Buffet



A buffet is a meal-serving system where patrons serve themselves. It is a popular method of feeding large numbers of people with minimal staff.

One form is to have a line of food serving stalls and foods and customers take food they require as they walk along and pay at the end. This form is most commonly seen in cafeterias. Another form known as the "all you can eat" buffet has a set fee and customers can help themselves to as much food as they wish to eat. This form is found often in restaurants, especially in hotels. Another form is the Swedish Smorgasbord. In North America, buffets specializing in Chinese cuisine are especially common as are ones for other ethnic and non-ethnic foods.

Buffets are effective for serving large numbers of people. They are also popular in that they give customers a great deal of choice and the ability to closely inspect food before eating it. Since a buffet involves people serving themselves, it is generally viewed as a less elegant form of dining.


While serving oneself at a meal has a long history, the modern buffet was developed in France in the 18th century, soon spreading throughout Europe. The term originally referred to the sideboard where the food was served, but eventually became applied to the form. The buffet became popular in the English-speaking world in the second half of the nineteenth century.

When the possession of gold and silver has been a measure of solvency of a regime, the display of it, in the form of plates and vessels, is more a political act than a gesture of conspicuous consumption. The 16th-century French term buffet applied both to the display itself and to the furniture on which it was mounted, often draped with rich textiles, but more often as the century advanced an elaborately carved cupboard surmounted by tiers of shelves. In England such a buffet was called a court cupboard. Prodigal displays of plate were probably first revived at the fashionable court of Burgundy and adopted in France. The Baroque displays of silver and gold that were affected by Louis XIV of France were immortalized in paintings by Alexandre-François Desportes and others, before Louis' plate and his silver furniture had to be sent to the mint to pay for the wars at the end of his reign.

During the 18th century more subtle demonstrations of solvency were preferred. A buffet was revived in England and France at the end of the century, when new ideals of privacy made a modicum of self-service at breakfast-time appealing, even among those who could have had a footman behind each chair. In The Cabinet Dictionary of 1803 Thomas Sheraton gave a neoclassical design and observed that "a buffet may, with some propriety, be restored to modern use, and prove ornamental to a modern breakfast-room, answering as the repository of a tea equipage"