Hotel buffets - from fab to drab
I’ve worked in the hotel sector for over 40 years and there have been more changes in the past five years than the last 40. So much has happened in such a short space of time. Thanks to rapid innovation in technology and mobility, hotel guests who arrive late evening or in the middle of the night, can now directly go to their rooms without going through reception. In a device dependant society, this kind of “self-service” in the reception operations of a hotel, is steadily gaining popularity.
Let’s now flip this narrative to “self-service” in the hotel restaurant. I get it that most hotels fall into a mindset where the accommodation revenues are a much simpler model to perfect, unlike the Food and Beverages component which is hard work, and more often than not, seen as an add-on. And so, there is a resistance to want to put some effort into F&B. That's the truth. A good example is the hotel buffet where not much has changed. The predominant buffet template in the majority of hotels today is still an aging restaurant concept.
I’ve lost count of the number of hotel buffets I’ve tried in Sri Lanka. Most of them melt into a blur, hard to tell between each other. Many were the times, where I struggled to choose anything that looked remotely appetizing or where I shied away from some dishes which I suspected (rightly or wrongly) to feature refrigerated food that had perhaps been sitting in an aluminum bin for long. There have been a few really surprisingly pleasing good buffets, offering feasts of flavoursome and imaginatively presented food…but they were more the exception than the rule.
Basically, buffets come with multi-personalities. It’s like mingling with strangers at a cocktail party. Staring at a sea of unknown faces that sends you into a tail spin, as you move swiftly away from the boring or self- opinionated ones including the conversation ‘stoppers’, until you find someone you can really converse with. 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.
Over the passage of time, I’ve come to look out for those oddities that buffets carry in outdated cloches. Most common of all are the salad sections that feature over 40 dishes including – bowls of lettuce leaves no one will ever touch (who wants to pay five-star hotel prices to eat boring salads). Then there is the Mexican chicken at lunchtime, which semi-circles the globe to become a spicy Indian chicken at dinnertime - all that changes is the label in front of it, i.e., unless it has gone missing. As for fish dishes - forget about something tasty like salmon or tuna. Instead, what one encounters is a mysterious species of fish that lacks both flavour and texture.
The action station: This is an interesting part of the buffet journey and is one way to give a sense of that ‘made to order’ experience, either with a carving station or the made to order pasta station. I wouldn’t dwell on the carving station because carving a piece of tenderloin is not very interactive. The chef is basically a human slicing and serving a piece. The pasta station though is another story. Even though there are chefs supposedly preparing dishes to order, some didn’t seem particularly highly motivated. Very seldom have I come across chefs who were enthusiastic and offered advice before preparing flavoursome fresh pasta dishes.
The dessert section of the buffet takes the cake. Where the occasional good buffet often stumbles is in the Dessert selection. It may look incredibly enticing, towering high with heaps of individual cakes in a rainbow of bright colours, until you realise that they are all basically the same. Dry base overloaded with sugar, where all the effort has gone into the decoration, and none into consistency. Many are the times my family and I, have left, saying “Good buffet, but the desserts could have been better”. And that’s a shame, because even if the mains and other dishes were good, the desserts ruined the overall price-performance expectation. I guess most chefs have never heard of the ‘Peak-end-rule’ where according to scientific evidence, 50% of the experience of a meal would be attributed to the dessert or the last dish you eat, thus becoming an essential dish for customer evaluation.
The value proposition of a greater part of hotel buffets has never been excellent food or refined service. It’s always been tons of decent food cheap. It’s still tons of decent food, but it’s not so cheap anymore, and there are now a lot of other, more interesting options in the same price range, or lower. Sadly, the traditional buffet, which began as a differentiator and was picked up quickly by all to become a standard, is now starting to feel like an outdated sacrament no one dares to drop.
More is no longer better! What if we flipped the script? Perhaps, then, the best place to start if we want to bring back better buffets is to decouple them from the idea of abundance and make them about quality, sustainability, and fairness in value for money.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Customer Service Trainer and Ex-Hotelier
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