As you will have noticed if you’ve been reading for me awhile, I love all-you-can-eat buffets. I’ve written about them before, and I’ve written about them again, recently, for The Bulwark:

I had seen a ghost. Not of a deceased relative, but the ghost of once-fresh lo mein and sesame chicken. I should have turned around and walked the other way, but I piled my plate high instead.

A few weeks ago I ate at what was once one of my favorite Chinese buffets in the D.C. area, in suburban Alexandria. I ate there for the first time, ironically, a couple of days before COVID hit the area hard, I liked it a lot, and I’d been excited to go again. But it was aggressively mediocre this time, and pretty empty too. I know they need the business, but you almost feel like you’re imposing by being in an empty restaurant. It’s almost like, go ahead, I’ll leave, go home early.

But I understand how tough the restaurant industry is. One point I make in the piece is this:

Buffets adapt poorly to the sorts of public health strictures introduced to combat the virus, including limits on crowds. (In April 2020, the FDA recommended that buffets and salad bars be shut down entirely in favor of other food-service options.) They also feel risky, despite the fact that surface transmission of COVID-19 is minimal. In any case, shared tongs, bristling profusions of crab leg, and fifty trays of mediocre food under heat lamps are decidedly no longer of the zeitgeist.

There are, or were, some real health justifications at least in the beginning. But I also get the sense that buffets are viewed, in affluent regions like Northern Virginia, as passé and déclassé. I still eat at the area buffets once in awhile, and I mostly see Black and Latino customers. Many of them are going to be working-class. When I was a kid, the buffet crowd seemed to be a cross-section of America. You’d even see people in business clothing out on their lunch break. The more affluent customers seem to have largely moved on now.

But I don’t think it’s just a class/income thing. Whenever I tweet about buffets, people out in the Midwest or South note that buffets are still ubiquitous and going strong. Meanwhile, in the places I’ve lived, they’ve been disappearing for a decade. It’s really interesting to see this manifestation of geographic and economic inequality. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. The idea of a dining concept going extinct is kind of weird, but it’s even weirder to see it happening only in some places. Even “higher-end” buffets have largely disappeared, with made-to-order all-you-can-eat options taking their place.

But the other side of the equation here is the supply side—the folks running and staffing buffets. I had a conversation with a Chinese-American about my age at an event recently, and he was saying his parents didn’t like that they couldn’t easily find Cantonese food anymore. Many of the classic Cantonese restaurants that once populated Chinatowns are disappearing.

He told me that there are two reasons for that, one obvious and one less obvious. The obvious one is that the children often don’t want to run a restaurant. In many cases the parents don’t want the children to run a restaurant. The restaurant was a way for immigrants to jump into business in a field with relatively few barriers and requirements, and at some point it served its purpose.

The other less obvious reason is that the south of China, and much of the country overall, has gotten much richer in recent decades, and so fewer people who might start or work in these restaurants are coming to the U.S. in the first place. (When Vietnam, for example, gets a lot richer, you can probably expect the number of Vietnamese restaurants to decrease.) I never thought about this at all, but it’s really interesting. Chinese buffets have traditionally been staffed by immigrants from southern China as well, which likely explains some of the segment’s decline.

Restaurants, in other words, are economic before they are cultural, and in some ways they’re fleeting, contingent things. Maybe everything is economic before it is cultural; sometimes I think about a Twitter exchange about beautiful 19th century Main Street architecture, and an explanation that seems obviously true but somehow dispiriting: they were the product of the cheap labor of European immigrant stonemasons.

I also compare the all-you-can-eat buffet to Howard Johnson’s:

Will the Chinese buffet as we’ve known it for the last thirty years still exist in another thirty years? Or will it be a curious period relic, like a 1950s drive-in, or an evolutionary dead end in culinary history like Howard Johnson’s—chided in its later years as “fast food served slow”? Perhaps a handful of establishments now in business will hang on long enough to achieve iconic status or gain retro appeal. Or perhaps a Chinese-American chef with an appreciation for her community’s story will reinvent the buffet in a way that updates it while also paying tribute to its past.

But very few new buffets are being built, and many are closing. While in some cases the steam tables sit there empty, in others they’re being ripped out—all but ensuring a buffet will never again occupy that space. The pandemic may turn out to be the event that made the buffet’s long decline its destiny, much as the 1970s oil crisis turned out to be the point of no return for Howard Johnson’s. The “host of the highways,” as HoJo’s was once known, only just lost its final restaurant this May, but it hasn’t been a household name for over a quarter-century.

And I conclude:

It is difficult to predict what will be considered culturally or historically important at some point in the future; Julia Child’s kitchen is (rightly) in the Smithsonian while nobody bothered to preserve a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. But it’s not too late to honor the buffet. Somewhere, someone should mock one up—making it look just as it would have brand new in 1995—and put it on display. Make a sign, too: Super Star East, China Dragon—any name on the old template will work. I get that it would be the equivalent of a stuffed dodo, there but dead, but at least it wouldn’t be forgotten.

Read the whole thing!

Related Reading:

Meat and Money in Northern Virginia

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

Trump Town

The Sun Sets on Harvest Moon

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