Buffeters, Listen Up

Okay, time to rant a little bit.

This is the Rude Eater rant.

About every other Sunday, my family and I go to a local Chinese buffet. It’s not your typical buffet where the food is substandard to what you can order on the menu. There is no menu, so the food is actually very good and plentiful.

There are probably over fifty items on this buffet. Everything from fried rice to duck. Everything that should be hot is hot and everything that should be cold is cold. The presentation is just right, both eye- and nose-pleasing as you move down the lines to shovel, er, spoon your favorites onto your plate.

There’s nothing wrong with the buffet itself. In fact, it has won several awards for the last nine years. No, the problem I have isn’t with the buffet. It’s with the people who partake in the buffet.

There is one particular dish on the buffet called Shrimp Combination. It has all kinds of vegetables, a light sauce and, of course, shrimp. At least it starts out with shrimp in it. Invariably, as soon as the pan of Shrimp Combination hits the buffet, some idiot, er, some consumer comes along and holds up the line while they pick out all the shrimp. It doesn’t matter that there are at least five other kinds of shrimp on the buffet, these people insist on picking the shrimp out of the Shrimp Combination.

That leaves just Combination. And it leaves me mad!

I mean, how rude can you get? I’d rather have someone burping uncontrollably around me when I eat, than have a rude food-picker destroy a dish that is clearly intended to HAVE SHRIMP IN IT when I go to eat it!

So, if you’re a food-picker, listen up. Take a spoonful of the dish and eat the entire thing. If it’s called Shrimp Combination – eat the shrimp combination. It’s polite, it’s nice, it’s the human thing to do.

So there…