In theory, an all-you-can-eat buffet should be one of the greatest indulgences of a hotel stay. But experience tells us that the buffet will always come with peculiarities and disappointments. At the highest level, the usual pitfalls are occasionally overcome, but everywhere else, there are these staple oddities to look out for…
Bacon snow
Buffet bacon is cooked using a very special technique. CREDIT: ISTOCK
Buffet bacon is cooked using a special technique that leaves the edges nuked into exhausted submission, and the interior essentially raw. Coating it liberally, however, is a layer of bacon snow – that somewhat unnerving white substance that tastes both fatty and salty. And what better way could there be to start the morning than scraping mysterious residue off your food?
Watery scrambled eggs
Watch out for that egg water/bin juice at the buffet table. CREDIT: ISTOCK
The bain marie of scrambled eggs is the international symbol of food poisoning. Nobody ever quite knows how long they’ve been out for, but the edges will always look like they’ve wilted in a furnace, and there will always be a disconcerting amount of liquid sloshing about in the middle where previous guests have hacked away with a serving spoon. After bin juice, egg water is the second most unsettling liquid known to mankind.
Diamond-hard hash browns
Hash browns become inedible after being left in the bain marie too long. CREDIT: ALAMY
The standard hash brown in a buffet breakfast can be used to tip the drills in uranium mines. Again, the curse of the bain marie has something to do with this. Once palatable potato cakes simply get left to crust over, all moisture and goodness slowly eking from them.
Neon orange juice
Choose your poison from the fluorescent-coloured buffet juice. CREDIT: ISTOCK
Unless you’re somewhere incredibly posh where the orange juice is freshly squeezed, chances are your buffet orange is going to come out of a mysterious dispenser and have more than a few extra ingredients in it. It’ll look so bright you can paint hi-vis jackets with it, and taste so concentrated and sweetened that there should be a dentist on hand at all times.
Sweet bread
No matter what bread you pick, it will taste sweet.CREDIT: ISTOCK
If that dentist isn’t positioned by the juice, they should take up residence next to the bread. Hotel buffets often have a variety of breads on offer – rock-hard rolls, flimsy slices, the ones you have to cut yourself that are all end and no middle. But the unifying theme behind them is that they will all be unnecessarily sweet, to the point where you suspect the baker got the flour and sugar mixed up.
The kilometre-long toast queue
Guilty: The buffet toaster stands accused of annoying everybody. CREDIT: ISTOCK
The major buffet choke point is always by the toaster, which comes in the form of the world’s slowest conveyor belt. You put one slice in, it painstakingly trundles round, then comes out barely toasted, and has to go back in again. This process then needs repeating for the other side of the slice, while a scrum of very annoyed people forms around you.
Tiny, hot glasses
Thimblefuls of juice from the breakfast buffet table. CREDIT: ISTOCK
The hottest things at a hotel buffet, where all the food is traditionally kept depressingly lukewarm, are the glasses. They’ll be straight out of the dishwasher, at the perfect warmth for serving mulled wine.
Alas, you’ll not be filling it with mulled wine. You’ll be sullying otherwise refreshing juice and water instead. The good news is that you get to sully it again and again, as the glasses are so small, you have to get up for 46 refills to receive an adequate amount of liquid.
International chicken
The only thing that changes about the chicken is the label in front of it. CREDIT: ISTOCK
The themed nights at buffets don’t tend to be bywords for authenticity and ambition. You might get an extra noodle dish on Asian night, or a ruthlessly de-spiced curry on Indian night. If you’re lucky.
What you will almost certainly get, however, is a chicken dish in a sauce that stays essentially the same from night to night. The Mexican chicken becomes Mediterranean chicken then Oriental chicken, and all that changes is the label next to it.
Undefined fish
Fillets of fish in generic sauce. CREDIT: GETTY
The international chicken phenomenon also applies to the fish, but the fish is reliably more miserable. This is partly because the species of fish is never stated, although rest assured, you’re not getting something tasty like salmon or tuna. No – this is buffet fish, a species never encountered elsewhere, that somehow has a total lack of both flavour and texture. It is designed to slide down the throat like plain yoghurt, not provoke sensation.
Strangely textured cakes
Buffet cakes may be different colours, but they all taste the same. CREDIT: ISTOCK
The dessert section of the buffet is the most curious of them all. At first, it looks incredibly enticing, with lots of individual cakes, and a wealth of bright colours. But then you realise that the cakes are all basically the same, and nothing like any cake served anywhere else on earth. Most have a mixture of a sloppy, wobbling mousse-y body and an Atacama-dry base. All the effort goes into the decoration, and none into the consistency.
