Why is buffet bad

Take my usual breakfast buffet order, for example. I linger near the fruit salads, the platters of melon, the pile of ice studded with single-serve yogurts, and maybe take a small bowl of granola with arctic milk I do not eat porridge from breakfast buffets, because porridge from breakfast buffets has the consistency and, I imagine, flavour, of the limp and grey snot of the medically dying. And a small plate of four miniature croissants. Then, often as a sort of pudding course, just some continental-style slices of ham and cheese, arranged plainly on a plate.

This is my routine at every breakfast buffet I have ever been to. Do you not understand? Do you not see the monster in me, poking out? I sit and pretend I am a healthy person wishing to live a calm and structured life melon with yogurt, some semi-healthy granola.

I dread to think what inner turmoil the man three tables over from me eating hash browns, plain, and a single crumpet, also plain, out of a bowl, psychotically, is trying to eat over and hide. What happened to him the day before he ate a dry unbuttered crumpet out of a bowl? How did the day go after he ate four unsalted browns alongside them? Does he prescribe to a theory that the only possible method of day-to-day happiness is to start your morning on the worst possible note, because it can only get better from there?

Or was his mind fractured in two by some great unseen trauma? We will never know. Somewhere between my third and fourth coffee, he disappeared. And I walked away with three mini croissants in one pocket and two pains au chocolat in the other. There are buffets, the genre, and there are buffets, the art, and in that regard my mother was Michelangelo, was Da Vinci.

Every year my aunt holds her birthday party at the same place, Cosmo Authentic World Kitchen buffet in Wolverhampton, because the easiest way to please a group of people spanning the gender and generation gap is to offer them every single food on the planet, at once. Watching people load up plates at the Cosmo Authentic World Kitchen is more fascinating that wildlife documentaries, for me: the place ostensibly specialises in pan-Asian cuisine, so offers noodle dishes and fresh-seared stir-fries and then, as you move along around the conveyer-belt-style self-serve, curries and naans blistered seconds earlier in the tandoor.

Abruptly there is a pizza hub. And then, for some reason, an entire area where you can get a roast dinner. When things go awry — be it food poisoning or oyster crackers — a record is online instantly.

There are no secrets. Yelp was founded in and had 1 million monthly visitors by , and But once the option for anyone to write reviews was added, it exploded — 5 million monthly visitors by and 50 million by But now that Yelp is potentially dying , maybe buffets can come back?

Google has integrated reviews directly into Google Maps, though, and so we are not really going to pull out of this one. Allen, the restaurant analyst, tells me is he is aware of the problem of the internet, and restaurants are too. Before, he says, a customer would tell 10 people if they were upset about something they saw in a restaurant. The internet is very powerful, and kids are filming stuff and putting it there. There are already ,00 videos under the GoldenCorral hashtag on TikTok.

Somehow, Golden Corral is the sole remaining successful buffet chain in the United States. There are still close to Golden Corral restaurants in the US, which is not more than it had in but also not significantly less. He is the third CEO ever, and the company is still privately owned. The restaurants are getting expensive redesigns to make them look more like the glamorous and trendy dining halls taking over American cities, and to make the seating areas bigger and prettier.

The goal is to have a buffet without any of the physical or cultural connotations of the American buffet. The goal is to make the word buffet meaningless. How did Golden Corral weather its salmonella outbreak in Georgia, or its salmonella outbreak in Florida and norovirus outbreak in Wyoming, or its employee rebellion, which included the posting of a YouTube video in which trays of raw baby back ribs are shown sitting next to a dumpster?

Allen tells me part of it is just sheer luck and a strict vetting process when licensing the franchise to new people. Some locations have been torn down and rebuilt from scratch — nowhere in any of them a long stretch of serving trays or a winding line — and have seen a 50 to 70 percent increase in sales.

And it was. Golden Corral is the exception that proves the rule, and it is also the winner of the buffet battle royal. Many buffets collapsed, and others survived only because they took on tons of debt — later, they collapsed. Golden Corral, then, survived not just because of its superior franchise managers and tight corporate control but because many of its competitors died.

Or perhaps not internet-y enough. This inkling is how I ended up looking at buffets on Instagram for three hours. Why ruin the surprise? Multiple Golden Corral Instagram accounts were affiliated with email accounts that, unfortunately, turned out to not actually exist. None of the direct messages I sent to Ponderosa Instagram accounts elicited a response. Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Even though utensils used during food prep need to be switched out every four hours, no such rule exists for serving utensils in the buffet line.

So the same spoon can be used for an entire day , passing through countless numbers of probably unwashed hands. They fill diners up with starches first. The answer is a bit of psychology. Restaurants will always set up cheap and filling carb-heavy dishes think rice and potatoes in the beginning so you fill up your plate — and your stomach — before you reach the expensive meats.

When the portions are unlimited, you probably end up eating too much. Constant overindulgence leads to issues such as obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and tons of other avoidable health problems. Some diners will get greedy at buffets. Reddit users shared their most disgusting AYCE buffet stories, and Habs16 had this frightening tale:. For dessert they had these really tasty sticky buns that were in big demand. So me and my dad are in line to get one and once they put them out some big guy at the front of the line literally just picked up the whole tray and walked back to his table, it was like 30 cinnamon buns.

Nobody else at his table. Think of how many germs would be on your food without the sneeze guards. They were invented by Johnny Garneau, a buffet restaurant operator who was horrified at the idea of people sneezing and breathing germs into the food.

Leftovers go in the trash.