www.newyorker.com Open in urlscan Pro
151.101.128.239  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

Name: newsletter — POST

<form class="form-with-validation NewsletterSubscribeFormValidation-iCYa-Dt dweEln" id="newsletter" name="newsletter" novalidate="" method="POST"><span class="TextFieldWrapper-Pzdqp hNhevp text-field" data-testid="TextFieldWrapper__email"><label
      class="BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ TextFieldLabel-klrYvg iUEiRd stdEm fvoOvz text-field__label text-field__label--single-line" for="newsletter-text-field-email" data-testid="TextFieldLabel__email">
      <div class="TextFieldLabelText-cvvxBl eeDYTb">E-mail address</div>
      <div class="TextFieldInputContainer-jcMPhb oFrOs"><input aria-describedby="privacy-text" aria-invalid="false" id="newsletter-text-field-email" required="" name="email" placeholder="E-mail address"
          class="BaseInput-fAzTdK TextFieldControlInput-eFUxkf eGzzTT laFPCK text-field__control text-field__control--input" type="email" data-testid="TextFieldInput__email" value=""></div>
    </label><button class="BaseButton-bLlsy ButtonWrapper-xCepQ bqVKKv hVfNyj button button--utility TextFieldButton-csBrgY edxbrw" data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;Button&quot;}" data-testid="Button" aria-disabled="false"
      type="submit"><span class="ButtonLabel-cjAuJN hzwRuG button__label">Sign up</span></button></span>
  <div id="privacy-text" tabindex="-1" class="NewsletterSubscribeFormDisclaimer-bTVtiV dDUyBn"><span>
      <p>By signing up, you agree to our <a href="https://www.condenast.com/user-agreement" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">User Agreement</a> and
        <a href="https://www.condenast.com/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Privacy Policy &amp; Cookie Statement</a>. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the
        Google<a href="https://policies.google.com/privacy" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Privacy Policy</a> and<a href="https://policies.google.com/terms" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> Terms of Service</a>
        apply.</p>
    </span></div>
</form>

Text Content

Skip to main content

 * Newsletter

Story Saved

To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories

Close Alert

Sign In

Search
Search
 * The Latest
 * News
 * Books & Culture
 * Fiction & Poetry
 * Humor & Cartoons
 * Magazine
 * Puzzles & Games
 * Video
 * Podcasts
 * Goings On
 * Shop

Open Navigation Menu
Menu
Story Saved

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Close Alert





Dept. of Gastronomy


THE HOTTEST RESTAURANT IN FRANCE IS AN ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET

Les Grands Buffets features a seven-tiered lobster tower, a chocolate fountain,
and only what it considers traditional French food. Gourmands are willing to
wait months for a table.

By Lauren Collins

April 1, 2024

Les Grands Buffets takes a panoramic view of the French classics, ranging from
the palace-hotel repertoire (lièvre à la royale) to bourgeois cooking (bœuf
bourguignonne), regional specialties (quenelles de brochet), and rustic dishes
(snails, frogs’ legs).Photographs by Alexander Coggin for The New Yorker
Save this storySave this story
Save this storySave this story

Listen to this article.

My friend Guillaume is always telling me interesting things. Like: there’s a
dance called the Madison that many French people think is a regular feature of
parties in the United States. Guillaume recently alerted me that a man who was
fired for not being fun enough at work got his job back, winning five hundred
thousand euros in a landmark case. Last summer, I went to dinner at Guillaume’s,
and he mentioned a restaurant, an all-you-can-eat buffet not far from his home
town in the South of France. He had just celebrated his birthday there. There
was talk of flaming duck and a chocolate fountain. Guillaume showed me a picture
of the crystal-curtained lobster tower—seven layers of vermillion crustaceans,
topped by an upright specimen thrusting its claws to the sky, as though it had
just slayed a halftime show, amid a cloud of mist.

The restaurant is called Les Grands Buffets. A week or so later, I went to its
Web site, and entered my e-mail address to receive a secure link to make a
reservation online. It was late July. The next available table was for a
Wednesday in December, at 8:45 p.m. “We remind you that this reservation is
non-modifiable, you cannot change the number of guests, the date of the meal,
the hour of the meal, or the name of the beneficiary,” the confirmation e-mail
read. If I wanted to bring children under ten years of age, I needed to submit
their names at least three days in advance. (They eat at discounted rates.) I
would be refused entry if I showed up in sweatpants, an undershirt, a bathing
suit, a sports jersey, flip-flops, a ball cap, or any of three kinds of shorts.
The toughest reservation in France, it turns out, is not at a Michelin-starred
destination like Mirazur or Septime. It’s at an all-you-can-eat buffet situated
in a municipal rec center in the smallish city of Narbonne.


“Our golden rule is that, if it’s complicated, then that’s a good reason to do
it,” Louis Privat, the restaurant’s proprietor, said. “Our job is to rid people
of their inhibitions.”

Last year, more than three hundred and eighty thousand people paid fifty-two
euros and ninety centimes for the pleasure of visiting Les Grands Buffets.
Drinks cost extra, but they are sold at a minimal markup, so a bottle of Mercier
champagne costs twenty-five euros, about the same as it does in the supermarket.
Everything else is unlimited, from caviar to stewed tripe. There are nine kinds
of foie gras on offer, and five pâtés en croûte, including one known as Sleeping
Beauty’s Pillow, which involves a panoply of meats (chicken, duck, wild boar,
hare, quail, sweetbreads, ground pork) and is considered by connoisseurs to be
“charcuterie’s holy grail.” The chef Michel Guérard has called Les Grands
Buffets “the greatest culinary theater in the world.” Guinness has certified its
cheese platter, featuring a hundred and eleven varieties, as the largest known
to restaurant-going man. It’s more of a cheese room.



All-you-can-eat buffets are usually associated with a catholic array of foods:
California rolls and king-crab legs, baby back ribs alongside pasta bakes and
hot-fudge sundaes. However, Les Grands Buffets serves only what it considers to
be traditional French food. You will find chorizo at the charcuterie station,
but there is no pizza, paella, or couscous, no nems or thiéboudiène, even though
more than a tenth of people living in France were born elsewhere. Les Grands
Buffets takes a panoramic view of the French classics, ranging from the
palace-hotel repertoire (lièvre à la royale, peach Melba) to bourgeois cooking
(veal blanquette, bœuf bourguignonne), regional specialties (quenelles de
brochet, pissaladière), and rustic dishes (snails, frogs’ legs). “More than a
gargantuan orgy,” Le Journal du Dimanche reports, the restaurant represents “a
sort of conservatory of the nation’s gastronomy.” The effect is something like a
Golden Corral by Auguste Escoffier.

Les Grands Buffets has four dining rooms, sumptuously decorated in different
styles. One has an Art Deco theme. Another is a tented room, paying tribute to
Louis XIV, complete with an original 1697 map by the King’s engraver.
Chandeliers made by the craftsmen who light the Château de Chambord cast a lush
glow over lemon trees planted in wooden boxes originally designed for the
gardens at Versailles. Tables throughout are set in a grand style, down to the
fish knives. Waiters clear plates and serve drinks, instead of leaving guests to
a soda fountain, squirting cherry Coke into the same paper cup as Tropicana and
Sprite.

Louis Privat, the restaurant’s proprietor, believes that gastronomy is suffering
from globalization: everything is the same everywhere, and even some of the most
creative cuisine, he says, “has lost its national identity.” In his view, French
people, especially the young, need reintroduction to the culture of the table
and its associated arts. He sees his restaurant as something like a “Louvre of
dishes,” with a pedagogic mission as well as an epicurean one. “Why would you
put a tarte Tatin in a shot glass?” he said to me recently, a cloud of despair
passing over his face. The bistronomy movement, which in the past thirty years
has whisked the cloths off French tables and consigned silver to drawers, is,
Privat thinks, a cost-cutting crusade masquerading as a trend. “Our golden rule
is that, if it’s complicated, then that’s a good reason to do it,” he said.

“Out of the way—I’m a doctor!”
“Out of the way—he’s not in-network.”

Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
Copy link to cartoon
Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop
Shop
Open cartoon gallery
Open Gallery

Pascal Lardellier, an anthropologist at the University of Burgundy, calls Les
Grands Buffets “the site of all the superlatives.” Last year, it brought in
twenty-four million euros in revenue, which reportedly makes it the
highest-grossing restaurant in France. The Sybarites of ancient Greece issued
invitations to guests up to a year in advance, so that they would have time to
prepare their outfits and jewelry. Fans of Les Grands Buffets also book up to a
year in advance, and spend the intervening months dreaming of how they’ll fill
their plates. “My husband and I can’t dine out often,” one repeat customer wrote
on Facebook, “so we prefer to reserve our leisure budget exclusively for Les
Grands Buffets.”

When December came around, I caught a train from Paris and rode south for five
hours before arriving in Narbonne, less than seventy miles north of the border
with Spain. The city center, with Roman ruins and a fantastically old-school
market hall, was within walking distance, but I took a cab toward the outskirts
of town. Bypassing gas stations and a KFC, we circled a roundabout, where an
inflatable snowman bobbed in the wind. Finally, we arrived at a massive leisure
complex built by the local government in the nineteen-eighties. Inside, gray
light streamed through a pyramidal skylight, accentuating turquoise exposed
pipes. From the lobby, you could enter a bowling alley, an ice rink, a swimming
pool, or Les Grands Buffets. The restaurant’s entrance, in cherry wood and
gleaming brass, brought to mind the cabin of an ocean liner, plunked down on the
set of “Saved by the Bell.”

In the vestibule, floor-to-ceiling cabinets displayed a collection of silver
serving dishes. Nearby, what was supposedly the world’s biggest silver fork was
mounted on a wall. While waiting for the maître d’, a customer could step on an
antique scale the size of a grandfather clock. Lest that put him in an
abstemious mood, a golden plaque displayed a quote in Middle French, from
Rabelais’s “Gargantua”: “Fay ce que vouldras,” it commanded—“Do as you wish.”

Pascal Lardellier, an anthropologist at the University of Burgundy, calls Les
Grands Buffets “the site of all the superlatives.” Last year, it brought in
twenty-four million euros in revenue, reportedly making it the highest-grossing
restaurant in France.

It was nearly the end of lunchtime. Guests clustered around the dessert bar,
where chocolate flowed down the famous fountain in glossy sheets. They ladled
chocolate onto strawberries, pineapple chunks, financiers, and canelés from
separate vats offering a choice of white, dark, and milk. As Roy Strong writes
in “Feast: A History of Grand Eating,” fountains have dazzled diners for
centuries, disgorging rose water and eau de muscade. One attendee of a banquet
in Lille in 1454 recalled a statue of a naked girl, guarded by a real lion, who
sprayed mulled wine from her right breast.

Video From The New Yorker

Friday Night Blind: Bowling Without Sight



An employee led me to the tented room, where Louis Privat was finishing up a
meal with a pair of V.I.P.s. Privat is seventy, with cornflower-blue eyes and a
meringue of gray hair. He was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck, and bemoaning
chefs’ attempts to pass off bastardized forms of classic dishes on an
unsuspecting public. “It’s tomfoolery,” he said. Imagine: serving a Mont Blanc
without chestnuts, or calling a plate of beans a cassoulet. He continued,
“That’s the main fight we’re leading today, not to let these dishes be
corrupted, even if the recipes aren’t patented.” At another table, a corps of
waiters wheeled out a gramophone that played André Claveau crooning “Bon
anniversaire.” Out the window, one could glimpse a five-story waterslide.



Privat ordered tulip-shaped glasses of raspberry eau de vie—an
eight-euro-and-fifty-centime supplement—for his guests. In the restaurant’s
gilded ice-cream parlor, diners availed themselves of eleven flavors, along with
Irish coffee and lemon ice doused in vodka. Also on offer was the trou normand,
or Norman hole—a shot of Calvados served over apple sorbet, which is said to
counteract the sensation of a full stomach. The restaurant serves about a
hundred and fifty trous normands during each service of five hundred diners.
Some guests take more than one. They are welcome to. “Our job is to rid people
of their inhibitions,” Privat said.



Like all buffets, Les Grands Buffets is a volume business. About eighty-five per
cent of the restaurant’s patrons are French; others come in large numbers from
Belgium and Spain, notwithstanding a decision by Les Grands Buffets to prohibit
tour buses. Hardly a year passes without Privat dreaming up a new enticement or
entertainment. “We add things all the time, but we hardly ever take things
away,” he said. (A fancy version of mashed potatoes, he admitted, had not been a
success.) Irène Derose, a retired bank employee who lives in a village in the
Hérault, has been to Les Grands Buffets eighteen times, most recently for her
birthday, which she celebrated by eating both lunch and dinner at the
restaurant. “And I still haven’t tasted everything,” she told me.

Restaurateurs typically adhere to a three-hundred-per-cent markup, so that a
hanger steak that costs five euros appears on the menu at fifteen, and a filet
that costs ten goes for thirty. Because Privat’s costs are relatively flat—he
serves the same thing every day to a consistent number of diners and receives
bulk discounts—he chooses to earn his margin as a stable rate, rather than as a
multiple. “It’s the same supplier, the same refrigerator, the same cook,” he
said. “What justifies taking ten euros on one dish and twenty on the other?
Here, if you want to eat something better, I take the same amount.”

Some buffets jack up their prices on weekends or charge customers for uneaten
food. At Shady Maple Smorgasbord, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which bills
itself as America’s largest all-you-can-eat buffet, the vibe is almost
prosecutorial. “Don’t Risk It for a Biscuit,” the restaurant admonishes diners,
warning that anybody who pockets a roll will be treated as a shoplifter. (I
couldn’t help but think of the “Simpsons” episode in which Homer is dragged out
of the Frying Dutchman by the armpits after helping himself to a whole steam
tray of shrimp.)

By contrast, Privat practices a sort of gastronomic prosperity gospel. He
believes that the client who feels that he is not being taken advantage of will
relax; the client who is relaxed will have another glass of wine; the client who
enjoys his wine will go home with a case (rendering the bottle drunk at the
table gratis); the client who savors his case at home will come back. “I prefer
to get away from this logic of rationing,” Privat said. “If you give, you will
receive.”

“I have a theory that too much sunlight isn’t good for you.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Copy link to cartoon
Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop
Shop
Open cartoon gallery
Open Gallery

He suggested that we sample the restaurant’s russe: a striated dessert of sponge
cake and praline cream. It was concocted by a French baker in the
nineteen-twenties, but was named either for its main ingredient, almonds sourced
from Crimea, or for the sprinkling of powdered sugar on top that recalls the
snowy Siberian steppes. The russe was a touch sweet for my liking, so I went
back to the dessert station, trying to think of a French delicacy that wasn’t
represented. But they were all there, from technical feats like île flottante to
spoonable goops like chocolate mousse. In a nook, an employee was flambéing
crêpes on a silver chariot that originally belonged to Le Negresco hotel, in
Nice. Despite the foreign-food ban, a brownie had sneaked into the offering.
(The French pronounce it “broonie,” by the way.) I took a slice of opéra
cake—almond sponge, buttercream, coffee syrup, chocolate ganache—and thought of
le droit à l’erreur. The principle, enshrined in a 2018 French law, minimizes
punishment for people who screw up their taxes in good faith. I added a dollop
of prunes stewed in red wine to my plate. Like few things in life, the
all-you-can-eat buffet guarantees the right to make mistakes.

The writer André Borel d’Hauterive once attempted a taxonomy of eaters: the
gastronome (appreciates good food and wine and partakes reasonably), the
gourmand (prefers quantity to quality), the friand (has a sweet tooth), the
goinfre (eats enthusiastically to excess), the ventru (“makes a God of his
stomach”), the glouton (dessert comes and he has no idea what he’s eaten), the
goulu (dessert comes and he has no idea how much he’s eaten).

Buffet-goers might fall into any of these categories, but their chosen pursuit
requires a logistical edge. There are competitors to be assessed, maneuvers to
be considered, routes to be mapped. I was reminded of a football playbook as I
studied a brochure that featured a bird’s-eye view of Les Grands Buffets, with
arrows indicating various counters (“Ice Cream Shop,” “9 Kinds of Ham”). If a
day at Disneyland is all about beating the lines, a meal at Les Grands Buffets
is an exercise in optimizing calories. Some expert buffet-goers swear by
starting with the most expensive stuff, or by assembling an “introductory taster
plate.” Others warn against maxing out on carbs. One Reddit tactician writes,
“NEVER take a single piece of food until you do a preliminary reconnaissance
sweep of the entire buffet. No use filling up on fried chicken breasts when
there’s a prime rib carvery station at the end.”

Les Grands Buffets prides itself on never running out of anything. At the same
time, the restaurant claims to produce little waste. “We know down to the gram
how much to allot for each client,” Pierre Cavalier, the general manager, told
me. “The foie gras, for example—it’s not fifty or fifty-one, it’s precisely
forty-eight grams!” The average customer, he continued, goes through 1.3 oysters
and 7.4 plates. (He added that leftovers go toward staff meals for the
restaurant’s two hundred employees.) Once, as the stock of shrimp dipped
perilously low, Cavalier jumped into his car and sped to the local fishmonger to
get more. “Without looking at the price, I bought everything they had,” he
recalled. “The diners were lucky that day.”

The atmosphere at Les Grands Buffets is calm and even reverent. Still,
stratagems abound. I saw one multigenerational family gathered around a table
loaded with plates, each containing a single foodstuff: rillettes, saucisson,
pâté en croûte, œufs mimosa, organic crudités. Their postures were relaxed and
the conversation was flowing, as was the twenty-five-euro champagne. I realized
that they had decided to set up an apéro—the French equivalent of cocktail hour,
except that it often lasts much longer—just as they would have at home. Every so
often, someone would pop a cherry tomato into his mouth.



Cavalier showed me around the main floor. That morning, staff members had
prepared each station according to specifications laid out on laminated pages in
a binder. “Obviously, the notion is subjective, but everything needs to look
appetizing,” Cavalier said. He adjusted the claw of a crab: “They’re all
supposed to point in the same direction.” The cheese room emitted a farmyard
odor, but he was unbothered. “Some clients who don’t like cheese complain that
it stinks, but we own it,” he said. (A new ventilation system has apparently
helped.)


The chef Michel Guérard has called Les Grands Buffets “the greatest culinary
theater in the world.” For the presentation of le canard au sang, a suave male
voice, accompanied by the triumphant chords of “Ride of the Valkyries,” intones,
“Ladies and gentlemen, behold the pressed-duck ritual, just as it was conceived
in the nineteenth century.”

Cavalier noted with satisfaction that many patrons were following the classic
sequence of hors d’œuvre, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert. Some people
think that there is a correlation between price and abandon: the cheaper the
buffet, the higher the customers stack their plates. If Shoney’s inspires
teetering skyscrapers of meat loaf and onion rings, Les Grands Buffets
encourages horizontality, with stuffed quails and leeks vinaigrette and babas au
rhum stretching neatly into the distance, an endless suburb of plates.



There is just one rule at Les Grands Buffets: at the stations where diners place
orders instead of helping themselves, they can take only one dish at a time.
This creates a minor barrier to marquee food while insuring that customers can
get it hot. At the rotisserie, a short line had formed in front of a stylish
open kitchen, where cooks in toques bustled around, wielding copper pots. Privat
sees the restaurant as a preserve not only of hard-to-find dishes but also of
disappearing métiers: rôtisseur, écailler, saucier. A sign bore a list of
twenty-six specialties that customers could have prepared in front of them. A
man stepped up to the counter and ordered an omelette with cèpes.

The orders went out over a microphone. “Oui, chef! ” the underlings called.
(Privat had warned them in a staff meeting that morning that just “oui” or
“ouais” would not suffice.) The customer waited with a ticket, which he
exchanged for the dish once it appeared. The plates kept coming: marrowbones,
tournedos Rossini, andouillette with mustard sauce, a whole roasted turbot. At
the back of the kitchen, a cook stood on a raised platform, basting a suckling
pig.

Food historians trace the origins of the modern buffet to the seventeenth
century, when Louis XIV entertained at impromptus and soirées d’appartement, his
servants quickly dressing tables with silver torches, pyramids of flowers, and
filigreed baskets heaving with oranges, lemons, and candied fruits. This
aristocratic habit was eventually codified as service à la française,
distinguished by the practice of putting multiple dishes on the table at once.
“The buffet, historically, c’est chic,” Madame Figaro recently declared, in an
article about the resurgence of all-you-can-eat restaurants.

The first commercial buffets likely originated in gaming houses and at ticketed
balls. In the nineteenth century, Parisians frequented buffets such as one that
stood at 10 Boulevard Montmartre, offering a choice of dishes at sixty centimes,
seventy-five centimes, and one franc. “No table, no utensils, no garçon,” one
journalist noted. “Some people talk about these places as the first fast food in
France,” Loïc Bienassis, of the European Institute for the History of Culture
and Food, said. “That’s debatable, but it’s certain that they were intended for
eaters in a hurry.”

Guinness has certified the restaurant’s cheese platter, featuring a hundred and
eleven varieties, as the largest known to restaurant-going man.

With the advent of railroads, buffets gained widespread popularity in France.
They were a particularly convenient format for train stations, where hungry
passengers came and went throughout the day. As the pace of travel accelerated,
these “station buffets” suffered. Le Monde reported in 1955 that only about four
hundred were left. At the same time, though, buffets were enjoying success at
all-inclusive holiday destinations such as Club Med. The generation that had
survived the Second World War “knew what it was to lack,” Kilien Stengel, of the
University of Tours, told Madame Figaro. Bienassis sees buffets as the
gastronomic manifestation of postwar economic prosperity, reflecting “a society
that no longer measured, that had stopped counting, that believed in infinite
growth.”

Swedes popularized the buffet in America with a revolving smorgasbord at the
1939 World’s Fair. In the mid-forties, the El Rancho Hotel opened Las Vegas’s
first all-you-can-eat buffet, luring deal-seeking gamblers to the Buckaroo
Buffet “chuck wagon.” The concept caught on, with Sin City becoming the historic
home of an exuberant strain of gluttony. “The South has fried chicken, Texas has
barbecue, Chicago has hot dogs, New York has pizza and Las Vegas has them all,”
C. Moon Reed, of Las Vegas Weekly, writes. “That is to say, our regional cuisine
is the buffet.”

I have loved buffets since childhood—if my dad was working late, my mom
sometimes took us to a “steak house” chain called Quincy’s. It may have served
sirloins and filets, but I never saw them, loading up instead on yeast rolls and
ice cream from a soft-serve machine. Call them tacky, or repulsive, but buffets
elicit a hopeful, almost juvenile feeling of possibility. As with a scavenger
hunt, there is a satisfaction in checking things off your list. As with a yard
sale, you never know what kinds of treasure you’ll find, nestled amid the junk.

One person’s plenty, however, is another’s overkill. Even in the first century,
Petronius was satirizing the culinary excesses of wealthy Romans, envisioning a
banquet at which slaves trimmed guests’ toenails and the belly of a gutted pig
disgorged sausages and puddings. In the 1973 film “La Grande Bouffe,” a group of
friends retreat to a villa and stuff themselves to death on meats, sweets, and
the decadence of a consumerist society in which everyone has to have everything
all at once.

Covid was supposed to kill buffets, which have long been associated in the
public imagination with dubious hygiene. The fear is sometimes warranted: a 1987
study of customers in self-service restaurants observed nearly a dozen “problem
behaviors” in salad bars alone, reporting that “licking fingers was noted 45
times and most frequently associated with salad dressings.” At Les Grands
Buffets, most of the cold offerings are presented on specially designed
refrigerated slabs, and Cavalier told me that the restaurant works with an
independent lab to develop its hygiene protocols. “If they tell us that
something lasts five days, then we give it two,” he said. “The idea, as I’m sure
you can understand, is never to take a risk.”



According to IBISWorld, a market-research company, several mid-range chains
folded in 2020 and 2021. But both budget-conscious and high-end buffets have
partially recovered since the pandemic, aided by inflation, social media, and
the pent-up desire for communal fun. “We’re the comeback kids,” the C.E.O. of
Golden Corral told the Times. The Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace charges up
to $84.99 a head for a mind-boggling spread (Filipino congee, red-velvet
waffles, an omelette bar, birria tacos). In College Point, New York, the Buffet
recently augmented its pan-Asian offerings (sushi, hibachi, dim sum, teppanyaki)
with a Brazilian Churrasco Experience.



In France, elaborate buffets featuring attractions such as koi ponds and karaoke
have lately become popular. According to Le Monde, around seventy per cent are
run by people of Chinese descent, many with roots in Wenzhou. “An essential
element of peri-urban civilization, with its housing estates and warehouses,
maxibuffets, most of which are halal, attract a middle class who want to taste
chic without emptying their wallets,” the article notes. Les Grands Buffets
strives to set itself apart from its anything-goes peers, calling itself, for
example, an “eat-what-you-wish” rather than an “all-you-can-eat” buffet.

At one point, Privat griped that a certain Hong Kong restaurant had plagiarized
his concept. I went to its Web site and wasn’t too convinced. For one thing, the
place serves abalone and curries. Yet the success of Les Grands Buffets has led
to imitators elsewhere in France. Customers at one restaurant in the southwest,
for instance, can visit a familiar-looking array of stations, right down to a
rotisserie with a raised platform for basting meats.

In the evening, I dined with Privat in the newly constructed Salon Doré Jean de
la Fontaine. It is decorated in a neoclassical style and pays tribute to the
seventeenth-century fabulist, immortalized in a series of murals featuring his
crafty foxes and unsuspecting crows. “I wanted to reopen in a flamboyant fashion
after the pandemic,” Privat explained. He looked around the dining room. To his
satisfaction, many people were dressed for the occasion. There were several
women wearing sequins. A toddler sucked on a pacifier clipped to his shirt with
a spiffy gold chain.

Privat was born in Narbonne. His father was a doctor, with a thriving clinic,
which his mother helped run. They hoped that Privat would work at the clinic one
day. He pursued acting instead, joining a theatre troupe in Toulouse. Later, he
studied international commerce and became a certified accountant. In his
thirties, Privat and his soon-to-be wife, Jane, took over a dusty restaurant at
the seaside near Narbonne. (Jane is now the purchasing manager at Les Grands
Buffets.) They renovated everything in a blue-and-white scheme and replaced the
frozen food and canned sauces with fresh local fish. The restaurant was a
success, but by then the Privats had two children, and its seasonal rhythms
clashed with their desire for a peaceful family life.

“More than a gargantuan orgy,” Le Journal du Dimanche reports, Les Grands
Buffets represents “a sort of conservatory of the nation’s gastronomy.” It
preserves not only hard-to-find dishes but also disappearing métiers: rôtisseur,
écailler, saucier.

In 1989, Narbonne was looking for someone to handle catering in the new rec
center. The Privats decided to put in a bid. “At the time, especially in the
provinces, going to a restaurant was hardly the habit that it is today,” Louis
Privat once recalled. He knew that in order to flourish they would have to draw
people from far beyond the city. So he decided to offer something novel: an
all-you-can-eat cafeteria. Little by little, he upgraded the menu and tricked
out the décor. The hyper-French concept emerged only gradually—a brand identity
as much as a patriotic conviction. “We had sushi,” Cavalier confessed, of the
early days, during our tour.

Privat can come off as something of a reactionary, valorizing a national culture
that has probably never been as homogeneous as he would like to think. But his
politics are less predictable than his tarte-Tatin fetish and his lectures about
manners might lead one to believe. Les Grands Buffets offers interest-free loans
to help employees pay off debt, and workers participate in a profit-sharing
agreement. In 2022, Privat made headlines around the country for raising buffet
prices in order to bring up employee income by an average of about thirty per
cent. And, for all their talk about French tradition, Privat abstains from
alcohol, and Cavalier eats meat at work but “not in my private life,” because of
ethical concerns. Over the years, scores of investors have tried to persuade
Privat to expand Les Grands Buffets to other locations. He has refused, because
he considers the bald pursuit of profit pointless, and the idea of churning out
imitations bores him. “Using Les Grands Buffets as an A.T.M. doesn’t interest me
at all,” he said, picking at some smoked salmon.

For several years, Privat has threatened to decamp from Narbonne, saying that
his public landlords don’t maintain the facilities properly. In 2023, he
accelerated this campaign, conducting public auditions for a new site. Le
Parisien reported, “The juicy saga of the move of this culinary institution has
a million French cuisine enthusiasts in suspense on social networks on both
sides of the Pyrenees.” As Privat delivered theatrical ultimatums, local
officials sprang into seduction mode. One parliamentary candidate even made
retaining Les Grands Buffets part of his platform.

“I completely share Mr. Privat’s vision of being able to continue to develop and
innovate,” Bertrand Malquier, the city’s mayor, told me. “We are fighting so
that, when he makes his choice, it will be exclusively Narbonne.” Last week,
Narbonne and Privat announced that they had come to an agreement: Narbonne would
pledge fifteen million euros to renovating the rec center, carving out a
separate entrance for Les Grands Buffets, while Privat would commit nearly five
million to the creation of new attractions, including a separate tea salon and a
shop selling regional products, with a shared goal of increasing the annual
number of visitors to eight hundred thousand. Every Narbonnais, Malquier told me
fondly, has been to Les Grands Buffets at least once. In fact, his family had
just celebrated his son’s eleventh birthday there. Malquier had discovered a
delicious new cheese. It was actually from England—Stilton, he thought it was
called?

Recently, I was listening to “On Va Déguster,” a popular French radio show, when
the host mentioned BOULOM, an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Eighteenth
Arrondissement of Paris that was, according to the show, “turning away hundreds
of people a weekend.” BOULOM is the venture of Julien Duboué, a classically
trained chef (he’s worked at George V and with Daniel Boulud), and it has
garnered fantastic reviews in publications such as Le Figaro, which
congratulated Duboué for his decision “to lend his nobility to the
all-you-can-eat buffet, an exercise in style regularly massacred in the
establishments that practice it.”

A friend and I visited the restaurant for lunch the following Tuesday. We
entered through a picture-perfect bakery, squeezing past racks loaded with
cooling loaves and pastries, and emerged into a back room packed with customers,
as though we’d stepped through a magical wardrobe. BOULOM charges between
thirty-two and fifty-eight euros per person, depending on the meal and the day
of the week. A sign warns that two euros will be added to the bill for every
hundred grams of waste, but an employee I spoke to said that she’d never seen it
enforced. The idea is more to create a chilling effect, bringing overzealous
plate loaders back to reason.

Irène Derose, a retired bank employee who lives in a village in the Hérault, has
been to Les Grands Buffets eighteen times, most recently for her birthday, which
she celebrated by eating both lunch and dinner at the restaurant. “And I still
haven’t tasted everything,” she said.

The place is supposed to feel like a village inn of yesteryear, where simple,
lovingly made dishes are left to simmer on the stove throughout the day,
offering nourishment to all comers. The weekday spread includes roast meats, a
dozen desserts, and name-brand ingredients like Joël Dupuch oysters and Eric
Ospital charcuterie. I loved the grilled mackerel, and my friend made what
amounted to a personal pan pizza of the crème brûlée, nearly emptying the dish
in three rounds. Still, it felt like a regular meal. Seafood occupied a few
metal bowls, not a tower. I ate no more and no less than usual, took no chances,
enrobed no strawberries, commissioned no omelettes, made no mistakes. I missed
Les Grands Buffets. The point of all its over-the-top excess might actually be a
kind of scarcity: an experience so bonkers that it’s exceedingly rare.



Before I left Narbonne, I returned for a final meal at Les Grands Buffets.
Precisely at noon, I dropped my stuff at a table for one in the tent room and
went off to fill my first plate. I started with the caviar (technically, it’s
just “fish eggs”), simply being greedy. Then I added some stuffed mussels,
because someone had recommended them; some leeks mimosa, for health; some
Serrano ham, because Les Grands Buffets lets you put on a metal glove and shave
your morsel off the leg yourself. In the cheese room, I pushed a button and an
automated slicer produced a frilly mop of Tête de Moine. Now I was having fun.
Buffets are the culinary version of your wedding day or a big birthday—a bunch
of foods that don’t belong together all in the same space, somehow getting
along.

I was standing near the rotisserie when, suddenly, a “Welcome, shoppers”-style
intercom activated. “Ladies and gentlemen, behold the pressed-duck ritual, just
as it was conceived in the nineteenth century,” a suave male voice intoned. “The
duck has been roasted on a spit. It is now placed on the table of the master
canardier. With the silver duck press, he will crush the carcass to extract the
blood and juices, which give the sauce its unique flavor.”

I turned to see a black-aproned employee emerging from backstage, carrying an
impaled bird as though it were the Olympic torch. Flames leaped from a cup at
the bottom of the spit. She proceeded to the table, where she was joined by the
canardier. “Discover le canard au sang, the emblematic dish of French
gastronomy,” the voice continued. “Les Grands Buffets is the only restaurant in
France to offer this historic recipe every day.” The triumphant chords of “Ride
of the Valkyries” filled the room as the canardier lifted the duck off the spit
with two forks, raising the carcass up to the gods. ♦



Published in the print edition of the April 8, 2024, issue, with the headline
“Feast Mode.”


NEW YORKER FAVORITES

 * Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash.

 * The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool.

 * Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier.

 * Where the Amish go on vacation.

 * How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune.

 * What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

 * Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with
   the World”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New
Yorker.

Lauren Collins has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. She is the
author of “When in French: Love in a Second Language.”




WEEKLY

Enjoy our flagship newsletter as a digest delivered once a week.
E-mail address

Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie
Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and
Terms of Service apply.



Read More
The Food Scene
Café Carmellini Is Fine Dining That Knows a Good Time

Andrew Carmellini’s latest venture is a serious, sophisticated restaurant, with
white linens on the tables and bow-tied service captains, but it never
sacrifices a sense of fun.

By Helen Rosner

On and Off the Menu
Why New York Restaurants Are Going Members-Only

Ultra-exclusive places, like Rao’s and the Polo Bar, once seemed like rarities
in the city’s dining scene. Now clubbiness is becoming a norm.

By Hannah Goldfield

Las Vegas Postcard
The Poodle Partying with the Kardashians and Cher

At a private party, the dog actors playing Josephine—the mascot of the new
Fontainebleau resort in Las Vegas—upstaged Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

By Amanda Fortini

Tables for Two
Exquisite Beach Vibes at Quique Crudo

A seafood-focussed counter from the owners of Casa Enrique—the first Mexican
restaurant in the city to earn a Michelin star—opens in the West Village.

By Shauna Lyon








Sections

 * News
 * Books & Culture
 * Fiction & Poetry
 * Humor & Cartoons
 * Magazine
 * Crossword
 * Video
 * Podcasts
 * Archive
 * Goings On

More

 * Customer Care
 * Shop The New Yorker
 * Buy Covers and Cartoons
 * Condé Nast Store
 * Digital Access
 * Newsletters
 * Jigsaw Puzzle
 * RSS

 * About
 * Careers
 * Contact
 * F.A.Q.
 * Media Kit
 * Press
 * Accessibility Help
 * User Agreement
 * Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement
 * Your California Privacy Rights

© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a portion of
sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate
Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced,
distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior
written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices


 * Facebook
 * X
 * Snapchat
 * YouTube
 * Instagram


Manage Preferences







WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY

We and our 167 partners store and/or access information on a device, such as
unique IDs in cookies to process personal data. You may accept or manage your
choices by clicking below or at any time in the privacy policy page. These
choices will be signaled to our partners and will not affect browsing data.More
Information


WE AND OUR PARTNERS PROCESS DATA TO PROVIDE:

Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for
identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Personalised
advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research
and services development. List of Partners (vendors)

I Accept
Show Purposes