You’ve probably been hearing about this place Les Grands Buffets, an all-you- can-eat restaurant (though they don’t use that term) in the city of Narbonne, in France. It’s been mentioned in various places but an article by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker promises to be the defining word.
They serve what they consider real French food, the price is fifty-two euros and ninety centimes for the food, which sounds kind of reasonable though the drink costs extra.Reservations are incredibly hard to come by which I’m sure adds to the desirability for some people.
Two things in the article stood out for me. First, that Guinness has certified the restaurant’s cheese platter, with its 111 varietes of cheese, as some kind of world record, although Lauren Collins says it’s more of a cheese room.
That picture actually vaguely reminds me of the cheese department at Harrods, a store that I worked in for much longer than I intended to. (I was in the furniture department).
One of the small perks for employees was that first thing in the morning before the shop was open, you could wander into the food hall and ask the man setting up the cheese counter if they had any left over offcuts from the previous day. Sometimes he had, sometimes he hadn’t, and sometimes even if he hadn’t he’d just cut a chunk off a perfectly good slab of cheese, put it in a bag and say, ‘Now it’s an offcut.’ Good times.
The other thing, as the article attempted to investigate the economics of the business, it quoted Pierre Cavalier, the general manager, who said that the average customer goes through 1.3 oysters and 7.4 plates. That surely means that quite a lot of people must eat no oysters at all. If I was at an all you can eat oyster bar, I’m pretty certain I could hit the 2 or 3 dozen mark and possibly many more besides. But I’m also pretty certain that I won’t be going to Les Grands Buffets. I’ve never much enjoyed buffets, generally because I eat too much and yet still feel unsatisfied.
Whether the success of Les Grands Buffets signals the return of the buffet, I don’t know, but a riffle through the archive reveals several postcards of 1960s American buffets, or perhaps more accurately smorgasbords.
This is The Stockholm, in Manhattan:
This is Bit of Sweden, in Hollywood:
This is Old Scandia in Opa Locka, Florida:
Of course I’ve never eaten in any of them but they look better than any buffet I've ever eaten from – just one more use for a time machine.
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