In Praise of the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet!
If you're scoffing, hear me out, because I just might change your mind.
For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.
I love a great all-you-can-eat buffet.
And by saying that, I can now hear the scoffing of about half the readers of this article.
They’re unsanitary! some of you are thinking. And the food is baaaad.
And anyway, our culinary experiences should be about quality, not quantity, right? Less is more.
Except the most sublime dining experience isn’t only about quality. It’s also about variety.
Indeed, studies clearly show that we perceive our first taste of something to be the best — and the more we eat of it, the less interesting the flavor becomes.
This is called sensory-specific satiety, and it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective: humans require a variety of nutrients to survive, so we’re compelled to eat as many different foods as possible, increasing the chance we’ll get everything we need.
So if we most enjoy the taste of something new, and a meal has lots of different kinds of food, well, that seems like a pretty good way to get an interesting meal, no?
This idea of sensory-specific satiety is why we humans celebrate with “feasts” with lots of different dishes — and also why, no matter how much we eat at Thanksgiving, we always still seem to have room for dessert.
This is also the thinking behind the famously lavish Turkish breakfast, and the increasingly popular “tasting menus” at high-end restaurants.
But I’ve never heard any scoffing or negative judgment at all about celebratory feasts, or Turkish breakfasts, or tasting menus.
Something about heat-lamps and warming trays really rubs some people the wrong way, I guess.
In fairness to you scoffers, the food in all-you-can-eat buffets sometimes is truly terrible.
I’m on record as saying that the breakfast buffets at American hotels are almost always unspeakably bad: sticky-sweet muffins and pastries, scrambled eggs obviously made from powder, and deep-fried but warmed-over hash browns or weirdly flavorless home fries.
And I’m not sure Chinese food in an all-you-can-eat buffet can ever be “good.” Isn’t the whole point of much of that cuisine that it comes out sizzling hot straight from the wok?
That said, even these places have their patrons, and they must be finding some pleasure, even if it’s from sheer gluttony, which I feel I should also celebrate to avoid looking like a complete hypocrite.
But there are also all-you-can-eat buffets with good or even great food. Breakfast buffets outside of America are often as amazing as they are terrible back in the U.S.
One hotel I stayed at in Cambodia had a lavish fruit bar, a large salad bar with a wide selection of cheeses, and three different hot noodle stations — and they were also taking orders for traditional Western breakfasts from the kitchen.
And in 2023, this hotel with breakfast cost only $38 USD a night (but that’s neither here nor there).
Possibly the best all-you-can-eat buffet I’ve ever seen was in 1992, when I was invited to my first Hollywood press junket, for the Tom Hanks movie Philadelphia. The movie studio put us journalists up at the luxury Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, and the dinner buffet was unbelievably posh. That was the first time I’d ever eaten about six different things, including caviar, truffles, and real saffron.
But it was also shockingly expensive: $65 USD (or about $150 in 2026 dollars).
Fortunately, the movie studio had granted me a daily stipend of $100 for meals at the hotel.
Alas, I made the mistake of also having breakfast at the hotel buffet the following morning, and I learned upon checkout that, despite being at the hotel for the two-day junket, I had been booked for only a single night — and only had a stipend for one day.
So while I’d eaten two amazing buffets, I also now owed the hotel about a third of the monthly rent I paid on my modest housing back in Seattle — and about half the money I was making for this whole writing assignment. Part of me still wonders if this wasn’t a bit of a scam.
Unlike Chinese, some cuisines do lend themselves to buffets. Indian food is mainly prepared in advance anyway, and the flavors actually improve upon simmering. It’s also heavy in “cheap” items like rice, potatoes, lentils, and vegetables.
Then there’s Mongolian cuisine, which I’ve never actually tasted and probably isn’t anything like the “Mongolian grill” restaurants that swept America back in the 90s. But fake or not, this is another cuisine that is perfectly suited to an all-you-can-eat buffet: you pick out your own veggies, meat, and sauces, and then the guy cooks it for you over blisteringly hot heat.
In this case, it is served piping hot — directly to you, not even passing briefly under a kitchen’s heat lamp.
There will always be terrible all-you-can-eat buffets. Then again, there will always be terrible restaurants of all kinds.
And if you’re thinking, “They don’t put enough care into the food they serve in buffets!” I suspect you’ve never seen how they sometimes cook in the kitchen of a busy traditional restaurant.
Here’s another important way buffets are superior to almost every other restaurant: you can literally see the food you may be eating before you commit and sit down at a table. I always ask to take a look first.
As for cleanliness, you can get a good sense of that too, and you also have the option of washing your hands between every visit to the buffet. Many of these establishments even have a handwashing station — that everyone else will ignore, but at least you won’t have to wait in line.
But the biggest misconception about all-you-can-eat buffets? That the joy comes from stuffing yourself silly.
Maybe that’s part of it — hey, I’m still trying hard here not to be too judgmental of sheer gluttony! — but I maintain that the real pleasure comes from the variety of food.
You find yourself eating things you wouldn’t ordinarily try. In Bristol, England, I went to a fairly mediocre buffet solely because their dessert area included endless trays of every bulk candy imaginable — and I got to try the many confections I’d been curious about all my life but had never bothered to sample.
But the beauty of all-you-can-eat buffets is about even more than that.
What if you could experience that first incredible sensation of sinking into a hot bathtub, over and over again? Or repeatedly feel the wonderful tingle of that first touch of the masseuse?
And what if you could taste that fantastic “first bite” of delicious food over and over again? Who wouldn’t do that?
You see where I’m going with this: at an all-you-can-eat buffet, you kinda-sorta can — for a fraction of the price of a more expensive restaurant’s tasting menu.
If you occasionally enjoy a good all-you-can-eat buffet, I suspect you already know this.
But those of you who began this article with a sneer on your lips? You’re reluctantly admitting to yourself I may have a point, aren’t you?
Not to worry. One of these days, you’ll come upon an unexpectedly tantalizing buffet, and you can test my theory for yourself. It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me the results.
But if you do tell me, I promise I won’t tell your friends.
Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out my new newsletter about my books and movies at www.BrentHartinger.com. And order my latest book, below.
I LOVE a buffet! There is a place in Narbonne, southern France called "Les Grands Buffets" and it is the most insane thing you've ever seen. A huge, incredible quality French buffet where you can get everything from all you can eat oysters to cheese, lobster, steak and truffles. I think it's been discovered by social media people now so I don't know what it's like anymore, but I still really want to go back, for the cheese alone
Breakfast buffets in Hilton brands are--while still dire--much better in the UK than in the US. I wrote to Hilton to point this out, and recall a reply in which they said they follow local standards. In other words, Americans are happy to eat simulated food in abundance, knowing no better (a theme of 1920s writer Louis Bronstein, Ohio farmboy turned expat in France, who also became an organic foods pioneer). Or perhaps the national tendency to be "positive" makes people reluctant to push for better. I bring homemade granola on my travels, and add it to the hotel's yogurt.