when vegas buffets go bad

I can remember my first experience with a LV buffet happened in 1990.  I was a teenager travelling with a friend and his grandparents.  It was the Circus Pukus breakfast ‘experience’.  An experience consisting of hundreds of sweaty, half asleep tourists corraled into a tiny dining hall and forced to sit elbow to elbow at gigantic plastic, cafeteria style tables.  The food on offer was a greasy, soggy mess only outdone by the psychotic, elderly Asian beverage waitress who would appear every 30 seconds to brutally yell in my ear:  “MO ORANGE JUICE? YOU WANT MO ORANGE JUICE?”.  In fact, I did want more orange juice. The tiny (no joke) shot glass sized serving was hardly enough to wet the inside of my mouth, let alone quench my thirst.

Times for me have changed (thank God).  I no longer have to slum at the cheapest buffet in town when choosing a dining option. 

It should be no surprise however, that buffets in general haven’t improved as much as perhaps they could.

From a review of the Round Table Buffet @ the Excalibur Hotel Casino:

First, one woman’s take on the general experience:

The next thing I noticed was that the plates are BLAZINGLY HOT. It’s like they washed them in boiling water and then dried them using a flame thrower. I picked up the plate and burned my hand. Before I could warn my young son he picked up a plate and dropped it in pain. The plates had to be quickly picked up and slid across the counter until they were cool enough to handle.
To add insult to injury a family behind us was getting impatient with us and the woman yelled at us: “Just pick up a plate and move on!!!”. My son tried to explain what had happened and my wife also tried to explain but I decided not to reward their rudeness by being helpful. I motioned to my wife to stop talking so this b-tch and her brood could experience the WHITE HOT PLATES for themselves. She grabbed a plate in disgust and then literally threw it away as it went crashing on the floor. I felt like saying “Hey lady just pick that plate up and move on….” but I decided nothing could be gained by further antagonizing her. My smirk and laughter under my breath at her getting her come-uppance was enough for her to see.

Then, another reader discusses the fine food on offer:

Beyond tasting bad, I got the distinct feeling that everything I put in my mouth was diseased. The “shrimp”, if they could be called that, looked less like they had been caught fresh, and more like they had died of AIDS. I’ve never seen shrimp that oddly thin before. Really, it looked like they had survived some sort of shrimp holocaust. Same with the “clams”. The meat from the carving station was so tough I couldn’t cut it with my knife, but the effort was rewarded by a taste that suggested the flesh was infected with the prions that cause Krutchfield-Jacobs disease. The chickens that gave their lives for this dinner service likely came one of those Chinese industrial farms that are responsible for influenza pandemics.

This same reader complimented his fellow diners thusly:

Never have I seen so many people in the same room eating food while a lit cigarette dangled from their mouth. But this was also the only “restaurant” where such a practice would actually improve the taste of the food, or at least mask the odor of decay. Beyond them, I was also treated to a fair share of trailer-trash in wedding dresses bragging about how much they drank at Bennigan’s the night before, and folks who looked like they were missing 9 to 12 chromosomes (though I am happy to report that the chromosome that enables one to find a store that still sells fanny packs was certainly still present and active in most of them). Overall, my fellow diners helped me to understand what it would have been like to take the short bus to elementary school.
To wrap up:
Food: Disgusting and Diseased.
People: Mongoloid.
Overall: I want to kill myself.

Ah, the comic gold mine that is un-moderated review sites.

Find more hilarious stories of buffet (and room) woe at Rate Las Vegas