The Pros and Cons of The All You Can Eat Buffet Meal

THE PROS AND CONS OF THE ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET 

I have mixed feelings about these kind of restaurant deals. The basic premise is great – for a modest set fee, you can eat as much food as you like, and return to the food tables as many times as you wish while the restaurant remains open.

Though they seem new to us, the All You Can Eat (AYCE) establishments have been around since 1946. They really began to dominate the restaurant districts of our cities in the 1990’s.

Buffets are popular at weddings and other party events where catering and waiter service isn’t always practical. For Jews and Muslims, self-catering buffets give practical control over what is kosher or halal or not. Buffets make that easy to regulate.

The average buffet is not all you can eat, and some trust lies with diners not taking too much of the best food, and leaving the less appetizing dishes to others. Children, unsupervised will tend to grab cakes and sweets while leaving the savoury dishes alone. I have seen a few adults secrete buffet food away in bags for themselves and friends

All you can eats emerged as an extension on this, with many foods rich in sauces, with rices, pastas, and other cheap but filling ingredients usually cooked in bulk, for ladelling out, it makes for cheap overheads for restaurants. Indian & Chinese restaurants are particularly suited to AYCE given that most people will add relatively cheap rices and Nan breads to the sauce heavy dishes.

It’s certainly economical, and yet it presents all kinds of problems and lapses in social etiquette. A lot of All You Can Eat food tends to be heavy on monosodium glutamates, and salt, as once the restaurant has your initial admission fee, any other profit can only come from the drinks bill. They like to serve food that makes you thirsty. This means they tend to attract drunken louts.

Surprisingly, waiter service for drinks can be poor, as waiters resign themselves to moving empty plates and dislike cash handling in such restaurants.

For the restaurant, the food is often cheap, and a few have been known to bury old stale ingredients under the fresh supplies – a practice that can be maintained over days. A few such restaurants have closed due to food poisoning or visits by health inspectors.

Another problem is that while individual dishes are marked up to alert vegetarians or people with food allergies many diners slop food from serving dishes into the often closely set beside one another trays of other ingredients, spilling curries into gravies, splashing mayonnaise over potatoes, etc. It can be dangerous if nut-containing products get mixed up with food preferred by someone with a nut allergy.

Popular All You Can Eats sometimes tend to set time limits on customers, so you only get an hour or 90 minutes to gorge yourself stupid, which for most people is suffice, though for anyone wishing to eat at a more sedate pace, it can be inconvenient.

Dining habits by customers can be bizarre. Knowing they are going to an AYCE, many will consciously starve themselves all day, ready and then seriously pig out to get their money’s worth. 

Unless there is a time limit, there is no reason to pile a plate high with food as you can go back, but many diners seem to create Food Mountains on their plates. Some seem to have no idea what foods compliment one another either, so fish, chicken, pork and three different sauces will be heaped together with every taste cancelled out by another. The display of greed can be disturbing if you see it too closely. A plate of food picked by some diners can resemble the swill bins of scraped out leftovers after school meals. They simply mush everything together.

Another problem customer is the competitive eater, determined to eat more than everyone else, staring at what everyone else gets, counting the dishes each puts away and forcing himself to get more food even as others are ready to settle the bill. I have seen one friend looking quite green and ill but still forcing another plateful down himself to show off like this. Truly annoying behaviour.

Used wisely, AYCE’s are fine, but they can bring out the worst in many, restaurants and customers alike.

Arthur Chappell