The difference between all-you-can-eat and a buffet seems to be lost to many people. Those plates stacked to overflowing are ludicrous. Neither all-you-can-eat nor buffets limit one to a single trip to the food trough.
Brunch buffet is the worst of the lot (unless it's free, in which case it's okay but I'd rather pay $5-7 for two fresh-cooked eggs and toast I don't have to toast.)
I squint every time I hear the word "Buffet".
I hate them.
What finished me off was going to my first (and only) FT "do" (we happened to be there at the same time) and buying my first buffet for mrs uk1 and me and I hadn't realised the importance that some of our colonial brothers place on the table they choose and it's proximity to the food. In hindsight, it was as though they had developed some sort of mental tape-measure that could calculate each seat and it's approximate travel time to the table. .................
This sounds like that last few weddings and company Christmas parties I've attended. Being polite (er.. drinking) we usually wait until the truly starving have cleared out and invariably discover there is no food left or the main courses are gone and dessert is being put out.
But those events are not really buffets with a large variety of food, they are a cheap (for the venue, not the people footing the bill) and easy way to serve crowds a limited choice of sub-par food.
And what is a buffet? The restaurant putting out a bunch of stuff so they don't have to take orders and deliver food and charging about 3x what anyone would pay to order off a menu. Sometimes variety isn't the spice of life.
I don't even want to think about the sanitation, the sneeze screens, the restaurant dumping old product .....
But if you have teen-age boys an all-you-can-eat buffet can be a very good family night out until they learn better
