What If Restaurants Charged Us For Not Cleaning Our Plates?

Rachel Tepper Paley
·Editor
Updated

Photo credit: Julia Bainbridge

Are your eyes too big for your stomach? Anyone who has frequented an all-you-can-eat buffet can likely answer “yes.” We’ve all been guilty of piling our plates just a touch too high before.

That can translate to a lot of waste, and one eatery is taking a stand: Patrizietta, a restaurant in Losone, Switzerland with an unlimited lunch buffet, now charges diners a fee of $5.65 for not clearing their plates.

That’s pretty steep, especially when you consider that the buffet costs only $13.50 a plate.

“I wanted to send a strong signal,” the restaurant’s chef, Giovanni Tafuro, told the 20 Minutes newspaper. “It made me sick to see so much food being thrown out.”

Such fines are not without precedent. In 2012, a Chinese buffet-style restaurant in the United Kingdom announced it would fine diners who failed to clean their plates, to the tune of about $34.

We’re all for reducing waste, but how does one know they’ve had all they can eat until they’ve eaten, well, all they can eat? Seems like that line is a very easy one to accidentally cross. 

[via Eater]