So JJ and I splurged the other day and went to the fancy Brazillian buffet restaurant near Jing An Temple.  I have been to this place before and it is really nice.

For those of you that have never really eaten Brazillian food before or have never eaten in this Brazillian style environment, it is really cool.  There is sort of a small buffet section in one part of the restaurant.  They have your basic needs; salad fixings, a few sides, potatoes, some other small dishes and of course, desserts.  The main food for this buffet though is meat and if you love meat, then you will love this kind of restaurant (which is every man’s dream).  The waiters at this place continually stock up in the kitchen with a single slab of meet on a huge skewer.  The meat can be anything from beef, steak, duck, porn, chicken, you name it.  They go from table to table, slicing off a piece of the meat that is stuck to their ginormous skewer.   The waiters will basically serve a few tables, let the meat heat up again, go back to the kitchen, and stock up on another kind of meat.  In addition to meat, there is also french fries, onion rings, fried bananas, and occasionally some seafood (scallops, octopus).   By the end of the meal, you are guaranteed to be incredibly full and considering the place is one of the few semi-cheap places to get good high quality meat, I am to the point of pain when I am leaving this restaurant from the quantities of food I eat.

So anyway, JJ and I return to this restaurant a few days ago and everything seemed the same.  The restaurant is in this upscale area of Shanghai where tourists go, where everything is more expensive and where there are always beggars.  In fact, there are always several beggars immediately in front of this restaurant, crowding you when you enter and crowding you when you leave, pleading for a few extra coins.  Actually, sometimes I get incredibly annoyed by these people because they are so much more ‘in your face’ than the typical beggars that you see in the U.S.  I guess we have a standard, even for beggars, which says that you cannot touch people, you cannot use your children to ask for money, you cannot use your disfigured sibling or your blind husband because he plays harmonica.  These rules, for one reason or another, are followed in the U.S. and are ignored in China.  So you get people, especially in front of this tourist / foreign / expensive restaurant begging you for money in the worst ways imaginable.

This reminds me of a funny story that happened to me the very first time I went to this restaurant, a very short time after I came to Shanghai.  We went with a huge group, like 12 people.  It was kind of the first time that I socialized with people and got to know some of the foreigners who I later became good friends with.  So we were happily enjoying our food (and our meat) when we noticed that a guy outside of the restaurant was somewhat close to our large table, which was facing this window on the perimeter of the buffet.  He had some kind of notepad and he was repeatedly looking at our table, and in fact, looking at, what I originally thought, was me.  It was really strange and since at that time, I was not as familiar with the begging practices that I described above, I and others at the table were very curious what this middle-aged man was doing.

So eventually, after about 20 minutes, he revealed his notepad and we all were in hysterical laughter.  The notepad showed a primitive sketch of one of the guys from Romania (who was one of my roommates).  The sketch was actually not really bad, I kind of liked it.  But now the artist, if we can call him that, was trying to get the subject, the Romanian guy, to purchase the drawing of himself.  Quite a clever scheme this artist / beggar had going for himself.  So initially, the Romanian guy refused, mostly because the artist / beggar was asking for way too much money.  But then we started to discuss with each other the actual worth of this quick sketch and we all realized that this sketch was only valuable to the Romanian guy.  It was not valuable to another group of people or another stranger at another table.  It was a stupid sketch and nobody in their right mind, except for the Romanian guy, would buy it.  So once we discovered this fact, it was very easy to just say, ‘Ok if my price is too high, then go sell that sketch to someone else who wants a drawing of me’.  I think eventually he ended up buying it for a dollar or two dollars, but that whole situation was pretty funny.

Ok so back to the present.  I wanted to mention what happened to me this time that I thought was really funny.  So everyone knows how buffets work.  You get a shitload of food, usually too much, you try a bunch of things, and more often than not, your plate is not absolutely clean.  You always have a bunch of food that you either tried and did not like, you became stuffed during the process of eating or you simply just chose NOT to eat the food for no particular reason.  This is just an inherent property of buffets.  You cannot avoid that and the restaurants take that fact into consideration when they buy food, charge higher prices, etc. Ok, so during the course of this dinner, I fell into this trap, and despite being a pretty distinguished buffet eater myself, I had a plate full of shit I did not want to eat.  I had pieces of sausage, a few pretty substandard dishes, and just some food that was not good for me.  Nothing out of the ordinary, just normal buffet eating.  So one of the waiters who is serving meat says to me (in very broken English, presumably because was actually Brazillian) something like “Do you like that? (pointing to some stuff on my plate that I had mentally chose not to eat)  Because if you are not going to eat that, the chef is not going to be happy that you are wasting food.  You should not waste food, you should get small quantities, you should eat only what you can eat.”  OK, and let me be completely clear.  I did not have a huge plate of shit I did not want.  This was a normal plate with mostly small pieces of dishes I tried and did not want.  I had eaten most of the food, this was just completely normal.

So after he left, I was pretty confused because I did not know if the guy was trying to be humorous but did not come across that way due to his broken English OR if he was actually telling me to not waste food, in which case he was being incredibly rude.  Even if I was wasting food, which I was NOT, you don’t tell a customer in that kind of situation.  This is a friggin buffet, not a fancy shmancy free dorm cafeteria.  This is a buffet.  I pay for eating unlimited food.  I don’t pay for eating only the food I take on my plate.  I don’t pay for following the buffet rules.  I am at a friggin buffet, it’s as simple as that.

So then I overhear a group of Britains at a table beside us.  I assume one of the members of the group lived in Shanghai and the others were visiting China and he was showing them around.  Anyway, I could listen in on their conversation, which I accidentally do from time to time due to the rarity of understanding a conversation at a table beside my own, and I heard the host explaining to everyone NOT to waste food.  He went on to say that if you take too much food and they don’t like what you are doing, and you are obviously not eating the food that you are taking, they will try and weigh your food, assign a price and charge you for the food you are ‘wasting’.  Now I guess I am not completely against this policy, because theoretically someone could just take all the food, not eat anything, and then say they can do anything they want.  But in a normal society with normal rules and normal behavior, this was a rule that should not have to be enforced and one I will never forget.

So remember folks, the next time you go to a buffet, (in China), don’t waste food!