Life is Funny

Oh this is a favourite one for me…

How to get rich, while making customers sick. “BAD Buffet Tricks and Secrets”. It could be a book that would probably fly off the shelves. Well actually, maybe a lot of buffet owners already know these things, so it would be nothing new to them.

What I can’t understand, is why buffet food in cheap divey places is allowed to be surved. The ingredients were fine before they were prepared. It’s not like there was a chicken walking around somewhere that had a bad taste disease before it got shipped off to the restaurant, was it?  Was the tomato spoiled when it was picked off the plant?

How is it that they can take these ingredients, do what they do to them (over cook them, poorly season them, let them sit for 6 or 8 hours steady, etc) and totally ruin the food?

The buffet kitchen must be a garbage factory. Good food comes in the shipping/receiving door, it’s processed, and turned into foul, cheap tasting food, riddled with toxins and bacteria and served, all for the low price of $12 for dinner.

So I’m going to poke a little fun here, but you will have to wonder if any of these suggestions are actually true?

HOW TO GET RICH WHILE MAKING CUSTOMERS SICK

This is a satire comedy routine for entertainment only..
DO NOT FOLLOW ANY OF THESE SUGGESTIONS!

Suggestions for the restaurant owner who wants to run a buffet for profit and doesn’t care about making his customers sick.

1. Any food that you have at home that is expiring or spoiling, bag it up and bring it to the buffet restaurant. You can come up with a dish that someone will eat.

2. Advertise a 500 menu item buffet table. Remember! salt is 1 item, pepper is 1 item, sugar is an item, water is an item, coffee is an item, creamers are an item, sweetener packets are an item, what’s that 7 items so far? Ketchup is an item, on, and on, and on…  This way you can fool people into thinking you have a lot of food items, meanwhile all you have is 50% condiments, and 50% food.

3. Keeping food from getting dried out after sitting for 6 to 8 hours isn’t easy. Those heat lamps cause the moisture to evaporate. Sure, you could probably just frequently cook fresh food, enough to meet the demand and frequently replace old food with new, but why go through all that work?  Warm up everything just before lunch hour, and let it sit all day long until 9am.  Add water, LOTS of water. Infact, if you’re worried that you’re watering down the dishes too much, just add more spice, and more water. Water and spice all day.. Everytime the food looks old and dry, throw more watery sauce on it. That will keep it mystery of how old the food is…

4. Instead of option 3, of over-liquifying and manually re-hydrating your dried out old food.. You could simply undercook it!  Cook the food 1/2 way, and eventhough the lunch crowd will probably get sick, they are paying a cheaper price anyway.  This way the food can sit for 5 hours under the lights, and by dinner, hopefully the food will be fully cooked. Remember, if you purposely undercook the food, by the time dinner rolls around, not only will the food be cooked at 120 degrees by the heat lamps, it will also not look dried out! This way the higher paying dinner crowd will get what they are paying for..

5. Don’t buy fresh food from restaurant suppliers. Instead, you can buy food from the discount produce rack at the grocery store.  Look for dented cans, even if they do not have labels.  While you’re at it, put on some ripped clothes and get food from the food bank. Just because you’re a restaurant owner, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t save every last penny you can.. Besides, the customers aren’t looking into the kitchen, so they don’t know where your food comes from..

6. Buy as much pre-packaged food as you can. For instance, fool customers into thinking you’ve prepared nice dishes. Your spaghetti sauce can come out of a big bulk Ragu can. Make lots of kraft dinner and melt some mozerella cheese food product (not real cheese, the kind that has an edible wax additive) all over it, to give the appearance that its just like momma use to make.

7. Those wasteful customers! Watch out when you clean plates with food on it. The 5 year old kid who drooled all over his deep fried chicken leg but didn’t eat it… Go ahead and bring that plate back into the kitchen. 30 seconds in the deep fryer, and it can be put back out again.

8. Put things out on the buffet that you KNOW no one will eat. Stale shrimp with the shell still on is a good one. Make sure you put lots of icky sauce cuz no one will want to peel the shrimp skin off because of the sauce mess.  Put out octopus, whole.. squid with the ink sacks still in them. Any type of seafood that mainstream people do not eat. Then advertise “Seafood buffet $19.99″. When people show up expecting crab, mussels, peeled shrimp and lobster, you can snicker as you give them other “things” that come out of the ocean that are prepared horribly.  Imagine, tuna is seafood — who cares that it came in a can and you shaped into a boneless filet with some garnish on it, these customers do not know anything.

9. Salad bar!  Do you know that one regular bottle of salad dressing with extra water, vinegar, salt, and pepper can yield 18 bottles of the same salad dressing without sacrificing taste?

10. As the owner of a buffet restaurant, you must understand, this is a WAR. You know the customers are showing up to prove to you that they can eat 3X the amount they pay. When they pay $12, they expect to eat $36 worth of food. I know some people might try to tell you that on average it does work out, because some people eat LOTS, but some people eat hardly anything..

Don’t listen to reason this way.. Instead, you do your job of serving substandard product and see how many people you can charge this way before you run out of customers. If you are lucky, some people will even come back two or three times after forgetting about their gastroinstestinal illnesses.

P.S. You’ll have to buy the book, if you want to read things like:

a) How to deep fry foods in cooking oil that is more than 2 years old and never filtered. How fish, chicken, potatoes and more can be deep fried in one vat, and the extra dormant flavor just makes everything taste great.

b) How 80% of everything you serve should be breaded, then battered, then floured, then deep fried. Serving chicken balls? The chicken piece can be the size of a dime, but you can end up with a tennis ball sized ball! By the time they realize what happened, it will be too late.

c) How to serve 37 different types of cheap potatoes with only 2 meat products 

d) How dog and cat food can be made to work for you and your restaurant’s bottom line

e) How stray animals found out in the rear of the restaurant can be useful.

f) How hot dogs and spam can be popular alternatives to the other junk you’re serving

g) How to shave a roast so thinly that people can almost see through the meat! How to turn one 10 pound roast into over 2,500 servings!

Look, don’t get mad at the author for this article. I’ve eaten at so many substandard places over the years, that some of them truly do use this tactics to save a buck. The worst part is, that the public allows it to happen and the health authorities are very lazy at fixing them. They hand out warning after warning, but very little gets done, and I bet there are bribes out there everyday.

If you eat at a restaurant, and within 2 to 4 hours you feel sick, you’re probably the victim of food intoxification or food infection. This is why I applaud www.foodsafe.ca for coming up with a real plan to fix these problems from occurring.