The buffet is back, stretching dollars and swinging crab legs

The buffet was skimmed during the pandemic. Even as diners sneaked into restaurants covered in hand sanitizer, a model of eating based on shared serving spoons and eating seasoned with the breath of strangers seemed like a goner.

But the all-you-can-eat buffet, symbol of America’s love of choice and penchant for excess, will not be denied. From stacks of crab legs in posh Las Vegas casinos to pans of fried chicken in small-town Southern restaurants, the buffet is back, baby.

“The media called buffets zombie companies — we didn’t know we were dead,” said Lance Trenary, the CEO of gold bead, whose 360 ​​restaurants offer unlimited servings of 150 different items for less than $20. “But we’re the comeback kids.” So far, we’re turning up about 20 percent.

At a time when inflation has driven up the cost of both groceries and restaurant meals, the newfound popularity of a cheap chain restaurant buffet can be explained as a value proposition. But at the most lavish spreads in Las Vegas, where dinner can cost $79.99 before cocktails and tax, reservations remain hard to come by and wait times can exceed two hours.

The demand is so strong that Bellagio last month it reopened its signature buffet for dinner, with 120 choices. The Bacchanal buffet Caesars Palace, the largest in Las Vegas, recently received a nearly $10 million facelift and added two extra days to its brunch schedule.

“Americans like big things. That’s all,” said Allison Corona, a data analyst from Pittsburgh, who recently traveled to Las Vegas with her husband and friends for four buffets for four days. “We just like more. I’m not saying that’s good. I’m just saying it’s who we are.”

Buffets speak to an American food culture that values ​​consistency, value, and choice. They can make people of modest means feel rich, if only for an hour or two. They provide culinary road maps for recent immigrants and culinary tourism for those who haven’t traveled much. A buffet can be as communal as a church picnic.

Buffets also serve that secret spot in the American dining scene that just wants to pile it on – despite attempts to rechristen “all you can eat” to the more genteel “all you eat” concern to eat.”

Lilly Jan, food and beverage professor at Cornell University hotel administration school, calls it the Cheesecake Factory effect.

“Americans want consistency because they’re afraid to take risks with their dollars when it comes to food,” she said. “They want to go somewhere with the kids where everyone can have what they want and it doesn’t cost money, but they want to make it an experience.”

Yet the buffet landscape has taken on a new shape due to the turmoil of recent years. To begin with, the undergrowth has been cleared.

Mid-range buffets that didn’t offer great value or great culinary payoff never returned. Fresh Acquisitions, the company that owned Hometown Buffet and three other chains, filed for bankruptcy in 2021, citing concerns that some restaurants could not reach the 75 percent capacity needed to make a profit on all-you-can-eat meals.

This is also the final chapter for the cheap Las Vegas buffet, which began in the 1940s as a way to keep gamblers from leaving casinos. On the Strip, where there were once 18 buffets, there are only eight left, he says casino.org.

Before the pandemic, Sheri Orner ran buffets for Station Casinos, an inexpensive local favorite. “I was budgeted to lose money every month,” she said. Company never have buffets reopened after shutdown.

Mrs. Orner started working as general manager of Bad spoon at the Cosmopolitan a year after it reopened in June 2020. On a busy day, it serves 1,800 diners, for $49 per person ($74 if you add unlimited alcohol).

On a recent Saturday, the wait to enter her world of bottomless mimosas, steamed crab legs, and custom omelets took nearly two hours. But the young, diverse audience wanted more than the greatest hits.

“The buffet is designed so that the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can take their nice pictures of the food,” Ms Orner said.

While many tables at Las Vegas buffets are covered in almost nothing but crab, there is plenty of food that would never have appeared on Frank Sinatra’s buffet. Korean spiced chicken wings were nestled in individual frying baskets. Horchata was purple with ube. Birria tacos came hot off a grill and steaming bowls of black garlic ramen were made to order.

Of course there are the showstoppers. The line for fresh crepes at the Bellagio was long, and people lined up for refrigerated lobster claws and three kinds of crab at Bacchanal, where it’s not uncommon to put out 4,000 pounds of steamed snow crab and slice 600 pounds of prime rib a day.

The people who manage buffets, both large and modest, are paying closer attention to the balance between food cost and abundance, and are working to minimize food waste, the buffet’s ugly underbelly.

A helpful strategy is to serve food in individual portions, such as single servings of roasted bone marrow or small bites of tuna poke, said Nathan Frost, the executive chef at the Bellagio. Increased kitchen efficiency and new technology help chefs more accurately track what, when and how much customers are eating.

At the end of each day, the Bellagio staff packs some items not on the buffet into aluminum pans and freezes them for Three Squarea food bank that partners with 160 agencies in southern Nevada.

“It’s beautiful food,” said Maurice Johnson, the food bank’s director of operations.

The pandemic pause has allowed buffets to perk up, whether it’s a multimillion-dollar renovation at Bacchanal or new hand sanitizer stations at Golden Corral. It’s a relief for diners who are newly vigilant about food safety and their own health.

“We wouldn’t have done this a year ago,” says Djuana Jordan, who ate a $16.99 dinner at a Golden Corral near Atlanta with her husband and two kids. They were on their way home to Chattanooga, Tennessee, after picking up their teenage daughter from a Florida softball camp. No one could agree on what to eat, so they stopped at the buffet.

“It’s kind of a step forward for us after Covid,” Ms Jordan said.

Even buffet skeptics love it Faith Fisher Einhorn, a real estate agent who splits her time between New York City and Boca Raton, Fla., have embraced the wide spread.

“If you knew me, you’d know I wouldn’t be inclined to go to a buffet,” she said. The hot bars and salad bars found all over Manhattan? “I’d rather die.”

But when she’s in Boca Raton, she can’t wait to visit the lavish buffet St Andrews Country Club, one of several in the area serving the residential communities around them.

“I feel like it’s well maintained and food doesn’t sit around for 60 years,” she said. She texted a picture of the Christmas buffet, which she described as “a football field’s worth of food.”

For Gen Xers and older millennials who grew up during the golden age of Chinese buffets and national chains such as Sizzler And Pizza Hut, the buffet is also a nostalgic play.

Choo Choo Hu, 34, a professional pianist in Atlanta who emigrated from China as a child, builds her journey around food. But she remembers with great fondness and detail her favorite dishes at the Old Country Buffet in St. Louis, where her parents would take her and her sister when the family had something to celebrate, such as the day they got their green card.

“It felt like we were as American as we could be,” she said.

Dr. Jan, the hospitality consultant, grew up in a Taiwanese-American family that frequented lavish Asian buffets in Flushing, Queens. Before the family walked through the door, her father would issue a warning echoed by many parents who consider teaching a child to hit the house at the buffet an important life lesson: “No noodles and no rice.”

“When it comes to cultures with food insecurity embedded in stories and folklore,” she said, “there’s a lot of value in playing the system. But it’s also about the experience.”

In smaller towns and cities across the South, the buffet is as much about community as it is endless platters of fried chicken and pumpkin casserole.

The Movie star restaurant, a $15.99 all-you-can-eat buffet in Hattiesburg, Miss., is named after the lingerie factory that occupied the building at its original location. Last March was the strongest sales month since the restaurant opened in 2000.

“The pandemic didn’t kill the buffet, it just made it stronger,” says Lori Ford, whose parents founded the restaurant. “I think people appreciate it more when they haven’t had it for so long.”

Then again, it might just be the strength of a buffet.

“People and their food,” she said. “They don’t like being told what they can and can’t have.”

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