Beef-eating couple gets the boot from restaurant

The choice may be yours at Chuck-A-Rama — but not all you can eat of it.

A West Valley couple on the Atkins diet found that out last week, when they were told they'd had enough of the roast beef during a meal on April 20 at the Taylorsville branch of the local buffet restaurant chain.

"I approached the manager and told him I thought it was 'all you can eat' and was told that it wasn't, it was a buffet," Isabelle Leota said Tuesday. "I thought they were one and the same."

The situation escalated when Leota, who said she felt humiliated, asked for their money back. The police ended up being called to escort them off the premises, and Leota and her husband, Sui Amaama, have hired a lawyer.

Since then, the couple have appeared on two national early morning shows, including ABC's "Good Morning America" Tuesday. Versions of their story have appeared in publications as far away as Australia.

All of this has given Duane Moss, the chief executive officer of Chuck-A-Rama, well, something akin to a bad case of indigestion as he waits to see if the 38-year-old company is going to be sued.

"Did I sleep last night? No. Do I worry about it? Of course I worry about it. It's a business. I have 600 employees depending on the direction we go," Moss said. "If I had it to do over again, I'd give him his money back. That's pretty obvious, isn't it?"

Nothing like this has happened at the chain, which has restaurants from Boise to St. George, since a customer helped himself to a tray filled with 18 pork chops back in the 1970s, Moss said. The police weren't called in then, though, he said.

The Chuck-A-Rama boss said he wants to set the record straight about the roast beef incident.

"We didn't kick them out for eating too much roast beef. That is wrong. They did eat large portions of roast beef to the point that we made note of it and told them, 'We just can't give you anymore,' " he said.

"They finished their meal. When they came up to the register demanding their money back, we told them we couldn't do it. Then they said, "We're not going to leave.' "

That's when the police were called.

"We still have never, ever called the police because someone ate too much," Moss said. "We called the police because someone wasn't leaving our lobby and we didn't know whether it would escalate into something more."