NEWS
EVENTS
All-you-can-eat diners banned for eating too much
Thursday 4th October 2012 | Liam
A pair of “greedy” all-you-can-eat diners in Brighton were banned from an all-you-can-eat restaurant for eating all they could....twice a month for two years.
Two young men were banned recently from a Mongolian restaurant in Brighton for taking advantage of a misleading advertisement that suggested they could eat all they wanted. George Dalman and Andy Miles, both 26, visited the restaurant twice a month for two years, in order to take full advantage of the £12 offer.
But on their last visit to Gobi, the men were confronted by the manager of the restaurant for taking liberties. “How they believed that the £12 entitled them to an indefinite supply of unlimited food is beyond me,” said the baffled manager. He went on to call the technically paying customers “filthy pigs” who had allegedly started bringing their own buckets to sweep food into, and would then sit on the floor and gorge noisely and snort, after which they would lay down to rest and allowed piglets to suckle from their bloated teats which, the manager reportedly said, “justified the metaphorical connection to pigs”.
The restaurant owners stressed that there was a small print clause on the banner advertising the restaurant’s deal that “explicitly implied that 'all-you-can-eat' was a figure of speech relating to the amount of food the average person can eat in one five-hour sitting”. They added that most people were satisfied that once they had eaten and left the restaurant they did not need to come back two weeks later demanding more food. “Which is what the boys did,” said the manager. “For two flipping years!”
Dalman and Miles acknowledge that the small print was there but Dalman said he was short-sighted, and Miles reportedly claimed that he was illiterate. They dispute the claims that they “push and shuffle people from the barbeque area,” and deny that they threw a tantrum when the restaurant once ran out of buuz (a type of meat-filled dumplings). “That table flew through the window of its own volition,” said a disgruntled Dalman.
On the fateful night, when the two were officially barred, the restaurant co-owner, Peter Westgate, accused them of acting like sharks, and ordered them to stop “crawling around on the carpet nibbling the legs of fellow customers who they had mistaken for seals” and leave. After a brief scuffle – when Miles ran into the kitchen and began sampling dishes critically “like effin Gordon Ramsey” – the two were ushered out by armed police, and Dalman was heard screaming back into the restaurant: “But the sign said ‘all-you-can-eat’!”
Gobi’s website encourages customers to “select meats, seafood and vegetables from the buffet, add herbs and spices, then take it to the grill to be cooked - repeating the process ‘as many times as you wish’”. The restaurant insists this is not at all misleading.
By Liam McKenna
