Avoid This Buffet Habit That Makes Other Diners Instantly Lose Their Appetite

Buffets — love 'em or hate 'em — are a great way to fill your stomach and feed your family with a wide range of food in an inexpensive way. Though cities like Las Vegas have recently welcomed in a slew of high-priced, over-the-top, luxury buffets filled with steaks, seafood, and caviar, for the most part the traditional buffet is still an affordable, family-friendly experience.

In spite of those cost benefits, buffets can be dicey when it comes to hygiene. Even with those sneeze guards, there are a lot of hygiene concerns that might make you think twice about paying for the standard buffet experience. Utensils get mixed up, plates get reused (which can cause cross contamination), and food sits out in the open for hours. While there are plenty of buffet etiquette rules out there — from cutting in line to double dipping to ignoring serving utensils — by far, the worst buffet etiquette violation in our opinion is allowing children to serve themselves.

By no means is this an indictment on bringing your children to a buffet, because that's the beauty of the buffet itself. Restaurants like Golden Corral (the struggling chain did make a huge comeback), Cici's Pizza, and Sizzler have a little something for everyone — which might allow the parents to get more adventurous while the kids stick to chicken fingers, fries, and pizza. The problem is when our beloved children frolic through the buffet line without supervision. That's when all sorts of buffet hijinks can negatively affect everyone else's experience.

Kids are kids, and kids are going to do kid things. But the buffet, with all its hygiene, germy, and unsanitary potential, is a place where kids need a little help. Your 7-year-old might not understand that the tongs in front of the chicken fingers are meant to be used instead of their fingers. The yummy ranch sauce isn't a freestyle playground for double dipping. And the chocolate fountain shouldn't be treated like a water faucet. Inherently, all-you-can-eat buffets present sanitary issues. That's the risk you take when you visit a buffet restaurant. However, it's easy to avoid adding on to all these potential problems by just accompanying the kids so they don't meander through the buffet line unsupervised.

The best buffets do everything they can to make the experience clean and healthy — from serving oysters on ice to replacing certain food items after a certain amount of time to simply wearing sanitary gloves and offering service with a smile. And, despite their inherent issues, we have no problems with buffets — especially the ones who put care into their food and service. Plus, as we've said, buffet restaurants are ideal spots to take the kids for a cheap, family-friendly meal. We just have one request: Don't let the kids go through the buffet alone. It's a minor, easy rule of etiquette to follow to make sure both you and other buffet customers have the best experience possible.