer!

The Restaurant manager, Sam Fung, defended the policy however; he was quoted in the Daily Mail saying: “I accept that my staff should not have spoken to the family about the food on their plates more than once. However, they left a lot of food from the buffet on their plates and we have to charge for wastage of food. We stand by our policies.”