Las Vegas, of course, has a decades-long love affair with the buffet. Originally, in the 14th century, the term referred to a pre-dinner feast of bread, butter and cheese that you ate with friends and family on a side table. And the concept comes from the Swedish “smorgasbord” - “smor” (butter), “gas” (lump of butter) and “bord” (table). The word evolved from “bufet,” which refers to a sideboard or something that you can serve from. The American buffet is the epitome of excess, but it wasn’t always the free-for-all associated with buffets today. The woman who took my payment at the front let me know there was a 90-minute time limit on the table.
Some of the chefs behind the sneeze guards wore masks. Dim sum carts touted tableside lobster bisque and American Wagyu hot dogs. Sanitizer dispensers, placed between food stations, held the promise of a balm for our ingrained fear of germs. Weeks before I arrived, I made a reservation online (the buffet is reservation-only at the moment for non-Caesars Rewards Seven Star guests, and more than 10,000 reservations were made in the first 48 hours for the coming weeks). The trip to the Bacchanal was my first visit to a buffet in more than two years, and things were different this time. Don’t touch anything anyone else has ever touched, ever, without sanitizing. Go grocery shopping once every two weeks and make it count. So much of the last year and a half has revolved around survival and attaining the bare minimum. The buffet takes most of the ingrained fears and behaviors of the pandemic and turns them on their heads. Murphy estimated that diners would go through 800 pounds of crab legs and 18 to 20 prime ribs. “We have a total of 36 desserts, not including our 11 new gelato and sorbet flavors.” “We have a little over 220 dishes,” Murphy said. In another room there was Roman pizza enough cheese, salami and prosciutto roses to make the grandest of charcuterie and cheese boards assorted nigiri build-your-own congee bowls bang bang shrimp banchan and beet hummus with pita. The Latin station housed a whole suckling pig. Nearby, mountains of crushed ice were sheathed in dozens of pounds of stacked crab legs, shrimp, oysters and scallops on the half shell, lobster claws and snow crab. The space between the guests was less than six feet.
They scooped up individually plated, split rods of bone marrow waiting to be slurped. People lined up at the carving station, waiting for a sliver of Wagyu, a hunk of prime rib and a slice of brisket.
SOUTH POINT BUFFET FULL
That afternoon, diners got the full buffet experience, and the scene appeared shockingly normal. “We decided to hold out and wait until the restrictions were lifted so that our guests could have the full buffet experience,” Caesars Palace executive chef Jennifer Murphy said. The buffet sold out for the evening with more than 1,100 diners. (Clark County allowed traditional buffets to reopen on May 1.) While other local buffets, including the Cosmopolitan’s Wicked Spoon and the Garden Buffet at South Point, reopened as staff-service operations last year, Caesars Palace waited until guests could serve themselves again. May 20, the buffet reopened for the first time since the pandemic shut it down in March 2020. This is the crown jewel of the Caesars Palace Bacchanal Buffet American carving station, a sea of deep browns and char that beckons under golden heat lamps.Īt 4 p.m.
The beef clings to what I can only imagine is a dinosaur bone sticking straight out of the top. You can’t help but stare at the 80-pound American Wagyu steamship, a gargantuan slab of meat with a crackly, glistening crust.
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