In defence of all-you-can-eat buffets

“In the popular imagination, there’s still something nasty and down-market about all-you-can-eat buffets.”

How much breakfast is too much breakfast? I found myself contemplating this question just a few weeks ago while queuing at a popular all-you-can-eat buffet, plotting my second – or was it my third? – raid on the breakfast bar.

I’d already seen off a full English earlier that morning, washed down with a couple of Bellini sharpeners, and was now hovering over the basket of cakes and pastries that seemed to stare up at me and whisper, “Go on, then, nobody’s watching.”

It’s my second morning at the hotel buffet, and the table I’m seated at affords an excellent view of the restaurant. It’s a modest place, nothing too fancy. The guests here are relaxing into their holiday, reclining into the staccato-like rhythm of the buffet; there’s a hurried transience and a touch of awkwardness, too, as guests shuffle from table to sideboard, nudging and stretching their way across one another for ladles and tongs, ducking under heated lamps and re-emerging with plates stacked with one cardiac horror after another.

There’s a frisson of chaos, a low hum of activity that admonishes pretension and encourages familiarity among strangers. No one’s waving down waiters, demanding service or making shrill complaints about noise or the airconditioner. There’s an easy egalitarianism: no VIPs allowed in here.

The all-you-can-eat buffet owes its rise to Herbert Cobb McDonald. In 1940s Las Vegas, Herb pioneered the modern concept and later established the Buckaroo Buffet, promising customers “every possible variety of hot and cold entrees to appease the howling coyote in your innards”. In truth, the innards weren’t all that important; the buffet’s main purpose was to keep the punters – and their wallets – rooted to the casino floor for as long as possible.

A buffet breakfast spread

Since then, buffet economics has advanced little. For every big, hungry man or woman, who really can eat their own body weight in pancakes and hash browns, buffets must always count on the few who won’t. While they don’t need to contend with fussy guests sending orders back to the kitchen, they do deal with another kind of customer: the one who wants to bankrupt them with their stomachs.

Back at the pointy end of the buffet queue, where the mood becomes seriously competitive, good manners fade fast. A couple of thickset punters are elbows out and heads down, scanning the sprawl of trays and canapes, extracting great wads of bacon and sausage with a look of severe concentration.

It’s clear this ain’t their first rodeo: there’s no time wasting, no hint of vacillation or uncertainty. They’ve paid good coin – now they want their pound of flesh. To them, this is not a game to be taken lightly; it’s a blood sport to be pursued ruthlessly until you drift into a pleasant food coma or find yourself hunkered down on all fours waiting for the worst to pass.

Mind you, not all diners want to climb aboard the buffet bender. While it’s true they embrace few austerities – unless self-imposed – you don’t necessarily need to massacre everything in your sights to prove you’re having a good time.

In the genteel world of gastronomy, few subjects are as maligned and underexplored as the all-you-can-eat buffet. This lacuna is not difficult to understand. Bad press has blighted the buffet for decades. Food poisonings and overconsumption, though occasionally amusing, make for powerful deterrents and easy headlines.

In the popular imagination, there’s still something nasty and down-market about them: a reminder of the clattering inedibles of the old school tuckshop and of saturated foods congealing in a trough of grim, lurid shame.

But if contemporary fine dining has become gripped and suffocated by the cult of “experience” and the choreographed tyranny of social media, then the all-you-can-eat buffet counts as the perfect antithesis. It proves you can’t manufacture intimacy and ambience. Despite their drawbacks, some things are just too easy to reproach. Now I think it’s time for one of those pastries.