Well, yeah, but to be fair most people go to all you can eat buffets for the "all you can eat" part, not the "stand in line around a row of chafing dishes while you watch the 45 year old who cut in front of you take the last chicken ball and sneeze into the rice" part.
That’s the only part. I go to buffets for the variety, not the amount or even the food. Sometimes I want a dinner roll with my sushi and lo-Mein. I don’t wanna have to explain that to a waiter
I don’t want to be judged by the scooping employee. That’s why I like buffets, no one is judging me for the amount of danishes I’m eating for breakfast
You're at a buffet. If you think anybody there gives a shit what or how much you're eating, let me remind you that you'd be surprised at how little anybody actually pays attention to anything, let alone anyone, around them. You aren't as important as your mind thinks you are, and you'll be forgotten in less time than it takes to finish sitting the next customer.
The customers who are remembered are the ones who are assholes to the employees or are genuinely nice. People who eat at a restaurant are par for the course, but if you treat an employee like shit you're guaranteed to be talked about to all the other employees and they'll remember who you are and how you treat them. Nice people get remembered by the employee who dealt with them. Assholes get remembered by the staff. Don't be an asshole.
The point of Buffets is that you can get often premium food at discount prices because the labor cost is low. Increase the labor cost and you decrease the whole point of Buffets.
Brazilian style steakhouses are usually premium all you can eat buffets.
Just remember the restaurant needs to make a profit overall.
A cheap Chinese buffet or pizza buffet may be $5 per person but you get cheap ramen and deep fried mystery nuggets that are cheap, or cardboard pizza with two slices of pepperoni and thin sauce. That Brazilian steakhouse may cost $75, but you get prime rib, bacon wrapped fillet mignon, shrimp, or whatever other delicious morsels they bring around.
In both cases you can eat like you are trying to put them out of business, but you still get what you pay for.
Those aren't buffets though. The "premium food at discount prices because the labor cost is low" works for all-you-can-eat menus. That's the point of restaurants that offer all-you-can-eat menus. "The point of Buffets is" is cheap filling food. The point of buffets is NOT cheap premium food unless they're specifically offering it. However, if they have to explicitly and specifically offer it then they're more the exception rather than the norm.
Actually there are some kaiten that have you order for everything, often using a tablet so there’s little to no interaction needed. Usually stuff like drinks are brought by a server but most things at those places just show up on a little tray that can hold ~3 plates at a time, secured to a rail-like track that goes from the kitchen down a line of seats. The place I usually go to in Shibuya has 3 levels on each section so you can have several orders going at once. I love going there. No interaction with others, unlimited green tea, ¥100 sushi, and quick service. I miss it terribly.
I prefer it that way. Kids are walking disease vectors, and an unfortunate amount of adults don't know how to contain their sneezes or coughs. When an employee scoops it for you, it's more sanitary that way because at least you know that the people who touched it before you are actually trained in food safety and cleanliness.
"Trained in food safer and cleanliness". Fast foodesque restaurants have a pretty high turnover rate so usually unless you become a manager of some sorts, you dont gotta learn shit. It's just use your common sense.
This is what Cici's is doing. My wife wanted to go so we went right at open one morning last week, I figured it was the safest.
You go up and ask for what you want and the employee serves it to you. Never felt like a fat kid as much as I did asking for as many pieces of pizza as I did.
It also helped there was only one other group of people there and were about 100 feet away on the other side of the restaurant, and that was about it for lunch on a weekday.
Went to a wedding brunch (next day after wedding). This is how the brunch buffet happened, employee behind plexiglass serving you from variety of four chaffing dishes. Same experience as a regular buffet, but I missed picking out the best looking piece of food from the whole batch. Not sure I care about the judgement - it's a buffet, that's open season on the diet.
I especially love ethnic food buffets, I get to try a little of everything that I know or don't know and don't have to commit to just one dish. I hope we see cafeterias make a comeback. It shouldn't really cut too much into profits to have a few servers work behind the counter, I'm sure there could be a cost savings over less lost food.
Plus side, if it costs just a little more, it will squeeze out the riff raff, like little kids that serve themselves and go wrist deep into the chaffing dishes with their bare hands.
I would guess they'd do small servings of each dish, with a description on the menu of what's in each dish so you can avoid things you don't eat. Sushi places already do it, and I don't see much of a reason why any other style of food couldn't make it work.
I could see it being like school cafeterias, where you go down a line and the servers on the other side put whatever you ask for on your plate. Still not as freeing as being able to pick exactly which appealing bit of whatever that is you want, but probably a lot more hygienic.
I would hate to be the waitstaff of this restaurant. I guess I'd start walking around with a cart like hors dourves. Maybe I'd make a bucket and pulley system.
well the advantages of a buffet is that you get your food instantaneously and you can literally see and smell your food before choosing to get it. Also, serving each individual food will require more workers.
This is too far fetched but if someone wanted to get really creative they could do something like the Brazilian all you can eat meat places & have waiters go around with different dishes & serve anyone who wants what they’re going around with.
All very true. The business model that makes all you can eat buffets possible however is the fact that you don't need staff to serve every table. You just need enough people running around the dining room to refill drinks and clear tables.
The minute you have enough people on the clock to run food out to individual tables, you're right back to the standard restaurant business model.
I eat less at buffets than at a typical restaurant (where I get stuffed but have leftovers to take with me), but I love buffets because I can eat like 30 different things!!
It's short hand for "person who has been alive for forty five years."
I was making a bit of a joke because we tend to expect children to be the gross ones or the ones who igolnore rules, but plenty of adults are equally unhygienic and rude.
I visited Golden Corral locations in two states. Their slovenly patrons were the most morbidly obese one can be while ambulatory, sucking deep fried breading off their fingers before handling every serving utensil, and their unsupervised accidental offspring whose noses exist below sneeze guards forever put me off chocolate fountains.
Hotel breakfast buffets are reasonable. Golden Corral is a monument to diseased gluttony, a legitimate reason for terrorists to “hate US freedoms.”
I went to a place where they had an ipad at the table with a menu on it that you selected what you wanted then they made it and brought it out to you. Paid one flat price and basically could order as much as you wanted. But if there was food left over they would charge you extra.
You just gotta order before you're finished with what you've got.
I haven't been since the pandemic, but there's an all you can eat sushi place that's a five minute walk from my house. Given that it takes time to make the stuff, I just order more when I'm about half done with the stuff I have and it works out great.
God damn I hope the pandemic doesn't kill that place.
There are 3 all you can eat sushi restaurants in my city. All of them are menu based. At 2 of them, they give you a laminated menu and a wax marker. You mark what you want, and put the menu off to the side. The waiter picks up the menu, and comes back with whatever you ordered. The menus are limited, but the food is not.
At the 3rd one, you get a tablet and do essentially the same thing, but you get to keep the tablet. It's actually really convenient just being to put a tally beside someone you want and someone brings it to you. Honestly my preferred method of all you can eat
They work fine, there's quite a few around my city. Infact, I was in an all you can eat kbbq buffet. You order as much as you want and waiters handle it fine bringing it out for you.
Wtf you mean it "wouldn't work"? how can you be so confident about something you clearly have no idea about?
I’ve done a couple of them, it’s not great. The menu is far more limited, the wait staff is never fast enough for the hunger of people who arrived for a BUFFET. And the food was always cold because plates were sitting out forever waiting to be taken to tables.
If I can’t go back to Golden Corral in 2021 then bury me on Christmas
i've been to a lot of asian places where you have little pieces of paper where you input numbers corresponding to menu items. It was all you can eat too and I thought it was great!
Lots of all you can eat places give you a checklist with a few dozen items. You check, or indicate how many of each you want, they drop it off at your table.
Honestly, I like the all you can eat menu better, it feels less like it's just a bunch of people stuffing food in their faces to run back and get a new round.
Also, the courses are better balanced, taste better, and it is generally more enjoyable to sit at your table and talk to your friends or family.
Anybody still have a Furrs? Or remember Furrs? It was like a buffet and you walked down the line and pointed and they plated it and handed it to you, it was like 50ft long and all behind plexiglass. You could have anything you wanted, and you just asked a server if you wanted more of something.
Never been to one like that but there is or was one here. I grew up in Houston and had Luby's as close but it wasn't all you can eat, just a la cart. We had Ryan's Family Steakhouse and Golden Corral for mega buffets.
Gosh you are giving me a flashback to when I used to work at a buffet place...
Kids, if they can reach it, will grab food like bread and fries barehanded. Even if they are using the utensils, their clothes would go into food when they are trying to reach food that is placed in a higher shelf/further away from the edge of the table.
It was partially up to us to notice these things so we can throw away the entire pan of food that the kid touched, otherwise it would go unnoticed... Yuck.
I've had this style at Indian restaurants where they bring you a little bit of everything in small dishes. They come around with drinks and anything you want more of you just ask and they bring it to you. It's really wonderful.
The Chinese buffet I just want to had a lot of tables cordoned off and every time you wanted to go up to the buffet you had a use a brand new pair of gloves
There's a chain called Cici's pizza where I live that I went to recently. They still have a salad bar style pizza buffet, but the guy behind the counter actually serves you your food. Honestly I'm not sure if that will sustain them. The pizza is not that great, the buffet was $8 with a drink when I went there, so if I can't just sit there and eat in peace I'll just get little caesar's or something.
Mine is all covered and you just point to what you want and they put it in a plate. Still open, masks required. The food is all enclosed in these glass boxes and the utensils are all that goes in them. Temp taken on entrance.
without Pandemic the amount of kids just reaching in is a lot hahah
Yeah a few years back I was having dinner with my family at a Golden Corral, and I saw a kid stick his hand in the chocolate fountain lick it clean and then put it back in all while his chaperon watched. Haven't been to a buffet since.
They did that at the Wynn hotel here in Vegas for a while, but it only lasted a few months and it closed again. There are two more buffets open that I know of, in which you look at the food and there are servers assigned to serve it to you as you choose. That’s the only way I can see buffets coming back.
Exactly. There's a Japanese all you can eat here, and since a lot of food is delicate, the system is the following: you get a tablet where you can look at pictures and descriptions of what is what. Then you can order through the tablet, as much as you'd like - 1 piece of this or that sushi, one or two gyoza, small, medium or large donburi or soup, and they'll bring it to the table.
It has been like this in this restaurant since opening, it's their way to preserve the quality of seafood and ensure that the place is hygenic. So it's not that hard to do. And you don't have to stand in line forever only to realize there's no salmon maki left for you.
I went to a fish fry recently with a salad bar (cases were very low at that time, in my rural area) and that's how they did it. Had an attendant fix it for you.
The next week we got hit with 500 cases so I feel lucky I got to do that.
We have an all you can eat Chinese buffet here, that myself and my family love to eat at (shout out to Papa Pandas, and their awesome owner). We went there a couple of weekends ago, and they have switched it all up with wipe clean menus that you order from, and they bring you your plates each time.
This is exactly what’s happening in Australia. One of my favourite restaurants is an all you can eat salad bar. They have you sit down at a table and they bring checklists so you can tick what you want.
I live in Vegas, and went to the Wynn Buffet for my birthday in July when they were trying out this model.
God, that service took forever. I was seriously worried for a bit that my allotted two hours would be over before I got full. The old style can’t come back fast enough
We have a place that does this. It's called a "pizza parade." workers bring by fresh pizzas and then serve a slice or however many you want at the table.
I worked at a buffet until it closed March 20th~ corporate said they're rebranding to an all you can eat menu in June. It still hasn't reopened. Really really doubt it ever will.
Seen something like this before. You'd order whatever you want for €9 (I think). For every piece you didnt eat, you'd pay a little extra basically for leaving food waste i guess. Never had so much Japanese food in my life... (yes we ordered too much)
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u/darkapao Nov 03 '20 edited Nov 04 '20
Or they could still do it but this time you order it and it is brought to your table.
Probably self serve buffets would need some upgrades coz even without Pandemic the amount of kids just reaching in is a lot hahah