It was this sense of awe that he passed down to me as a kid in the ‘90s, just as buffet culture in the U.S. It was about the freedom-almost anyone could afford to sit down in Shakey’s and eat like a king. To him, the appeal wasn’t just about the value-though the value, he emphasizes, was incredible-nor was it the quality (which was good!). He describes the wonderment he felt sitting down for the first time in the 1970s to unlimited quantities of pizza, garlic bread, chicken. My dad, for one, swears by Shakey’s bunch of lunch buffet. This rise in buffet culture ballooned beyond Vegas, in chains like Sizzler and among mom and pop Chinese restaurants (the first Chinese buffet dates at least as far back as an advert for Chang’s Restaurant posted in the 1949 Los Angeles Evening Citizen News). Other casinos scrambled to match the midnight all-you-can-eat supper-and by the 1950s, the Vegas buffet concept wasn’t just for late-night patrons with the Dunes and the Last Frontier resorts introducing morning “ hunt breakfasts,” which took the name of a brunch forerunner, often served with champagne, popular among the U.K. The answer was the Chuck Wagon (later renamed Buckaroo) buffet, which debuted in 1946 and charged $1 for “every possible variety of hot and cold entrées to appease the howling coyote in your innards.” It was a hit. As the story goes, El Rancho Vegas, the first casino resort on what would become the Vegas Strip, was trying to figure out how to keep visitors from leaving after the evening headliner finished their set. Even etiquette maven Emily Post helped promote this style of dining, with a calculated 1933 endorsement of the newly invented buffet server, which housed boiling water in a dish’s base to ensure that food stayed hot.īut the buffet we know today wouldn’t be what it was without Las Vegas. The hope was that by creating a set price for an unlimited quantity of inexpensive food, people would be more incentivized to dine out. During the Great Depression, for instance, the all-you-can-eat format was used as a gimmick to get people back in restaurants. Temperance movement teetotalers tried to scuttle these early buffets, but the model re-emerged, adapting to the times. These became “buffets or cafés,” where, for a nominal fee, businessmen could secure prepared food without hassle. Historian Jan Whitaker has mapped the concept’s early history, from the “supper clubs” of the colonial era to the “ free lunches” of the 1800s-spreads of food put out by drinking taverns to boost sales of accompanying alcohol. in the late 1800s (the term smorgasbord reportedly first appearing in American print in 1893), where it merged with other fledgling forms of the buffet here. Scandinavian immigrants brought the “smorgy” tradition with them to the U.S. The spread, which emerged in the 16th century, has its roots in the more formal brännvinsbord tradition, a spirits table that was served at banquets. ![]() The modern American buffet owes a debt to the smorgasbord, Scandinavia’s bread-and-butter table. What is it about the buffet that keeps us coming back for seconds (and thirds, and fourths)? And rather than the death for buffets that so many predicted in 20, the all-you-can-eat model has returned-modified somewhat, revamped with social distancing measures, but present all the same. The pandemic is far from over, but the health restrictions that turned restaurants and grocery stores away from self-serve buffets and salad bars have been lifted. I’ve been thinking about buffets lately because, if you haven’t heard, they are back. To call it a meal would feel disingenuous nothing short of “trip” captured the feeling of the experience, which stretched time and space and stomachs. I say the buffet because the chafing dishes all blur together-part and parcel of one great, endless table a physical manifestation of the infinite scroll before the infinite scroll had even been invented. Growing up, few things loomed quite as large as a trip to the buffet.
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