The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets (2020)

I love articles like this. I’d happily read a book with each chapter breaking down the unit economics of a given type of business.

Also, I can’t help but recount an anecdote from the last time I was at an all-you-can-eat place… conveyor-belt sushi with my kids.

A pair of guys came in and sat at the table next to us. They said a loud ironic prayer begging indulgence for “the sins we are about to commit” as they sat down… then proceeded to unwrap all the fish rolls, eating the contents as sashimi and discarding the rice and veggies on a tray on their table. By the time we left there was probably 8 lbs of rice on the tray… can’t believe they weren’t kicked out.

Deliberate food wasters are despicable.

It's rice. It's not like they're wasting anything significant, like the meat of an animal that gave its life. But still, the restaurant should have charged them for it at least, like every other all you can eat sushi place would have.

"like the meat of an animal that gave its life." - that's generally not how it works.

Outside of some restaurants in South Korea, we generally only eat dead animals.

I assume the GP takes issue with the word "gave", as it was not given but taken.

Can something be taken without being given?

If I kill you and take your land/stuff/body, did you give it or did I take it?

Both.

A question for the pedants.

No. That is why there is no word or concept for theft

Rice has a significant climate footprint due to the methane produced by the agriculture. It also requires a lot of fresh water to grow. (How much of an issue the latter is depends on the local conditions, of course.)

There's few things in your life that will impact the environment less than not finishing a bowl of rice.

That may be true, if done on occasion rather than regularly. But just because it's "only" rice doesn't make it insignificant, even though rice is such a staple that it may seem so. That's what I commented on.

Food in general is a significant part of our ecological footprint. Rice has a relatively high impact for a crop. Of course it's still in a different ballpark than beef.

Depends on the amount of rice obviously. Rice farming definitely has an impact on the environment in bulk. Now divide that by the amount of rice in a roll and we'll see how significant it is.

I'm guessing it's very, very small.

you're right, but a lifestyle that makes a habit of adding those small things up left and right becomes impactful quickly.

Don't forget as well that it's not only a case of them not eating the rice, they also massively increased their intake of fish by skipping the carbs.

Bit of a tangent, but nearly all foods have an animal death rate per calorie, so there's no such thing as insignificant food.

The exchange rate is usually better for grains than for e.g. chicken or even beef[0], though.

[0] https://animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/ Note that I'm a little skeptical of the numbers here, particularly those for grass-fed beef. Not that it matters for the purpose of claiming rice has a cost in lives.

Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-09

Kind of an interesting link. Another thing to keep in mind is that the rice patty being there means a natural habitat is now lost to make way for the farm. In truth there is no guilt free meal or anything else.

I think this is an interesting idea, and people inclined towards veganism might be able to better achieve their goals by going for a suffering-minimizing diet, but the studies this is based on aren't very good. For example:

> 33 field mice were fitted with radio collars and tracked before and after harvest. The researchers found that only 3 percent of them were actually killed by the combine harvester (amounting to one mouse). An additional 52 percent of them (17 mice) were killed following harvest by predators such as owls and weasels, possibly due to their loss of the crop cover. It is unknown how many of these mice would have been eaten by owls or weasels anyway.

That last sentence is key: without a control you can't draw much from this experiment.

Additionally, while they say "animals" many times they're not clear on which ones they're including. The decision on whether to consider insects would be especially important.

Well, we can relatively easily put a dollar value on human lives, too.

So any kind of waste that we can put a dollar value on, also has a value in human lives.

Make of that what you will.

All food waste is significant.

Not really.

Carbohydrates are much cheaper than proteins and fat.

Proteins and fat of vegetable origin are cheaper than those of animal origin, but they come accompanied by excessive amounts of carbohydrates.

The most efficient way of getting food for human consumption for now is to dump as waste most of the carbohydrates from vegetables and retain only the valuable proteins and fat (this can be done at home for instance by making bread but washing the dough before baking in order to remove most of the starch, producing thus a protein-enriched bread, or by removing completely the starch by extra washing of the dough, converting in into gluten a.k.a. seitan).

The high proportion of carbohydrates from vegetable food can be used completely only by those who do hard physical work, but not by those who have a sedentary lifestyle, who must necessarily dump the carbohydrates as waste, either directly or indirectly (by buying food where the carbohydrates have already been wasted in various ways, including as energy sources for animals that have been raised for becoming food).

In the future it might be possible to develop better ways to use the carbohydrates that must be wasted now, by converting them with high efficiency into proteins or fat, by using bacterial or fungal cultures.

Are you arguing that wasting meat is more significant than wasting vegetation? I agree, but that doesn't diminish the fact that wasting both is significant.

Are you arguing that everyone should be vegetarian? That's a topic I was not even remotely touching on.

Quite the opposite

It was rice but rice is a filler. Don’t know that the ratio is but let’s say 1:4 non-rice to rice. Dumping the rice skews that a lot.

Ironically the word "sushi" refers to the rice, not the topping. Rice properly seasoned with vinegar and sugar is the one essential ingredient in sushi. If there's no rice it's no longer sushi.

The word has a broader meaning in English, though. We'll often refer to things like raw fish alone, ie sashimi, as sushi.

Someone had to plant it, then water it and cultivate it, then harvest it, then package it, then ship it god knows how many miles, then the restaurant cooked it, prepared it, then they just threw it away. Then comes the trash processing chain.

How is that not a completely useless waste of energy, time, money and resources?

It's a safe assumption that such all you can eat sushi was of mediocre quality.

But, when it comes to the real deal. Sushi from a tier one or two Japanese sushi chef then the rice is actually the most important factor in making good sushi.

Discarding the rice would be seen as comparatively barbarian as dunking a freshly made piece of sushi by a good chef into this mixture of soya sauce and ersatz "wasabi".

More despicable than other kinds of wasters? Eating only the part of the food you like can't be that morally different from buying a sporty car that wastes gas, for example.

They hacked the business model.

Kicked out for what? If they want to disincentivize wasting rice, they should charge for leftovers and offer sashimi as an upsell. If they don't, that's on the restaurant.

That line of thinking usually pairs with 'If there isn't a law against it then it must be Ok'. So the world becomes burdened with complex rules and laws to prevent people having to live in a hellscape of Jerks.

I don't eat rice; I've been strictly keto for over a decade. My health choices make me a jerk?

Some people are allergic to rice. Some people are on medically prescribed diets. Maybe there's an obscure religion that forbids eating rice. Some people just don't like rice. Are they all jerks too?

That restaurant wouldn't be my preference, but if I did have to be there for an important reason, I certainly wouldn't be bullied into eating something I didn't want to eat. I'm generally strict about wasting food, but in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it.

Ordering a dish that is mostly rice knowing that you won't/can't eat it is being a jerk, yes. I don't know about that restaurant, but I've never seen a sushi place that didn't also serve sashimi.

"If they want to disincentivize wasting rice, they should [...] offer sashimi as an upsell."

I know, reading is hard.

You could simply eat elsewhere where they sell more suitable fare or avoid negative comments.

"That restaurant wouldn't be my preference, but if I did have to be there for an important reason, [...]"

There simply isn't a case in which you need to eat there unless the nuclear missiles are on their way and you happen to be out front and want a bite to eat before the end.

You have identified an aspect of the person with yourself and even though you yourself presumably don't walk acting like a jerk feel like you need to justify their misbehavior as if you were defending yourself. You don't need to keep defending them.

You're arguing against a straw man. I've actually been to events without food options that accommodated my diet, and I've been served meals on planes that included buns and sweets which ended up in the trash. No nukes involved.

If that makes some strangers on the Internet think I'm a "jerk", so be it.

If it's accidentally becoming a strawman, it's only by virtue of trying to tie it back to the original post. People didn't realize your goalposts were a mile away from those goalposts.

If you're given a single serving without asking, then you have almost no resemblance to the people being criticized here.

Your earlier post said you "wouldn't feel even slightly guilty" about wasting food in a way that implied you would act similarly to the people being criticized here, taking a whole bunch of pieces. If you do that, you should feel guilty. If you weren't trying to imply a similarity, you communicated your point badly.

All I suggested was that they were very quick to demand that people be forcibly ejected based on insufficient information.

I'd rather see the restaurant try to solve a problem than arbitrarily punish people, especially when "people" might include myself under the wrong circumstances. But I guess no one likes to hear nuance.

But I guess no one likes to hear nuance.

If you were trying to suggest nuance, you didn't do a great job of it.

"in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it" is jumping to the opposite extreme.

All I suggested

You definitely suggested more than that.

You definitely suggested more than that.

Then you're reading something I didn't say.

If you do that, you should feel guilty.

Guilty of what? It's a business, not a charity. If that's where I happen to be stuck having dinner, and if they're unwilling to accommodate my preferences even at additional cost, I'm not going to go hungry or cheat on my diet purely out of politeness.

They can either solve the problem and increase their revenue, or accept that they've created an edge case situation where some food will be wasted. Punishing their customers would accomplish nothing except loss of business and negative Yelp reviews.

I'm not going to go hungry or cheat on my diet purely out of politeness.

It's not politeness.

If we distill "all you can eat" down to the basics, you take a small amount, you eat it, only then do you get more.

It's generally fine to reorder those actions, such as by getting more food upfront, but the outcome needs to be the same as the basic version. That's the business deal being made. If you make a deal with the intent to break it, you should feel guilty, outside of exceptional circumstances.

If they're not willing to serve something acceptable to you, that's bad of them, but it doesn't mean you get to break the rules. Even if you "had" to be there for some external reason.

Also ejecting someone, or cutting off their supply, is probably nicer than charging them for eight pounds of extra food.

And again, this only applies to all you can eat situations. Not other restaurants, not plane meals.

I've never agreed to that specific deal at any ACYE place. If that's what they want to do, and they're clear about it up front, that's fine. If they're willing to charge a premium for waste, that's less ideal than a broader menu which avoids the waste, but at least it's an option.

What they shouldn't do is arbitrarily add new terms to the deal after the fact. Customers should be allowed to make an informed decision. If I know that they'll kick me out for eating, I can decide whether to leave or stick around and eat later. If they just kick me out without warning in the middle of my meeting/event/whatever, no one is happy and they look like assholes.

In practice, these are questions I would ask before paying and sitting down, but that shouldn't be expected. The business should either state its terms up front, or provide an early warning when they notice the behavior and offer a full or partial refund. Waiting until someone has eight pounds of rice piled up and then suddenly kicking them out is a ridiculous escalation, and they'd only lose more money when the customer rightfully disputed the charge.

All of this isn't to say that the guys in the story weren't necessarily in the wrong. What I am saying is that we simply don't know. Demanding they be kicked out is making an awful lot of assumptions. We have no idea why they were there or what their interactions with the staff may have been. As other comments have pointed out, there's a good chance that they were in fact charged for the leftovers.

You're probably focusing on the wrong thing if you're jumping to the defense of people who leave things on the plate for any reason.

The actual controversy here is that the folks in the story clearly thought they were cheating the system, and people are responding without questioning that, and some people are questioning that.

That's certainly a possibility, but none of us have enough information to say for sure.

The sins thing is about as clear as you can get.

Unless you're going to call the entire story fake, then yes we have enough information.

You could always speak with the staff about your dietary restrictions as is standard practice for the allergic, intolerant, and such.

If they can accommodate your request, and they typically will, you’re golden. If not, you may need to patronize a different business. It is, after all, a reciprocal relationship. If your basic needs aren’t met, and they have a stiff policy on substitution - then yes, you are a jerk for ignoring them.

That's exactly my point.

That's actually precisely the problem. People abusing the system make things more difficult for people who have legitimate reasons to be the exception to the rule (e.g. people with allergies).

That's a problem, but it's not the problem. I'm not sure why you guys are acting like it's an unreasonable suggestion for a sushi restaurant to serve sashimi.

Because living in a world where every bad behavior is prevented through enforcement mechanisms and bureaucratic procedure sucks ass, compared to a world where people generally speaking follow a social contract. If you can't understand why then you might not be thinking about it hard enough. It introduces friction, especially on those who would already have behaved well.

This is the internet after all.

Sushi restaurants also selling sashimi is "bureaucratic"? That's a strange take.

Why? Charging for leftovers and offering sashimi as an upsell is certainly one mechanism the restaurant can use. And so is reserving the right to refuse serving customers they don't like, and making use of that right every once in a while.

It's up to the market (ie patrons and restraunts) to decide which mix of policies they prefer.

They're free to use that mechanism, but it shouldn't come as a surprise to the customer. That accomplishes nothing other than wasted food, upset patrons, and credit card disputes.

Ultimately depends on the restaurant - we had an AYCE sushi, hibachi restaurant we loved with a style different than a conveyor belt that gracefully handled the issue.

The restaurant had a to-go by-weight option. For the dine in patrons, you would check boxes on a menu slip with your order, quantity, etc.

Their menu included a simple request that patrons reasonably finish each plate before submitting a new order, that being honest kept their prices reasonable, and that patrons wasting entire orders would be charged on a per-weight basis for the wasted order at their discretion.

By the time we left there was probably 8 lbs of rice on the tray… can’t believe they weren’t kicked out.

Why should they be? It's likely that the restaurant still charged them for the full price of the plates that were removed from the belt, regardless of whether or not they ate everything that was on said plate.

If they're otherwise quiet, respectful and paying customers, what about picking apart their food warrants kicking them out? As another user suggested, what happens if you don't eat the crust at a pizza joint?

Edit: Since I'm getting a lot of similar replies here, I'll point out that OP has since clarified that the conveyor belt sushi joint that they went to, contrary to how they are usually run, did in fact charge a "flat fee" for access to the sushi train. Hence my confusion - this is a deviation from the norm.

Edit 2: Kinda interesting watching the up/downvote progression in this thread. My initial post, despite being incorrect, was decently upvoted. Now that I've clarified that I was wrong and tried to correct myself, I'm getting downvoted. Neat!

the restaurant still charged them for the full price of the plate

At all-you-can-eat buffets, customers are charged a flat rate, not per plate.

Obviously this breaks down if people are taking plates of food and chucking them in the trash.

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro2_bQkaG5U&t=84s

OP specifically specifies that this was a "conveyor-belt sushi" restaurant. Those are only "all you can eat" in the sense that you're welcome to pull as many plates as you'd like off of the belt, but each plate is usually priced at one of a few different levels, and you will be charged for the total value of the plates you removed from the belt.

Eg, if yellow plates are $1, blue plates are $2, and orange plates are $3, and you pulled two orange plates, a blue plate and a yellow plate, your total would come out to $9 even if you didn't clear your plates.

So either that isn't all-you-can-eat, or I don't understand the definition of all-you-can-eat.

The confusion, as clarified elsewhere between GP and I in this thread, lies in the fact that you don't usually see an actual "all you can eat conveyor belt sushi" restaurant - they traditionally charge by the plate but you're welcome to order as much as you want. In point of fact, the restaurant OP went to bucked that trend and was actually a flat-fee conveyor belt joint.

As far as I can tell, most conveyor belt sushi places charge by plate.

But most all-you-can-eat sushi places use a conveyor belt.

“All you can eat” rarely means “you can eat as much as you can afford” but rather means “you pay one price and can eat as much as you like for that price”.

That a conveyor belt is involved doesn’t change the offer.

Correct. The confusion, as noted elsewhere in this comment chain, lies in the fact that most conveyor belt sushi joints are not all you can eat, and the format of the restaurant that OP went to is rare.

They clearly said it was all-you-can-eat and the behavior and reaction are very much fitting the context. Why are you assuming you know better than them the restaurant they went to?

Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.

Why are you assuming you know better than them the restaurant they went to?

OP clarified, and I thanked them for clarifying and acknowledged I was wrong. I've further mentioned as much in additional comments[1, 2, 3], and I've edited my original post to clear things up. Care to continue being snarky despite my attempts to correct myself?

Yes, flat-rate sushi conveys exist.

And are, by and large, less common than per-plate joints, hence the confusion.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562397

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38563087

[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38563030

I've visited two conveyor-belt sushi locations - one in Japan and one here in the US. The one in Japan followed the colored plate system, however the US one just worked off a flat $20 fee.

That's not how this place works, and clearly it would have been less offensive behavior if it was.

No this anecdote is about conveyor belt sushi, which in my experience is pay by the color coded plate

No, in this case, it was a flat rate up front.

Basically 100% a buffet except the table moves to you (which, to the point of the original article, waiting for your preferred sushi to come around probably slows down consumption and improves the economics)

Obviously if people want to buy food and waste it that's on them. But this was a pretty clear abuse of the restaurant's business model as well.

This place charged a flat fee at the door, then everything inside is all-you-can-eat.

Interesting, I've never seen that at a conveyor-belt sushi joint before. That's not how they traditionally operate.

There's a conveyor belt hot pot by me which does it both ways. You choose whether everyone at the table will do the normal method where they count up your plates and price based on the color, or pay a flat rate for however much you wish to eat. In the case of the latter, they reserve the right to tack on a fee if you're wasting food.

it sounds like it was an all you can eat place, the few one I go to has signs up saying if you don't eat what you take you may be charged an extra plate (I've never seen them actually enforce it, I assume it's more for people who go make a giant bowl and then eat almost none of it).

Conveyor-belt sushi does not charge the same way a traditional "all you can eat" buffet restaurant charges. See my comment here[0].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38562309

This one does/did.

Most all-you-can-eat places I've been to have rules against food waste.

Edit 2: Kinda interesting watching the up/downvote progression in this thread. My initial post, despite being incorrect, was decently upvoted. Now that I've clarified that I was wrong and tried to correct myself, I'm getting downvoted. Neat!

Because people didn't know you were wrong before, and it's usually good to make factually incorrect comments be gray.

I've toyed around with the idea of doing an article where the spreadsheet gets progressively more complicated with how to model major business types.

Maybe I should do it!

Please do. I for one would be interested!

Seconded!

Thirded

I'm sure you get the idea, but I'll go forth as well.

(Pun intended)

In my opinion you could teach both economics and common spreadsheet usage. Just please do not make it Excel-specific, many people here use Linux desktops. I would suggest LO Calc as it runs everywhere, or maybe Google Sheets as a distant second.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I was planning Google Sheets, since I'm on Linux and don't have excel.

I am hoping for something I can embed in the actual article.

I didn't even know about LO Calc. I'll check it out.

I would subscribe to this too!

Please do. That would be great. Thanks

I would love to know about the economics of theme parks. They require huge amounts of land, a massive upfront capital investment in the rides, and require a ton of logistics to coordinate the many workers required to run a place that often isn’t open year round (thinking Carowinds or six flags, not Disney). They also have to advertise continuously and serve an extremely elastic industry (people will cut theme park visits before cutting down on grocery store visits).

Like when do operators decide to invest in a new ride and what’s the payback cycle like?

The Park Database has a great 3-park blog series on the business of theme parks. This is part I, the others are linked from there: http://www.theparkdb.com/blog/the-business-of-theme-parks-pa...

They have a really interesting blog overall.

This is amazing. Thanks for the link! If someone else reads this comment please upvote this person.

There's also this video from Wendover Productions on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oESoI6XxZTg

They also have to advertise continuously and serve an extremely elastic industry (people will cut theme park visits before cutting down on grocery store visits).

Of course, elasticity goes in both directions. Demand that can be cut quickly, can also expand quickly.

Toilet paper is almost the opposite. And the extremely inelastic (and thus stable) demand means that competition is sharp and everything needs to be hyperoptimized for your business to stand a chance. There's almost no slack in the system, because that would be a needless expense.

They require huge amounts of land, a massive upfront capital investment

I believe I once read a quip in The Economist about golf courses being a good investment for the second owner (the first usually going bankrupt).

Have pondered slurping down pizza toppings and discarding the crusts...

I had an acquaintance about a decade ago who did this on the grounds that they were “gluten sensitive”. It was weird.

My cousin who has Coeliac disease used to do this every so often. We also made pizza with a non-wheat base for her.

Can't really fault her for this weirdness, she has it rough enough.

People eating “low carb” also do this. It’s recommended in the Atkins book IIRC.

I'd be interested in seeing a study on different health outcomes for crust-eaters and crust-avoiders in their 30s and 40s. Do crust-avoiders (or hambuger-bun avoiders) suffer less from obesity or type 2 diabetes due to getting that much less intake of carbs?

Pizza meats are incredibly high in fat, the cheese is very high in fat and sugar, and the sauce is high in sugar. It's possible the bread is the least calorie dense part of the pizza per unit of satiety.

I’d happily read a book with each chapter breaking down the unit economics of a given type of business.

Not 100% on-point, but check out Roadside MBA, [1] which was written by a trio of MBA professors. Instead of using the case study method with examples from huge companies, they do a deep dive on small businesses that they visited on cross-country roadtrips. Very entertaining and accessible.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Roadside-MBA-Entrepreneurs-Executives...

The hardcover costs $5. I think it's the cheapest brand new hardcover price I've seen.

Edit: It's $5 for a used edition. Then my comment is now moo.

Edit: It's $5 for a used edition. Then my comment is now moo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62necDwQb5E

The author (Paul Oyer, Yale MBA) also has some entertaining videos, and a book, on the economics of online dating.

I actually reached out to him to see if he would sign a copy of the book for my daughter, with whom I read the book during COVID. He was happy to do so, and did the same for his new book on the economics of sports.

I don't plan to read the book about online dating with my daughter, but perhaps she'll read it on her own someday!

Sometimes NPR's Planet Money podcast does this but it's generally 10-15 minutes at a pop coverage of a specific theory or news item for general audience, they covered buffets recently in a different way

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1197954459/all-you-can-eat-bu...

I find NPR Planet Money to be the shallowest and most unsatisfying of takes possible on pretty much every issue they take on.

It’s often the starting point for me to investigate something further, even This American Life might mention something and I have to look it up for proper context.

Any better recommendations? I used to listen to 99% invisible, but the quality is not always sustained. Planet Money is rather entertaining still.

I've never been to an AYCE sushi joint that didn't charge for the leftovers described in this example, for what it's worth.

Yeah every conveyor belt place I have been to just charges by the plate.

The closest thing I could think of was the economics of everyday things.

https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/

Available as a podcast

Check out a book called Growth Units, which dives into unit economics across different business types.

The profit calculator from NYMag was a great series of articles about the economics of business from investment banks, to drug dealers, to yoga studios. https://nymag.com/news/features/2007/profit/

I mean, they are perfectly within their right if that behavior is not explicitly disallowed.

Over here, all-you-can-eat Asian shops generally operate on one of two principles (sometimes combined):

1. You can only order 5 things per person per 10 minutes

2. For every X amount of weight left over you pay a penalty

Sounds like a category error, confusing the sadism of extracting oversized value from restaurateur with the deliciousness of food.

At least, I've never had a hankering for a water and a half pound of tiny slivers of sashimi.

The prank of taking the same amount of sushi and leaving it in a neat stack would be closer to enlightenment.

The article mentions that 80% of all restaurant items will be eaten at home by 2030.

This further cultural entrenchment of people into homebodies is really sad to me. Really hope this does not happen.

I am assuming of course that the implication is that in-restaurant dining demand will shift to delivery, not that delivery will see some massive explosion over and above current restaurant food demand.

Not sure I’d put a lot of stock in that. My behavior has completely changed, why would I pay DoorDash or Uber Eats $30 to deliver some fast food when I can go to a real restaurant and get much better food for cheaper?

Delivery made sense when it was artificially subsidized by VCs, now that they’ve all jacked prices it’s not competitive at all.

why would I pay DoorDash or Uber Eats $30 to deliver some fast food when I can go to a real restaurant and get much better food for cheaper?

Because you can eat it in the comfort of your own home, instead of the discomfort of an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers.

It may just be me but I really do not like eating in public.

Eating out isn't uncomfortable. You get to people watch, make small talk with the waiter, talk with the person you are eating with, read a book if you are alone. You also get a chance to get out of the house for a while, I love eating out, and honestly only having a baby (which does add complexity) is the only reason I don't eat out more.

Eating out isn't uncomfortable

That really depends on your personality. Not only is "people watching" not my thing, but the idea of other people "people watching" me is terrifyingly uncomfortable. Sends shivers down my spine level of discomfort. Please don't watch me while I eat. Some of us find the idea of "making small talk" with anyone, let alone wait staff, to be inherently uncomfortable.

For others, eating is a social activity, or an opportunity to socialize, and they like that. Some people feel "trapped" if they are cooped up inside their homes for too long, and need reasons to "get out of the house." That sounds like you, and that's great. Nothing wrong with it at all and you should enjoy eating out as much as you like. For others such as myself, who are introverted and find great comfort in the solitude of our homes, the reasons that you find eating out to be comfortable are the same reasons we find eating out to be uncomfortable.

That’s certainly a very valid viewpoint but it sounds like some form of social anxiety. I’m pretty introverted and rarely make smalltalk with anyone unprompted but I still enjoy going to certain restaurants and kind of nursing a drink while zoning out. I usually avoid the bar while alone because some bartenders think you want to chat.

It's actually not social anxiety. Believe it or not, my wife and I are performing magicians, so I'm actually a part time entertainer on the side. I have no issues mingling, making small talk if I have to, and enjoying the company of others.

But it's when I'm not seeking those things, when I want to enjoy a meal or a private conversation, then I start to a) feel protective of my privacy (and yes I know, restaurant = public place) and b) I just have no interest in the type of socializing that we're talking about (making small talk with the wait staff etc.).

In other words I just want to be left alone, and I find the concept of people "people watching" me while I eat or go about my daily business to be, well, creepy. If I'm asking for attention it's different. If I'm enjoying a meal with my wife, leave me alone.

I will add, however, that the privacy element is probably a bit more "extreme" for me than others because of having experiences as a child where privacy and boundaries, when there was an expectation of privacy, was violated. And so I am more concerned with privacy than probably even the typical tinfoil hat wearing techie who is paranoid about Internet and device privacy. That's undoubtedly where the thought of people "people watching" me while I eat at a restaurant creeps me the hell out comes from.

Please don't watch me while I eat

If it makes you feel any better, and maybe I'm only speaking for myself, but when I people watch, I'm barely paying attention, and I'm never really watching people actually eating. It's the activities around the eating, mostly just walking and talking (this is why I really like European sidewalk cafes, you get an endless river of people passing by to watch). I'm not taking detailed notes on anything, and definitely not bite sizes, how many times you chew, how messy you are etc. That's all too close for my own comfort. Couldn't care less about that stuff. Probably the most info I retain is new ideas on how to dress myself, outside of exceptional or weird situations that might arise in public. Which, OK, in the context of this thread, I might notice the people carrying two or more heaping mountains of food to their table at a time.

“Eating out isn't uncomfortable.”

For you. If a person says they don’t like eating out because it’s uncomfortable, you can trust they know whether they are uncomfortable or not.

I don’t like loud, busy places. It’s great when I can have a meal at a restaurant when it’s not packed, but you never know until you get there.

You and I say that, but mistrusting strangers and being "anti-social" is the dominant paradigm - in America much more than in other countries, I think.

True. But it is more about trend like watching movie in multiplex is fun, there are those large butter popcorn containers, soda machine, bigger screen, better sound and so on. But more people are now streaming than going out for movie.

So now I think more people then ever will be having restaurant food at comfort of home and not worrying about traffic, driving, cabs, parking, crowd, one more beer or wine glass etc.

For me, that completely depends whether I'm there alone or not.

With friends, family or coworkers, eating out is fantastic and a fun social activity.

Alone, it's awkward, uncomfortable and unpleasant.

If I'm not with someone, I'd rather it be delivered.

Don't forget the benefits of not having to set the table and not having to clean up, including doing the dishes. Also: not having to prepare, if you're cooking yourself.

Re: baby: If there's an Ikea near you, you might want to try that. Around here, they typically are very well-prepared for small children (say, 1+). Basically, all of the cutlery and china they sell for kids is available for use in the restaurant. And they have play areas integrated into the dining area - kids play and parents can eat.

It's absolutely incredible how much you can learn about cooking from youtube.

My family rarely goes out to restaurants anymore, not because we don't love restaurants, but because it's more fun to cook at home.

You quickly realize that most restaurants serve terrible food and so it isn't worth eating out at all.

I pretty much only go out now for stuff I can't make my self, or as a social thing.

Most restaurant food needs to be simple and easy so they can get you in and out quick.

It can be fun but its literally a two hour commitment usually to prepare a big meal, eat it, then deal with the hellfire you created in the kichen. I don’t always have the energy for that at the end of the workday.

You are so lucky to have a family who cook together!

Because you can eat it in the comfort of your own home, instead of the discomfort of an unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers.

People never ate out because of the food. They ate out because of the dining experience.

You can make better meals, cheaper, at home, in less time than it takes to go out. Yet people still dined out.

And, they pay a premium for it. There is no sense in paying a premium for home delivery, because you are getting substandard meals[1].

[1] Few dishes travel well in a bag, even if it's packaged properly and delivered quickly - steam rising off hot food that is not ventilated causes things to go soggy. If you do ventilate it, then it goes cold in minutes while traveling. Then reheating the food makes it less nice than it was when cooked. Hence, all delivered food tend to be slightly different to eating it off a plate when it is freshly cooked. Even pizzas suffer from being steamed while traveling.

You can make better meals, cheaper, at home, in less time than it takes to go out.

This is going to be highly dependent on your local restaurants and what you like to eat. I can't make better bbq or pizza than the restaurants near me. I can make either of those pretty well, but not faster. I can make a pretty good burger, competitive with almost all the restaurants near me, but I can't make French fries as good as a restaurant with a fryer.

I actually assumed eating at home increase wouldn't be because of doordash, but because of improved quality and variety of frozen meals. I remember what was available when I was a kid was mostly mediocre to outright bad. Now a lot of things like quite good frozen pizzas and lots of entrees you'd normally get at a sit-down chain are available in the frozen food section. I'm a pretty poor cook but I can't screw up following the oven directions on a box and I'd get the result faster and cheaper than doordash.

It isn't as good as a home cooked meal but it is a lot better than the awful TV dinners I rarely ate back in the 80s.

Here in Spain the restaurant is actually part of the experience. Like a beneficial thing. It's nice to truly get away. With colleagues we eat at a restaurant for lunch at least once a week. It helps that pretty much all places have a three course daily menu with drink for around €12.

While this is a valid preference, I think it may be a rather unusual one; people tend to like going out.

At which point its always better to just pick it up yourself unless you absolutely cannot go do that for whatever reason. Not only is it significantly cheaper, but the food is also significantly hotter.

Average HN work from home remotecel autist.

why would I pay DoorDash or Uber Eats $30 to deliver some fast food when I can go to a real restaurant and get much better food for cheaper?

1. I don't have to drive

2. I don't have to listen to other people talking loud or being obnoxious while I'm trying to eat my meal and have a quiet private conversation with my wife

3. I can enjoy it in the comfort of my home, whether this means eating dinner in front of the tv, or enjoying a scotch or wine we have at home, or even just being able to get out of the clothes we've been in all day and enjoy comfort food in our PJs

4. I don't have to brave the cold or wet weather

5. I don't have to deal with wait staff interrupting my meal every 5 minutes to ask if everything is ok

6. I don't have to worry about music that I don't care for, or is distracting, being played while I eat

7. I don't have to worry about dirty dishes on the table, or the table itself being dirty (although to be fair I have no control over the dishes used to prepare the food and so some might consider this to be moot)

8. I don't have to worry about my home being crowded and busy with strangers, making for an uncomfortable dining experience. My mother once took me to a restaurant to celebrate my birthday, just the two of us. I'm a foodie and, despite listing several reasons I often prefer delivery / take-out over dine-in, I actually do love a great restaurant and the food at this particular place was supposed to be amazing. The two of us were put in a tiny corner in a crowded restaurant so close to the tables nearest us that the three parties (us plus our neighbours on either side) could hear every single word of each others' conversations. It was practically a communal table situation. Edit: I forgot to mention that we had a reservation which made this experience all the more frustrating. Which leads me to...

9. I don't have to worry about finding myself at a restaurant that has communal tables

10. I don't have to worry about people celebrating their birthdays receiving a loud and obnoxious group of wait staff bursting out of the kitchen to interrupt the entire restaurant's private conversations with an annoying song and cheer

I recognize that a lot of the above points can be avoided by choosing a different restaurant. But sometimes you still want the food of a particular restaurant but that restaurant's dining atmosphere is what kills it for you.

5. I don't have to deal with wait staff interrupting my meal every 5 minutes to ask if everything is ok

I'm sure you know this, but they're actually interrupting your meal every 5 minutes to minimize any possible delay in seating the next person after you. They just accomplish that by asking if everything is ok.

It's all about throughput.

(And it's a US thing. In France, among other places, you're expected to be the only group using the table for that meal. Which means they're in no rush for you to finish, but also that they are not happy if a group sits down but only a subset of people order food. Sometimes to the extent of asking you to leave.)

I'm not so sure it's just a US thing. I've been to plenty of places in EU that are very interested in feeding you and getting you out the door for the next people to come in. Some high end, in-demand places will even tell you up front what the time limit is because with their limited space, they need to be able to accommodate the next reservation.

And often, it just comes down to overcorrection, where the server is afraid of getting bad tips (so yes, that is US specific, and maybe related to throughput, though not exclusively), or incompetency, where they haven't learned how to read the table and predict their needs.

One big thing is take out. It is quite common in many countries. Maybe not in US yet. Lot of people grab food from restaurant or stores on their way home from work. Some people even pick from different places to have some combo meal at home which is not possible while eating in a restaurant.

It's quite common in the US.

Yeah and you don't have to do the dishes afterwards. And it's served hot and you can order more if you feel like it.

I mean I never pay for delivery (except very rarely pizza) but I still do takeout over eating in the restaurant 90% of the time.

Yea it seems like western culture is obsessed with advancing hyper individualism. I can't judge, I'm a product of the culture myself, but our mental health seems to keep getting worse the more we keep our lives inside our own bubbles and move away from any aspect of community.

Coming from an eastern culture, I’m happy to judge. Luckily it’s a self-correcting problem. Hyper individualism makes having children both burdensome (lack of community support) and socially undesirable, and so these cultures are being replaced by less individualistic ones.

Except such cultures inevitably morph back into individualistic ones, typically once educational attainments and female emancipation kick in.

It's not about culture, it's about economic conditions.

It’s about culture, not economic conditions. A number of American sub-cultures that are more educated and wealthy than average (Mormons, Muslims) also have above-replacement fertility rates.

It is culture but it's not the pro-individualism enlightenment parts of Western culture that made us great. There's so much anti-natalistic culture to fix (and a little bit of economics)

- make housing cheaper

- fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier

- pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus

- also economic incentives help, beef up people's social security if they have kids

fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier

People can only learn so quickly; you're not going to give people a college-level education by age 15. Modern society requires more education to be productive than past societies, but this is at odds with human biology.

pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus

This is only a problem in the US, but birthrates are low in all developed nations.

Some economic incentives might help a bit, but they're not going to have a dramatic effect: people simply don't want to have big families any more. Kids are a lot of work (and expensive, even with those incentives), so people like to have 1 or 2 and concentrate all their attention on those. They don't want 6 kids.

Their reach of wealthy economic conditions is too recent. Give it a couple more generations and you'll see.

Maybe we ask Mormon and Muslim women what they think of their education, wealth and expected role in those above-replacement fertility rates?

I think this remains to be seen. It's possible that certain less individualistic cultures exposed to individualistic modernity will adapt in a robust way.

Jewish culture, Italian culture, Greek culture, Spanish culture - all famed for big families, worshipping fertility, etc etc. They all fell to the demands of advanced-capitalism demands. A couple of generations and that becomes true of any culture: once women are free to decide their own destiny, and educated enough to know there is a world of life options, they want to dedicate less of their time to child-rearing.

Are you claiming China and Japan are individualistic, or that people are hiding all the babies somewhere?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... does not show eastern countries as having particularly high birth rates, and the largest eastern countries have the lowest.

The description on that page under Africa, which is the only continent remaining with fertility rate well above replacement rate, does agree with your assessment that it's about the society and its expectations.

(As a side note, I heard that Nigeria is on track to soon becoming the country with the 2nd highest number of English speakers after the US, which stunned me given that India is the most populous country in the world and—I thought—has a fairly high percentage of English speakers.)

Are you claiming China and Japan are individualistic, or that people are hiding all the babies somewhere

No? A -> B doesn’t mean that B -> A. In the case of East Asia, it’s nearly a century of deliberate anti-natal government policy. China’s one-child policy is the most brutal, but pretty much all East Asian countries had softer forms of encouraging people not to have kids.

It's not like this at all. People aren't having kids in all developed nations, east or west, and also in developing nations as they become more developed, the birthrate falls dramatically. It's not "anti-natal government policy", it's various other factors: cost of living, expectations of how much resources/attention will be devoted to each kid, women's rights, etc.

China's one-child policy is long since over, but their birthrate is very low too. Government policy isn't the problem (if it's even a "problem"). People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.

There’s more community outlets than ever before. Try joining a makerspace or a slow pitch softball league in 1950. All you had back then was the church or beers at the elks lodge after work.

Americans' participation in community outlets has been plummeting across basically every category since the late 60s -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

At least for my family, especially as delivery packaging has improved, restaurants have become an inferior experience unless they are fairly high end.

Grandparents used to take everyone out to dinner regularly. Now we eat at their house. They have more comfortable chairs at home. The environment is much quieter. You don’t have to wait for refills. They personally have better cutlery. We aren’t really the types to like being waited on.

So unless we explicitly want something social from the restaurant or we need a table as we are travelling, the reasons for actually going in one have disappeared.

Above all, the probability of a restaurant being able to provide a meal with sufficient quality is too low.

If my family gets together, we can bang out a multiple course guaranteed high quality meal in one hour, having fun while we do it.

But a lot of that is due to cooking knowledge that the elders in the family pass down and refine over many, many decades.

That works if you have a family and enjoy cooking. For me neither applies.

And I'm sure restaurant chefs get some kind of training to replace the passed down knowledge :)

It also works for very narrow sets of dishes. Nobody is an expert in every type of food in the world. Parent poster was just humblebragging.

The packaging might be better but it doesn’t solve the problem that the food arrives cold. Especially since the drivers pick up multiple deliveries and it can be 30-40 minutes before you get your food.

I've never had food arrive cold.

I’d bet tipping inflation has a lot to do with that. Delivery can often times come out cheaper with the apps suggested tip than dining in with 20-25% being expected.

You can tip any amount. You chose if tipping inflation would affect you.

US tipping is sick, and it is not fair to people who are involved in preparing your experience. Why only servers receiving tip? Why not the cook? Or cleaning lady? After all, dirty toilet will ruin your dining experience.

some places do share tips across the whole staff, though sometimes waiters still get a larger cut

Could be. Here in Spain dining out is the norm and 0% tip is expected (though some is highly welcomed of course)

While I agree that the suggested tip percentages are getting out of hand, I personally refuse to follow those and I would be surprised if most people did. I tip the same as I ever did: 10% (or less) for bad service, 15% for decent but unremarkable service, 20% (or more) for good service. There's absolutely no reason to increase the percentages one tips just because the people writing the POS software are putting in crazy values.

That does sound like unreasonable extrapolation; I'd be very suspicious of _any_ prediction that _anyone_ makes about consumer behaviour in 2030, because the track record for attempting to make long-term predictions about consumer behaviour is... not great.

At least in this country (Ireland) restaurants seem to be, if anything, fuller than they were before covid; deliveries are definitely more of a thing than they used to be, but no apparent evidence that people are giving up on going out.

Well, restaurants, even on the high end, are increasingly getting louder and less comfortable. I thought that I was just getting older, but it's a real thing [0]. My favorite bars are the ones that are comfortable and don't blast your ears off with music.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r... [0]

The general trend is that people use money to buy "privacy," i.e. the freedom to not have to interact with "strangers."

It's a glaring example of local optimization at the cost of global (your own life, viewed in its entirety) worsening.

This further cultural entrenchment of people into homebodies is really sad to me.

This is an odd take because the trend in new/remodeled homes is dedicating practically the entire first floor and back yard of every home as an entertaining space. The line between "at home" and "out" is getting to be very thin.

Going over to a different friend's house 4-5 times a week for dinner, games, movies, music, sporting events, swimming, spa, fire pit feels to me pretty darn out.

My home is quiet, I can wear pajamas, it costs 20% less because I'm not tipping (I do tip a couple bucks for takeout), costs even less because I'm not buying drinks, alcohol isn't marked up 5x from retail pricing, and I can relax after my meal instead of spending 20 minutes trying to get my waiter's attention for the check and then having to drive home.

The only reason I eat out is it's a date and we're in the early stages of getting to know each other, I want to treat someone (including dates) to something nice, or it's a special occasion.

I once went to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Bulgaria with a mechanism I'd never seen before.

The salads and starches and suchlike were all self-service, and waiters toured the room with big skewers of freshly roasted meat they'd carve right in front of you. But of course they'd only serve you a certain amount, and they weren't very fast to make a return visit. Thus limiting diners' consumption of the more expensive items, unless the diner was very patient.

Of course, the prices were very fair and we all left well fed.

Reminds me of “In churrascarias or the traditional Brazilian-style steakhouse restaurants, servers come to the table with knives and a vertically-held skewer, on which are speared various kinds of premium cuts of meat, most commonly local cuts of beef, pork, chicken, lamb, and sometimes atypical or exotic meats.”

Ive found these types of restaurants all over the US - https://fogodechao.com/ is one I remember

churrascaria refers to the skewered and grilled cooking aspect.

the roaming the room and serving you from the skewer is called rodizio

Do americans have pizzeria rodizio? They bring slices to your table. Younger folks usually brag like "I had some 20 slices last rodizio"

There is a place in Texas that does this called Delucca, I've been to their Dallas location and really liked it.

Same, they had some kind of truffle pizza that was delicious

the only 'rodizio' I've seen in the US tend to be on the higher end, while most all you can eat pizza places tend to be on the lower end and just self serve.

The Mountain Mike’s pizza in my hometown used to do that certain night(s) of the week when I was a kid. I don’t know if they still do.

Similar dynamic, they’d come out with a fresh pizza, do a lap around the dining room, and if you wanted that flavor you’d ask for a slice, or keep waiting.

I don’t remember if adults could make requests / suggestions.

Although to be fair, most churrascarias use the rodizio model.

Hence rodiziogrill.com :)

You make me miss Brazil. And you make me hungry.

And don't forget Comida por Quilo - buffet where you pay by the kilo/pound:

https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/the...

Often advertised in the US as "Brazilian grills."

https://www.tucanos.com/

https://www.rodiziogrill.com/

The quality+price of a steakhouse with the variety of a buffet.

I love me a Brazilian steakhouse, I think you're overestimating the patience required.

* If there's something specific you want and it's not currently going around you can ask and they'll usually bring you a whole skewer just for you. Your server will also typically collect the table's favorites and send them your way.

* For everything except the steak that's carved right on to your plate you can just ask for more when they're serving it to your table. And the only reason for the steak is just because they have to take it back to get seared again.

* Unless your restaurant has specific dinner service slots (which is pretty rare) you'll likely get people coming over to serve you meat before you even get a chance to hit the "salad" bar.

Those steakhouses make the economics work by simply charging $25/plate/lunch $50/plate/dinner before drinks. They've got to be some of the least "sleezy" restaurants around.

This was at a time when Bulgaria's per-capita GDP was around $7500. I can assure you, they were not making the economics work by charging $50/plate :)

Which is probably why they weren't delivering full skewers at request.

I would have agreed with your comment 100% after my first visit to such a restaurant, but after my most recent visit I cannot do so. The amount of patience required depends entirely on the quality of service, and this is not necessarily consistent at all such restaurants at all times.

I was hesitant to be that guy, but this does indeed sound like a brazilian steakhouse.

We have those in the US; it's called Old Country Buffet https://youtu.be/net7t1HjQxY?si=W4lZ0ru3QYbFs7SO

Never saw that style of service at old country buffet. That chain is usually go get it from the buffet tables with a person on the end of the buffet tables carving ham or beef. If you have never been to a 'Brazilian' steak house you should try it at least once they are a little pricy but a very interesting experience distinct from a buffet. The one I went to had a very small salad bar. Everything else they wandered by and served meat of skewers.

That sounds like a churrascaría aka Brazilian steakhouse/bbq to me!

Did the waiters ask if you wanted meat or were there cards with a red side and a green side?

I went to one of those once without understanding how the token worked.

They kept coming again and again with the delicious things... I left so full I could barely walk.

It's weird how while I could have turned "more grilled meat" down at any time but I didn't.

I once went to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Bulgaria with a mechanism I'd never seen before.

Do you remember where it was and what it was called?

Makes sense. The slower you eat, the less food it takes to feel full, because the nutrients have had time to absorb into your blood and hit the feedback mechanisms. So the longer in between servings of high cost items, the less overall will probably be consumed.

I used to go with my team to Fogo de Chão in the before-fore times as they were right across from our building, and they applied the exact same strategy wrt to meat.

I was just at a Brazilian steakhouse in Vegas that is exactly this.

That being said, my table ate an inhuman amount of extremely delicious meat.

they weren't very fast to make a return visit

I've seen this at several AYCE sushi restaurants. They repeatedly offer you seaweed salad, soup, and mussel appetizers, but get really 'busy' when they are preparing the sushi rolls. The worst I saw was (about 20 yrs ago) some stingy owner had a stipulation for AYCE only for the first hour, then you had to pay up. The chef was incredibly slow preparing the food. Other places I've seen try to chat you up to slow down your eating.

In the US this is often the case at Brazilian steakhouses. They're usually higher end than regular buffets though because the meat is the main attraction and they're not stingy with it.

Reminds me of the Czech Republic, where in some places you get unlimited sauce and dumplings with any roast dish. So you might only get 2-3 pieces of meat with your ie. Svíčková but you can order more sauce and dumplings as often as you want. Of course both are relatively cheap and all the beers you order to go with it more than make up for it. Great for kids too (without the beer preferably).

I've seen that in a few places, though I've never been to Bulgaria.

This is how I remember buffets operating in the US when I was a child, too. Nobody would go table to table to serve the good stuff, but would have stations at the buffet line, and you'd have to ask them to carve whatever you wanted. You could go back and get more as much as you wanted, but each trip got you a set amount.

I grew up in a small town in Missouri in the 70s and 80s. I literally had never had any form of Chinese food until I was about 17, and I loved it. So a friend and I would go into "the city" on the regular for a Chinese buffet -- on average once a week during the summer.

I'm pretty sure the owner winced every time we pulled into the parking lot in my friend's heavily used Ford Escort. They had the best Crab Rangoon, and we would knock back between 3-5 heavily loaded plates, each. (Not only Crab Rangoon.) And then heaping bowls of self-serve ice cream.

The restaurant is long gone now -- it folded sometime after I moved out of state (so I don't think it was our feasting that did it) -- which is a shame. I can't put away food the way I did as a teen, and I wish I could go back and have a few much more reasonably sized meals to help restore balance. In my limited defense we always tipped heavily even though we were poor teenagers with part-time amusement park wages.

I literally had never had any form of Chinese ... They had the best Crab Rangoon

What the hell is that stuff? I lived most of my life in Asia, but went to a Chinese buffet on a visit to the USA. Crab Rangoon sounded exciting... but it was full of cream cheese or something? Absolutely shocking. I'm very confident that's not a Chinese (or Burmese) dish.

Chinese-American cuisine is it's own thing with dishes that reflect the ingredients available to Chinese immigrants in the 19th and 20th century and the demands of American consumers. It's typically a sweeter version of Guangdong food, with one or two Hunan or Sichuan dishes thrown in, and maybe some Japanese food as well. Then you've got uniquely Chinese-American food, like Egg Foo Young.

Around here (Midwest) we joke, it's not a complete Chinese Buffet unless it has mac-n-cheese.

Mac-n-cheese is very popular in (at least) Singapore, and that includes amongst our ethnically-Chinese people.

So it's Chinese enough by that standard.

In Shanghai, cheese is something of a novelty item, but milk is sold in every convenience store. I find this surprising given that more than 90% of Chinese are lactose intolerant.

On the other hand, I have gotten the comment several times from a cashier while buying milk, "wow, I've never seen anyone buy that much milk at once!"

How much milk do you need to buy to trigger that comment? One gallon. I drink that much in about two days. (This is several cartons; the largest carton you can buy is 1350 mL of milk.)

So I conclude that Chinese people expect to be able to buy milk, but regardless of that expectation, they actually buy almost zero milk.

The concept of lactose intolerance doesn't seem to be well known. I had someone react with horror when she asked what I was going to have for lunch and I said milk. She assured me that if I were to drink milk on an empty stomach, I would suffer from diarrhea. She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.

In Shanghai, cheese is something of a novelty item, but milk is sold in every convenience store. I find this surprising given that more than 90% of Chinese are lactose intolerant.

I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk); go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying. As long as _enough_ people will buy it, they'll sell it; doesn't need to be the whole population or anything like it.

I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk)

It isn't! To get UHT milk, you have to go to a supermarket - it's an imported product. Supermarkets will also have cheese; kind and quality of the cheese vary by store.

Convenience stores only carry fresh milk. I think my favored brand is from a local dairy.

The price of milk in Shanghai, by the way, is much higher than the price anywhere in the US. This is an extreme reversal of the normal situation for food products. Imported UHT milk is quite a bit cheaper, I assume due to economies of scale, but I can't stand the taste of UHT milk.

go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying.

Mostly those items are theoretically capable of being used to full effect by 100% of the customer base. Here we have a situation where less than 10% of the customer base is even included in the potential customer base for the product. And given that milk has no place in an ordinary Chinese diet, a very large majority of those potential customers are never going to consider buying it.

Singapore is a bit more westernised, so people are more familiar with dairy products. We also have enough people from the wider Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc), who traditionally have more of a dairy culture.

Plus Singapore is reasonably fond of her time as a British colony.

She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.

Of course, we also have populations of westerners with less lactose tolerance. I think Italians fall among them?

European-style lactase persistence is centered in northern Europe, so yes, Italians have less of it.

But the maybe 38% of Italians who can digest lactose ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673071/ ) still dwarf the ~7% of Chinese who can. If your only exposure to whites was Italians, with their very strong cultural features of cheese†, cream-based sauces, and ice cream‡, you'd still know that (1) whites consume much, much, much more dairy than Chinese do; and (2) they are much less likely to suffer any negative consequences from doing so. On the other hand, Italians would probably sympathize with the risk of indigestion from drinking milk "wrong" where Danes or Dutchmen would most likely just be confused at the idea.

My white ancestry is mostly drawn from England, Ireland, Sweden, and Russia, so the baseline expectation for me to be able to digest lactose would be a lot higher than the Italian baseline. Visually I do look more like a southern European.

† To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.

‡ Ice cream is also very popular among the native Chinese.

Wha?

Then General Cho's Chicken is American, because it's very popular in Iowa. Including amongst our ethnically-whitebread people.

Ironically you picked one of the American-Chinese food dishes that is, effectively, American.

There's a fantastic documentary about it (and the Chinese food complex in American in general) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Search_for_General_Tso

In Shanghai, if you visit a Papa John's Pizza, you will have no trouble ordering black pepper beef chow mein.

But I would hesitate to call that "pizza" just because of the name of the restaurant. I would not even call it "American food". That's not why it's on the menu.

Some version of this comment has been smugly posted on every single discussion about Chinese food since the beginning of time.

If you are living in America, and you want the food made by the people in your community who are Chinese, would it make sense to call it Chinese food?

Chinese food, as in: the food the Chinese people make.

Italian food, as in: the food Italian people make.

Indian food, as in: the food that Indian people make.

America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.

I understand why this can be confusing to people who aren't used to living in culturally diverse countries. It is normal in The United States to interact with people from all over the world. Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.

If you are living in America, and you want the food made by the people in your community who are Chinese, would it make sense to call it Chinese food?

That still wouldn't include crab rangoon. It's just as homespun American as key lime pie. No Asians of any variety were ever involved, as you can tell by the fact that it is made of cheese.

Saying "Chinese food" does not literally mean food from China, it means food made by Chinese immigrants to The United States.

Not even close. It means food that is sold in restaurants that are called Chinese restaurants. If it meant food made by Chinese immigrants, it would include Mongolian barbecue (which is Chinese food) and all Japanese cuisine (which isn't, but the Chinese like opening Japanese restaurants because the American price of Japanese food is higher).

America is a country made up of immigrants from other countries, so when they are here making the foods that they used to make in their home countries, we call it "Chinese food", "Italian food" etc.

This seems to contradict the rest of your comment. Are you taking the position that "Chinese food" refers to food that is made by American Chinese for whatever reason, or that it refers to food that is made by Chinese in China? If the second, what are you objecting to in your parent comment?

I think in the past 20 years or so fusion food has started to gain more respect.

Particularly as second and third generation immigrants gain adulthood, it's easier to recognize that Tex Mex, Cal Mex, UK Takeaway Indian, American-Chinese, LA Korean, etc. are their own categories of food worth celebrating. Yes Korean tacos from a truck aren't "authentic Korean" but they're not trying to be.

I usually just tack Country-X on food when we're talking about the fusion version. It's a little unwieldy but makes the point clear.

On the topic, "Chicken Tikka Masala" is actually of British origin, and "Butter chicken", while purportedly developed in India, caught on more in the Western world as a representation of Indian food than it did in India.

I don't think that this is how it works. In Italy almost all sushi restaurants are run by Chinese immigrants, but we definitely don't think of sushi as Chinese food.

for reference: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-crab-rangoon

It's cream cheese. Sometimes there's some crab or krab mixed in.

My understanding is a lot of those fried American Chinese appetizers were introduced as part of the whole Trader Vics thing when he was getting underway

They had the best Crab Rangoon

In late 1970's or early 1980's (I think), Super Stop & Shop's salad bar had a "seafood salad" with imitation crab meat.

So I'm wondering if your "crab" Rangoon was real crab, or something much cheaper.

Well, most Sushi places use fake crab meat (kani). And to be honest, it is not what makes sushi good or bad. I had below average sushi with real crab meat.

Just for the guys with allergies: It contains eggs and wheat.

The quality of the seafood is absolutely what makes sushi good or bad. What else could make sushi good or bad? Rice is basically a solved problem with a rice cooker and vinegar. Soy sauce and wasabi are both cheap commodities.

Well, maybe the fact that sushi refers to the rice, not the fish. Cucumber avocado sushi is sushi. A piece of salmon, even though often lumped in to the category, is not. I'd rather have good rice and average fish than bad rice and good fish.

Random side note: kani is the Japanese word for actual crab. Fake crab is kani-kamaboko ("crab fish sausage"), but the second word was lost in translation.

Crab rangoon is almost always imitation. Sometimes just cream cheese.

I happily eat a dozen of them when the neighborhood Laotian church does its fundraiser, no matter what’s in them. Perfect snack.

Most of the places around here use the canned crab meat, but very little of it usually.

Our colloquial term for the Chinese buffets was "All you can stand Chinese".

I haven't been to one in years. A singular issue with Chinese food today is the seeming race to the bottom. They're all as commoditized and cheap as they possibly be, and it's a real shame. It's also, at least locally, seems to be getting sweeter and sweeter.

To avoid these situations, some owners have updated their language to “All-you-can-eat within reason"

That's just no fun, you lose all the upside. I hope they offer free doggy bags and takeaway for those who eat less than a reasonable amount

One guy I know got kicked because he showed up at noon and got kicked at 10PM when they wanted to close. He was mad that he could not stay and is mad 20 years later about it.

probably the same guy that buys socks with a "lifetime guarantee" and returns them 20yr later. Some people just get off on free stuff.

Some people just get off on free stuff.

That is an understatement with that guy. I have been tempted to over the years to make a web comic on this guy. The junk he does most normal people would never even think of.

Lifetime guarantee is a shitty term. If they are saying it's for the lifetime of the product, then just be upfront and say what the expected lifetime of the product is, and guarantee it for that long.

Was it this guy: https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...

hehe, it would not surprise me if he gave that a try.

I worked with a guy who would routinely get kicked out of AYCE restaurants and he seemed pretty cool with it. I think they'd usually kick him out after about an hour of dining.

All you can eat within reason is certainly lame.

Charging customers for food left on the plate is quite reasonable though. I’m sure a lot gets left on the plate and the waste must be nauseating.

Charging customers for food left on the plate is quite reasonable though.

Is it though? What if the food quality is really low? As the article states, it's a place to get rid of some old food items. Do you think you have an obligation to eat it no matter what?

The article doesn't say the buffet is a place to get rid of old food items, it says that buffets have worked out strategies to get incorporate their own old food items.

Anyway, if you don't want to pay for wasting things you don't like, make your first plate a grazing/browsing sampler platter, then come back for the stuff you liked.

I think we just have a distinction here where the poster suggested charging for "food left on the plate"

Even in a case of "sampling" and finding things you didn't want to finish, you'd be charged. There can be a reasonable alternative.

Do you think you have an obligation to eat it no matter what?

No, just pay for the waste.

Do you think you have an obligation to eat it no matter what?

Only if you put it on your plate ;)

yes, it's totally reasonable. if you aren't sure you're going to like the food, start with a small taste. if you don't like any of the food, take the hit once and don't go back.

A woman was booted from a Golden Corral for eating all the brownies, then attempting to smuggle home extras in her purse.

This is the most hilarious tragedy of the commons I've ever heard of

So I guess you gotta do what you gotta do

I heard an AYCE story from a cruise ship between Finland and Sweden. Someone at a table of Germans (a rep for cheepnis) was seen tipping food from their plate into a handbag, obv for later consumption. So a waitress comes by and says "oh you'll want milk with that" and pours milk into the loaded bag.

Red Lobster decided to make its "All you can eat Shrimp" a permanent menu item. Turns out it cost them dearly. It was designed as a promotional loss leader, which doesn't work full time. They eventually had to creep the price up from $20 to $25.

Back in Austin, there was a small chain of Mongolian grill restaurants that offered AYCE dumplings with your meal that a friend and I often went to. My friend really liked the dumplings and once had about six refill plates of them.

The next time we went, they no longer offered AYCE dumplings.

The buffet has to make money too, otherwise they wouldn't exist. If you want doggy bags/takeaway just eat at a regular restaurant and pay per item.

I worked at an all-you-can-eat buffet as a teenager in the 1990s.

Our big fill-you-up-cheap item was pizza. The ingredient cost for pizza is ridiculously low, even for above-average quality ingredients. An entire pizza was likely $0.50 or so, depending on toppings.

The restaurant oven was this giant gas-fired thing with 5 or 6 circular, rotating stone surfaces with each set to its own temperature. The pizza stone was set somewhere between 550 and 600° F.

My main job was making the pizza, and they were good. Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars. People would even ask for custom pizzas, and management didn't care. You put it out on the buffet line and wave at them so they know it's ready. Of course, while they're waiting they aren't eating other things...

The restaurant also had a little game room with arcade machines that spit out tickets for cheap prizes. Kids would have a slice or two of pizza and then run off to play games, making their visits especially profitable.

all-you-can-eat

pizza

cheap

arcade machines

This all sounds too much like heaven to be true.

That’s literally Cici’s. They have 300 locations in the US.

They have 300 locations in the US.

That implies a wide distribution, but digging a little deeper, about half of their 280 locations are in Texas.

Sounds like Chuck-E-Cheese.

Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't give you all-you-can-eat pizza. But yes, there's a reason it was popular.

In college me and a roommate would go to a cici's pizza on sunday. We usually got there right before the tball groups came in. So you'd see these 2 20 somethings in line ahead of an entire team of kids, and they would just watch us with concern and awe as we piled our plates high, lol.

My roommate could eat so much pizza I'm sure some of those kids were worried they'd run out.

Honestly, the simplest pleasures are often not inherently expensive

90s energy prices… cooking pizza costs much more now.

I feel like pizza is one of those things where the ingredients are really cheap, but much of the value is in the special equipment needed to make it really well. Normal people don't have a 600F pizza oven, so even with the same ingredients they just can't make the same kind of product.

For some definition of normal, to be sure.

My normality has been surrounded by people that make their own stuff, from septic systems, to custom cars, to work sheds, to brick barbeques and to wood fired pizza ovens.

There's an entire state here of people that wouldn't see that as much of a challenge to build or aquire if they wanted good pizza.

For years we just used the annealing oven out the back next to the glass furnaces .. other people had other ways.

A population able to build a massive pizza oven if they wanted to, is rather different than most homes actually having one.

I described a population of individuals each able to build a pizza oven, with those that want one having one.

There's not much challenge to a 320 degree Celsius oven (or 600 F in some parts of the world, apparently).

Solution: 'slow' cooking at 250C. First put the dough in the oven, then put it back in with toppings.

I agree that the oven made a huge difference. I wouldn't be surprised if its value was greater than the aggregate of everything else in the restaurant.

It's none of the chains anyone mentioned. It was just a single place in a dying rustbelt town, and closed up a decade or more ago.

In hindsight, it was obvious that this kind of place depended on being able to hire labor that it could pay less than it was worth. The dream around there was to snag one of the few steel mill jobs that was left, yet almost everyone I worked with went off to college and never came back. We all worked hard and used our brains. For example, they had tuned the oven such that a pizza was cooked in two revolutions of the stone. By using the peel to place the pizza in different spots on the stone you could vary the amount of time the pizza was actually in the oven without needing to set a timer or keep track of anything. Because, as you know, the perfect cooking time depends on the toppings ;). If you've ever watched a Pizza Hut/Dominoes/Papa John's/etc, you'll see that they just throw the pizza on a conveyor belt and forget about them. Everything gets cooked the same exact amount of time (in an over that looks horrendous for energy efficiency!).

Mr. Gatti's Pizza?

oh god i havent thought of this in a long time

Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars.

It's a shame that bad pizza is so popular, when good pizza is relatively cheap to make.

In Finland, a pizza-buffet chain has been one of the most common all-you-can-eat experiences. However, the catch is that you pay extra for drinks. I find the pizzas are so incredibly salty that I suspect they are intentionally made such to force drink purchases. (Like the old salted peanuts at a bar trick.) The pizzas might initially look enticing, but the magic wears off after just a few minutes of eating there.

As kids at a buffet we would all load up on way more food than we could eat. Naturally, we would just play with that food, mixing up all the things we could in cups and dare each other to take a sip. I bet we weren't the only ones who did that.

In most places now you have to pay extra for anything left on your plate.

Rightly so, food waste is inexcusable when we have people going hungry.

EDIT: With the planet being used up people are perfectly happy to just waste edible food. We're doomed.

So much food waste exists because food is incredibly cheap. Like, most of the time money spent recovering waste to give to the poor would be more effective if you just bought more food with it. That’s how cheap it is, and that’s why nobody follows economic incentives to recover the waste without further prompting (there aren’t such incentives).

Logistics are seriously underrated.

Logistics is also why "food is cheap" is a stupid argument.

If the food hadn't been ordered, it wouldn't have been shipped, it wouldn't have been grown...

It's silly to directly relate the exact food a kid didn't eat on a buffet in Los Angeles to a starving family in Detroit, but that doesn't mean there are zero lines to draw.

Rightly so, food waste is inexcusable when we have people going hungry.

How would that food in the buffet get to the hungry?

If the buffet restaurant hadn't bought it for someone to leave it on their plate, then the ingredient cost would have been lower and a poorer person would have been more likely to be able to afford it. Or someone in the supply chain could have donated it as part of their CSR program.

I smell a new startup!

And really this would depend on a rich freeze drying industry. Imagine people driving around in trucks collecting all the uneaten scraps from children and adults plates. Sure we would not be able to handle to food safely, but we will be exporting it to countries that do not have as stringent laws on human consumption.

Food waste is a result of trying to prevent people from going hungry. Systems which produce less food waste result in more people going hungry.

I really do not think that applies to all-you-can-eat buffet rules about leaving plates full of uneaten food.

Hunger is a political problem. We could easily feed everyone in the world pretty cheaply.

Housing is a political problem. We could easily house everyone in the world pretty cheaply.

As a kid, we went to all-you-can-eat buffets quite a bit. Once I stopped being a kid, though, I started avoiding them because the food tends to be pretty poor. I'd rather eat less and enjoy the food than eat more and not.

I regularly treat my 25-ish team to all-you-can-eat (AYCE) buffets (until recently, almost every week). What I observe, which could be country-specific, there are two kinds of "ideal" customers:

1. Family with kids. The kids don't eat much.

2. Couples. The female doesn't eat much. I honestly don't understand why they go to AYCE.

I'm surprised to learn that in the US the ticket is $20. In Indonesia, with a minimum wage of only $320/mo, it's around that price too! ($10 to $20). Also in most AYCEs here you're limited to 90 minutes.

Couples. The female doesn't eat much. I honestly don't understand why they go to AYCE.

Because a buffet isn't a competitive contest where you pay to see how much food you can stuff down your gullet for $20. No, you're paying to walk away satisfied. If that only takes one plate, well, you still "got your money's worth".

Because a buffet isn't a competitive contest where you pay to see how much food you can stuff down your gullet for $20.

I mean it was for me and my brothers growing up. Back when Pizza Hut used to have a linch buffet we'd always have a competition to see who could eat the most slices. Even though I was the youngest I won a decent amount of times. I recall my record being somewhere north of 20 slices, though the buffet slices were smaller than normal pizza slices. We were all skinny as rails back then too (and mostly still are).

though the buffet slices were smaller than normal pizza slices.

That makes sense. At my local pizza place there isn't a buffet, but there is a lunch menu for slices, and those slices are double the size of XL slices.

I like buffets in general for the freedom it allows me, not for the amount of food I can eat. Of course there's the freedom to choose foods, but I'm more talking about not being tied to a waitstaff. Eat what I want, then just leave. No having to flag down waitstaff when I want to pay, having to wait on them to come back, feeling guilted into tipping someone who did a pretty awful job, etc.

Making sure they don't actually make any money off you - this means checking your eating performance against your estimate of the prices of their inputs (wholesale food prices) - challenging and fun ?

Most AYCE places I know of charge 1€ per year of age which I find very reasonable.

Outside of children, it doesn't seems like a very good deal for customers. You don't eat more and more as you age.

Sorry, I should've been clearer. I was replying to the "families with with children". It applies only to children, usually up to 14 or the normal price.

doesn't eat much. I honestly don't understand why they go to AYCE

If someone is going and eating a small amount of a single dish then it makes no sense (unless, as in your example, they're going with someone else like a spouse in which case maybe the person/s they're going with like it enough for it to be worth going on average despite the person who isn't eating much).

But I've known a handful of people with quite small appetites who enjoy AYCE restaurants because it lets them enjoy several of their favourite dishes and/or try several new dishes, even if only a few mouthfuls of each. It might still work out poor value in raw terms of calories per $, but compared to any other way of enjoying 5 different types of tasty food in the same meal it can be very good value in pleasure per $.

I personally can only manage about 1 1/2 plates of food. Not stacked either. But I do enjoy going to them as like you point out the fun is having all these different things you can try with low risk.

[January 2020]

Originally on HN here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22151891 - with 268 comments

From a quick search on those comments, I still don't see the obvious comparison between all-you-can-eat restaurant buffets and all-you-can-use internet bandwidth.

I don’t see how that’s an obvious comparison at all? Food has a per-unit cost, while data packets (which is what I think you actually meant, not bandwidth) have at most a marginal cost that is nearly zero once bandwidth has been built and allocated.

Falsy. Torrenting and 4k streaming are the crab leg enthusiasts. Who's paying to expand the pipes to customers? Netflix refuses to, even though they were consuming a jaw dropping amount of bandwidth compared to all other services. And the cartels (Comcast etc) also refuse. So this has sometimes become an infrastructure problem where taxes etc are roped in.

And not all packets are the same. As much as net neutrality is a good idea at 10,000 feet. When you look into details like 911 calls over Wifi shouldn't actually share priority with 4k VR porn.

Netflix places edge caches at all major providers so they pay for it that way.

Who's paying to expand the pipes to customers?

The customers are. Comcast is charging every one of their customers $80+ per month to connect to internet infrastructure that they update maybe once every 20 years. They have massive profit margins, this is public data.

And not all packets are the same. As much as net neutrality is a good idea at 10,000 feet. When you look into details like 911 calls over Wifi shouldn't actually share priority with 4k VR porn.

QOS is entirely unrelated to charging money for data packets used and is already a solved problem with existing infrastructure and technology, so I don’t really understand why you brought up this straw man.

When you look into details like 911 calls over Wifi shouldn't actually share priority with 4k VR porn.

That's irrelevant, because sane people don't try to stream 4k VR porn and make 911 calls simultaneously on the same device. Just give each device ~64Kbps (enough for even a uncompressed phone call) that it has exclusive first dibs on. For robustness, give each modem ~1Mbps that it has exclusive first dibs on, so 16 people in the same house can't stomp on each other's traffic[0].

This works fine even if the porn and the 911 calls are both going over indistiguishable TOR connections, as they ideally should be in order to deny ISPs the physical possibility of not having net neutrality (though that's not always practical).

(A alternative option is to always allocate marginal bandwidth to the device that's using the least bandwidth total, which avoids having to know what a phone call costs, but seems like it would harder to make reliable in practice.)

0: Technically this is the only part you can properly enforce, since a user could reprogram their modem to give more bandwidth to certain devices, but the 64Kbps/device limit is good default, and if they change it, any problems are on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_transit

...but even if all the traffic is somehow within an ISP's own network, that "...marginal cost that is nearly zero..." is a very poor description of the economics. Networks aren't free, and building a network that can handle 10X the bandwidth means you're stuck with a far higher monthly payment on your construction loan.

One time my dad and his friend went to a pizza hut buffet. His friend was a prankster so he proceeded to pour the entire thing of dressing into the salad bowl, pick it up and take it to his seat. He said the manager came over and was pissed and told him he better eat all of it. He ate it all, much to the managers disapproval. We're talking the huge bowl, like 2 feet wide.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 'greens' were the most expensive part of the buffet. All the shelf stable stuff is super easy to do in bulk, but greens go bad so quickly.

Yep this is why McDonald's salads cost more than a burger.

Surprisingly their lettuce is a free topping

The manager was probably annoyed because they knew that other customers would get mad about the salad not being available. Someone taking the entire giant bowl probably isn't in their normal workflow and will take some time to work around.

I'm not justifying it, if I were the manager I'd be pissed too haha.

They miss the most important facet. Costco can only make so many chickens in their rotisserie. The downside is bounded.

The best bang for your buck options at a buffet still come in a bucket, but there no obligation for the restaurant to keep that bucket full, regardless of demand. It's a bit like playing poker in vegas. You're competing with the other gamblers, not the house.

If a buffet consistently runs out of items they wont be popular for long. However, I think you've stumbled on an interesting point. I wonder if they could squeeze more profit by charging 2 rates: "prime time" and "after hours". If the buffet was $30 at prime-time, you would be promised that nothing is run-out. Let's say that window runs from 11:45am - 1:15pm. Then sell economy-class half-price tickets that are still AYCE, but some of the good stuff might be picked clean or have limited quantity.

This comes with the assumptions that 1) food waste should be minimized (i.e. can't be sold the next day, or less ideal to serve it at dinner hour if it was cooked for lunch), 2) the $15 customer would almost never pay $30, or very little overlap.

If a buffet consistently runs out of items they wont be popular for long.

All items? Sure. But enforced scarcity on the more expensive items is almost a given.

Places do do this. Lunch buffet has less options, is cheaper. Dinner buffet (basic) vs premium dinner buffet + crab legs and other premium seafood

I worked for a hotel company once that did all you can eat breakfast buffets and lot of stuff was reheated day after day, the fruit salad was best avoided too.

I don't know if this is standard but I avoid such places like the plague.

I value free hotel breakfasts at zero for this reason, or whatever the contents of the sealed food items. I prefer Embassy Suites though, where I can see them crack eggs.

  >  I prefer Embassy Suites though, where I can see them crack eggs.

As I understand it, it's somewhat of an open secret that many of the eggs are powdered. I don't know if that's true. They may well also be "boil in a bag", which somewhat makes more sense when you see the texture and the somewhat strange "shapes" that they come out in, if they don't stir and break them.

Heck, maybe they're boil in a bag powdered eggs.

I was at a hotel in/near Miami, FL, and they opened their morning buffet to the local first responder community. I thought that was rather generous of them.

Stuff has like a couple hour window under heat otherwise you have some explaining to do for the health inspector. You can tip them anonymously fwiw.

starches like potatoes might only cost the restaurant $0.30 per serving, compared to $2.25 per serving for steak.

What you need is a hybrid buffet, in which each person gets a certain limit of meat, but unlimited of all the cheaper food.

Souplantation was like this.

You could go through the salad bar, the soup, and bread line as much as you want.

But on the salad bar, most of the actual proteins (I should say non-vegetable proteins -- all the garbanzos you can eat!) were an extra unit charge.

The "secret" was that they always had Chicken Noodle Soup, so folks would go there and simply pick out all the chicken, leaving the broth and noodles. Which was, honestly, pretty annoying.

Souplantation gave up with COVID. They literally threw in the towel, and shut the entire chain down.

There were, and probably still are, restaurants where you pay for the meat item and then get access to the unlimited "salad" bar which includes a wide range of other stuff.

In most restaurants, the food itself is a loss leader. The real money is in booze and drinks. Why most diners back east have a bar. All the money is made in the bar drinks.

In most restaurants, the food itself is a loss leader.

Food cost isn't typically a loss leader, but (American sense) entrees are often aimed to be around neutral because people judge mainly on that when they peruse menus. But that's neutral including loss.

Desserts margins are similar to booze, often. Appetizers make them money, as do sides and upsells.

I think that really depends on the place and the time. This used to be the case in Australia, but less so now. Particularly for pubs/bars - they'd have very cheap meals to get you in and get you drinking, but now the meals as are expensive as restaurants.

Times have changed and more people are there for the food and not for the drinks, so the business models change.

It’s basically like how insurance companies determine premiums for people but this is on a much smaller scale.

Personally, I liked going to buffets as a kid. But as an adult, I find them repulsive. In the back of my mind, instead of choosing a well balanced meal. I am instead motivated to just get the priciest items. Forget rice. Forget veggies. Protein. Protein. Protein. Steak, lobster, fish.

Of course I regret it the night of or the following day as it exits my system

You have provided a compelling argument for not doing as you do. Thanks.

In this post covid and high labor cost era - it'd be interesting if there will be any innovative company that attempts a Japanese conveyor belt sushi (i.e. pay $N dollars per dish of pre-plated food) setup but with Western style appetizers/Tapas.

We have some of these in Barcelona. They're great actually.

It's 12€ for 4 plates or 15€ unlimited with a drink, and really good quality overall.

In India all you can eat pizza is pretty popular. You pay ~350 INR per person for non-vegetarian and ~250-300 INR per person for vegetarian. It's pretty good.

The trick they use is a large fizzy complimentary drink up front, which reduces your hunger for the first set of pizzas which take a bit to arrive.

Yup avoid the fizzy stuff. And also I've noticed in the US that the salad dressings can have noticeable sugar content.

I can’t read this in iOS Safari, the page keeps reloading/snapping back to the top when I try to scroll. Even dumps me out of reader mode, eventually.

Also broken in Chrome on macOS, the article renders briefly before everything disappears.

They use larger than average serving spoons for things like potatoes, and smaller than average tongs for meats.

Smart! The buffet my family has gone to the most, Sweet Tomatoes (RIP, COVID-19) didn't really even have meat. You could fish for chicken in the chicken noodle soup, and they had chili, but that was about it.

Even higher-end buffets, like the $98 brunch at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, employ these tactics: “They hide the truffles, the foie gras, and the oysters,” says Britt. “You literally can’t find them.”

I've never had the $98 brunch, but their downstairs (less expensive) brunch buffet is a pretty good deal. The pricing for kids was especially reasonable when we ate there a few years ago. But nothing will beat their pricing on our honeymoon — they comped us brunch for the whole week!

Sweet Tomatoes (RIP, COVID-19) didn't really even have meat.

Can't speak to that particular brand, but a lot of buffets will have high-end meats that are hidden from plain sight. I went to a dinky local buffet not too long ago, and I found a prime rib roast on my second pass through. What they did was place the carving station in a hole in the wall so it wasn't sticking out, and then staffed the station with an extremely quiet man. Since your focus is on the buffet line, you completely miss him and his expensive meat (and also dim sum, and maybe a few other things. IDK, I just went straight for the prime rib).

The imagery of the football players at the buffet brings back memories of my team going to the breakfast buffets at Shoney's the morning of Saturday games at noon. We didn't need lunch and the food was down before game time.

There was a not-very-good Chinese buffet just off campus when I was at college, and religiously after Wednesday practice the whole rugby team would go. After 2 years or so of cleaning them out in about an hour, the owner banned us. :-)

I miss having on-demand cheap college cafeteria food. It's hard to find places that have the same slightly above average food for bargain prices.

IKEA's food is the closest I've found. Food courts at malls generally are no different from just going to a fast food place, which have all raised prices as of recently. Costco is cheap but their options/taste isn't great. I've been bumming off a friend's college meal plan recently and it's so good. Pizza, pasta, a few really good vegetarian options, same with the allergy-free section. If only I was allowed to pay what he pays for that food.

There are a lot of apps/rewards/loyalty programs now. Its kind of like two different economies for some businesses: those who use these deals and those who subsidize the others. E.g. at mcdonalds a big mac is still ~$3, but only if you use their app and use the buy 1 get 1 deal on the big mac.

Taco bell is also good about having some high calorie per dollar foods on their value menu. There’s a $2 burrito that comes out to like 600 calories. You could always swap out the meat for black beans if you want it a little healthier perhaps.

The other trick, especially at places like Golden Corral is the oily fried foods.

Oily fried foods are very filling. You are limited in how much you can eat without feeling sick.

Yeah, but who wants to go to a buffet to only eat fried foods? (I mean, I like an oily fried dish occasionally, but it's not something I'd go for at an all-you-can-eat place.)

I suspect that if Golden Corral is struggling, and they are mostly serving oily fried foods, the problem isn't changing consumer preferences. The problem is that they aren't serving foods people like.

I avoid all-you-can-eats, the quality is usually much worse and even if there is some good stuff everyone plunders that tray and it takes ages to refill. On special occasions the price is even higher, easily reaching 50€+. Why would I do that if there are several restaurants nearby where I get way better quality for less, can choose exactly what I want and still can barely eat it all? I don't understand the appeal.

The appeal is eating little bits of lots of different things. I order the same way at restaurants - almost always multiple small dishes and rarely an entrée. If so, it's shared.

Also, having been to some high end buffets, these can sometimes be disappointing but they can also be truly amazing. I ate at a seafood buffet at a fancy hotel in Guangzhou once that blew my mind.

Planet Money (best podcast of all times) did an episode on this a while back: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197954459

Didn’t see anyone mention Indian buffets in India. In my hometown of Bengaluru , many restaurants offer buffets. Weightage is given to starters ( I’m vegetarian so I tend to eat paneer ones ). Desserts are a few Indian sweets and lots of cheap ice cream which seems in line with the economics mentioned. If you eat protein heavy starters it’s unlikely you’ll want to have more food for mains.

ProTip: Many university cafeterias are all-you-can-eat and open to the public.

I love Golden Corral but when I took my snobbish Italian friend, he took one bite of the food and just walked out.

Somewhat related - I have enjoyed watching Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell, but I've always wondered about the economics of restaurants and whether Ramsay's "local and fresh" is really viable or not, and under which conditions. Anybody have recommendations that go into this?

Kind of explains why there are no buffets in Spain. Spanish people eat very healthily during the week but when they eat out, it's gloves off. Meat with meat.

I can't believe they didn't mention crab legs. This is my earliest memory of AYCE, sitting at the table for what felt like an eternity while my father went through plate after plate of snow crab legs. They also are the thing that ties most disparate AYCE places together: I've seen them at the Chinese ones, as well as Continental-style.

I don't often find myself at AYCE places, but when I do, I always enjoy watching people line up and jockey for position for the next batch of fresh crab legs coming out of the kitchen.

Given how much they cost at markets, this has got to be a higher cost than the highest cost they're accounting for of steak.

In the Philippines, buffets are "eat all you can," which is not quite the same as the US' "all you can eat."

My local Chinese restaurant stop doing their lunch and Sunday buffets during COVID. I asked the owner whether she would bring it back after the pandemic and she basically told me she makes 3-4x the profit off of take outs alone. And she’d cut dining-in too if she could. Restaurant business dramatically changed as a result of pandemic.

Also discussed 2 years ago (268 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22151891

Ah, the all you can eat buffet, where you're either obese and/or borderline diabetic, or you're paying over the odds for shitty food.

It's a good feeling when you check into a nice hotel and see a notice informing you about the "Free Breakfast Buffet".

I can only imagine it would induce a little snickering from Warren or the late Jimmy though . . .

My tiny, 5 foot tall, 90 pound mother _loved_ buffets. When she walked in you could almost see the owners doing a cash-money victory dance.

Buffets often break even on food and eke out a profit by minimizing the cost of labor.

I'm not sure what's that supposed to mean. Addition and subtraction are commutative, aren't they?

I have a masochistic interest in opening a restaurant of some sort one day and one thing I'm pretty adamant about is owning my property. I live in an area where that is feasible and obviously it's not in many areas/cities. But, seeing that rent is 3x profit on this validates my back of envelope math. I don't want to be working for a landlord that's going to be constantly upping my rent. It's obviously a bit more capital intensive but it's also an asset that can be sold if the business doesn't work out.

All the businesses I observe come and go it's usually something about how they opened a hip restaurant in a trendy neighborhood and 5-10 years later it's fully gentrified and the rent causes them to close shop. Did they make enough profit to offset the cost of the leasehold improvement investment? I'm guessing not in that short amount of time. Meanwhile, the businesses that are family owned and have been around for 50+ years have no rent expenses and can weather some ups and downs more gracefully. They also get to have a reasonable profit to live on.

For ordinary people, eating a buffet to "enough money" may mean greater losses.

It is pretty big in Asia. All you can eat sushi/sashimi is everywhere in Hong Kong, not that expensive, great experience for everyone.

When I moved to UK I realised the difference. I can only eat like maybe 70% compared to an average Westerner so it is always much more expensive for me.

My favorite is libertarians who use buffets as an example of why they don't pay taxes. "I don't pay for the salad bar, I get to eat steak, I can't choose where my taxes go". Except you literally do pay for all the wilting lettuce as you eat your steak. You don't get to tell them to un-order the lettuce and un-stock the salad bar just because it violates your NAP.

There are many economics lessons to learn from buffets. And people tend to learn zero of them.

Little ethnic buffets like the one mentioned at the end are my favorite types of hole in the walls. At that point, it’s about trying a little bit of everything which if you ordered one of everything would be very expensive in comparison with the buffet entry price.

What’s the best way to find all you can eat places? I don’t think there are any in my area so I want to make a road trip.

I wonder if those economics also apply to software, ie “unlimited data storage” service providers.

I'll never forget the Simpson's episode where Homer goes to one of these places. They kicked him out when he was still eating long after closing time, and he sued them. "The sign says 'All You Can Eat' and I can still eat more."

I miss Fresh Choice, the mostly-vegetarian buffet. They went broke because the buffet itself was a lose and they were making money on the extras.[1]

[1] https://www.mashed.com/1374299/chain-restaurant-buffets-disa...

In any sector with a 10% margin, there’s businesses that are losing money and businesses that are taking home 30% margins.