Photo: Bridget Bennett/The New York Times/Redux
I have many character flaws, but according to my brother-in-law Ray, the gravest among them is my devotion to filler. “Filler” is a term that Ray and his fellow buffet aficionados use to describe the lower-cost items on offer within the Americana bacchanalia that is all-you-can-eat dining in Las Vegas, Nevada. The chafing dishes of overcooked elbow noodles with melted Velveeta and Gruyère are filler, the great heaps of mashed potatoes are filler, and the contents of the ever-puffing rice cooker, sweating in the corner next to the delicate steam baskets of shumai, are filler.
“You don’t even want to look at the filler till you’ve had your fourth or fifth plate,” he explained from across a four-top in a dude-ranch-size buffet on the Las Vegas Strip one hot summer day. He paused to suck a string of crab meat from a spindly appendage he held to his lips as though it were a 1920s cigarette holder, before discarding the tricky limb with a shrug. “Not worth it,” he said. “I’ll just get another.”
A good Las Vegas buffet is a Bolshoi ballet, and Ray is its highest-ranking principal. The man just knows his way around a steam table. He is the only person I’ve met in real life who has purchased the now-defunct Buffet of Buffets pass, which allowed him to hit six separate buffets within a 24-hour period. “Never stayed so long in one that I’ve been asked to leave, though,” he told me with some measure of regret. Ray has been hitting the Strip since he was a child, when his family would travel to the city of sin from Fremont, California, once a year; his inauguration occurred at some point in the early 1990s at the buffet at the Excalibur, which was, to Ray’s delight, the largest in Vegas at the time, with 1,300 seats. As an adult, Ray assumed the mantle of planning annual Vegas visits for his group of friends, often leading multiple trips in one calendar year. Every single time, he and his friends would “do a buffet.” Today, he has a whole system for maximizing the value of each foray, which he once generously relayed to me over text message. It begins at the raw bar. “First, I try to do four or five plates full of legs. That’s like 25 to 50 legs?” he wrote, at an odd hour. His buffet system even has sidebars. “Other important fact: You can tell how good a buffet is by the shrimp cocktail,” he wrote in a follow-up. “Good ones have pre-peeled shrimp cocktail so you can down them without wasting time peeling.”
Ray was born only a half-century or so behind the earliest Vegas buffet pioneers. The city’s all-you-can-eat scene emerged in the middle of the 20th century with the “Buckaroo Buffet” at El Rancho Las Vegas, conceptualized to keep gamblers energized through the night. It was the quintessential loss leader, a bargain gorge that would fuel hours of ham-fisted spending. There began the late-night buffet boom. Then came the daytime fare, which was affordable, accessible, and advertised as a fantastical maelstrom of abundance. A 1960s postcard from the now-shuttered Dunes Hotel describes the “World Famous” English-hunt-themed weekend breakfast buffet, with text so small that it’s nearly illegible to accommodate the long list of available items: “our own country sausage,” “kidney and mushroom sauté,” “braised Swiss steaks,” “lamb chops,” “fried spring chicken,” and so on. At the end of the list comes the price, in large, bold, unmissable font: $1.50. “Continental” offerings emerged in the early 1990s with Rio’s Carnival World Buffet. The Los Angeles Times called it a “quantum leap forward in the Las Vegas buffet,” with distinct stations for Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and “American” dishes; it was a “mini food city with something for every taste.”
To keep up with the rapid development of the Strip and its new culture of the celebrity restaurant, the Las Vegas buffet went luxe in the early 2000s. The Cosmopolitan opened Wicked Spoon in 2010, kicking off a cascade of copycat displays of wild extravagance: prime rib, king crab, soufflé, brûlée. Self-serve chafing dishes gave way to elegantly plated bites on individual plates.
Far preceding any Vegas buffet was the Roman Convivium, technically more of a banquet in that the spoils were not self-serve, but a buffet in spirit: guests reclined on triclinium, basically giant class-dividing versions of the Restoration Hardware cloud couch, designed for lounging during a meal; raw oysters, lobster, shellfish, wild boar, and peacock were served in a parade.
The word “buffet” comes from the term for a French sideboard and was first used within the 15th-century court of Burgundy to describe a display of opulent serve ware. In a passage describing the 1454 Feast of the Pheasant — a banquet thrown by Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, to promote a crusade that never actually took place — historian Edmund Bowles writes:
The doors to the banqueting hall were guarded by uniformed nobles and crossbowmen, and three long tables were set up inside … The buffet was close by, with a gold service and crystal glassware encrusted with jewels. The tablecloths of silk damask touched the floor … A naked woman with long, flowing hair leaned against one of the large supporting columns in the hall, guarded by a live chained lion.
I encountered no such live beast at my first visit to the Bacchanal Buffet in Las Vegas, but I did see a teenage girl bring mussels into the bathroom where she continued to consume them. Back at our table, I told Ray about it. He was impressed. There must be a word for a buffet attendee like that teen, I mused — someone who maximizes the dollar value of their consumption in the amount of time allotted (90 minutes). There was a name for people like me, Ray pointed out — literally pointing with another crab leg — and it was “total novice.”
I wasn’t a total novice. It was true that my parents had hidden me away from all things indulgent and Americana excessive, having been scarred by their parents’ respective penchants for the sort of things David Foster Wallace might have skewered in narrative essays. But Ray was mostly correct. This was my first time in the big leagues, in this sprawling set piece of culture that was in some ways — with its infinite options, with its lack of even a performative hint at community, with its actual historic roots from another place, and importantly, filled as it was with individuals hot on the pursuit of the absolute best value — very American.
So, a few months later, I planned a 36-hour visit during which I would attempt to milk every last bit of value I could from the last Las Vegas Strip buffets. Las Vegas was still the epicenter of disparate and incongruous foodstuffs, even after the pandemic had threatened to end the American buffet for good. At the time, only ten buffets had survived the pandemic and the invasion of upscale food halls. But if you entered the Bacchanal Buffet on a Sunday evening, close to closing time, you might not have realized that the buffet was a dying breed. Plates whizzed by at eye level, some impressively full of Impossible Burger stroganoff and Sonoran street dogs topped with spicy mayo. Others were impressively restrained, with just a single piece of the Bacchanal Roll (tempura shrimp and eel maki with avocado Kewpie), or a caviar vol-au-vent bite: smoked-salmon mousse in a puff-pastry cup.
In line before I scored my table, I spoke to a man who was “drunk and hungry as hell” and in town specifically for the crab. It was the best way, he explained, to get bang for his buck. He was one of hundreds whose eyes were trained on the section of countertop where fresh mounds of legs would appear and then, after a swarm of diners, quickly vanish. On long countertops, rows of bloody Mary deviled eggs mingled with pickled turnips and beef steamship. The constant resetting of tables created a chorus of clanking silverware, as if to remind any lingering listeners that the venerable Las Vegas buffet was no more aware of its inhabitants than an ocean is of flotsam.
The next day, at the Cosmopolitan’s Wicked Spoon buffet, all eyes were again on the legs. Inside, the shellfish-heads were swimming in them; clarified butter glowed amber in a Champagne-tower-style arrangement of plastic shot glasses. A muted chorus of “yay” rang out when the steam-table guy replaced a dwindling platter of long extremities with an overflowing one; guests readied their shell-crackers. A man at a nearby table leaned across a plate of inch-thick asparagus so his wife could pop a bite of buttered lobster meat into his mouth. A man at a table near to my own methodically dismantled a pile of pizza and sushi with a skewer instead of a fork. Another strode past me, balancing on a single plate a tower of tacos and pork buns, with a lone burger on top. A child handed another child a slice of lox and the second child clapped merrily. There were families, groups of revelers drinking Champagne, and at least one table of women with suitcases consuming a binder-size banana crêpe, waiting to come or to go. Farther north, between the Jadeite green entranceway columns of the Buffet at the Wynn, a hot dad in a gray hoodie flashed a red card and skipped a zoo of hungry hopefuls, who watched forlornly as he disappeared in the direction of the foot-and-a-half-high tower of peeled shrimp. The caviar bar had just been restocked and three men dining as a group assessed its contents before passing it by for sliders. I watched a woman in a delicate yellow blouse move through the room double-fisting two plates of filler, one in each hand, a proud grin on her face, like she was carrying a pair of geese she’d killed with a single bullet.
I also watched a dozen diners walk past an entire pig, roasted and splayed on its stomach, without even nodding hello and thought of the Feast of the Pheasant, where each display of grandiosity was meant to convey a different, clear message. The naked woman with long, flowing hair who was guarded by a live chained lion? “She symbolized the city of Constantinople,” wrote Bowles. A tableau involving a castle made of pastry, in which 28 musicians cowered? Christendom and its challengers. It was a show full of propaganda, an ostentatious display of power meant to tempt and persuade, and primarily to distract, while the person in charge did what he wanted to do all along.
Was the Las Vegas buffet designed like this, to affirm our sense of agency in a world where autonomy so often feels elusive? Or had we brought that to it? I was in a country systematically dismantling my rights to birth control and abortion, but for $75, I could taste 14 flavors of gelato.
There we were, revealing all sorts of intimate pieces of ourselves as we reacted to that spectacle of choice. The ways in which we fulfilled our wishes told an onlooker anything he might want to know about what those wishes were: that Ray grew up ambitious, wanting nice things (he was the type of kid who saved all his allowance until he could purchase a $300 crocodile-leather belt), that I grew up craving control (mashed potatoes never run out). Eventually, at the Feast of the Pheasant, a live bird was brought in, on which vows, which were never acted upon, were taken against the Turks. Philip the Good threw a banquet with a buffet centerpiece to announce a crusade and then, when everybody had gorged themselves and fallen asleep, quietly canceled the crusade.
From Obsessed With the Best by Ella Quittner. Copyright © 2026 by Ella Quittner. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow Cookbooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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