Buffet Chronicles: Made In China
An unexpected travel perk
I have a bunch of notes from our family visit to China back this summer, and one of the things I found really interesting and wanted to write about was the hotel buffets.
Pretty much every hotel we stayed at had a huge, impressive, pretty good quality all-you-can-eat buffet. They were mostly at breakfast, but the food ranged from some basic Western breakfast dishes to Chinese breakfast foods to all sorts of savory dishes that you’d expect more for lunch or dinner. Noodles, stir-fries, soups, fried rice, vegetables in brown sauce. One even had sushi!
If you’ve been reading me awhile, you know I’m a big fan of buffets. So it was really awesome to have unlimited Chinese food every morning while we were out traveling. I felt like a kid, finishing off the leftover beef and broccoli the next morning after we had Chinese takeout. Sometimes the simplest and most random things are the most delightful.
I want to show you a bunch of these spreads/plates. Now this was obviously not the finest food, but it was plenty good—as good as many restaurants, and some of it better than what you’d get at an American buffet restaurant.
There weren’t just cooked dishes, either. There were hot and cold dishes; made-to-order noodle soups, including one where a chef was cutting fresh noodles off a block of dough; flat-top griddles to sizzle eggs and bacon, and put a crisp on the bottom of dumplings. This was impressive and fairly labor-intensive stuff. Waking up early with your time completely flipped—China is a full 12 hours off Eastern Standard Time—it was really nice to have a buffet to start these travel days.
In no particular order, this is how you will very likely start a morning staying at a nice hotel in China:
Why is this a common thing in nicer Chinese hotels and not in U.S. hotels? The internet tells me one reason could be that food quality out in the Chinese restaurant world is uneven, and so especially for people traveling for business, the hotel buffet is both a convenience and a kind of guarantee of quality and food safety. Other than that, the reason may just be that it’s done there. For whatever reason, the idea of overpriced hotel restaurants as a source of profit isn’t as much of a business practice in China. Probably, running essentially a free restaurant is cheaper in China than in the U.S., too.
Of course, there are free breakfasts, usually buffet-style, in American hotel chains, but typically they disappear as you climb the price ladder. Some of the hotel buffets in Europe, in my experience, have pretty nice spreads, but they’re not always free, and don’t have the same variety.
If anyone has any insight into how the hotel industry makes these decisions, leave a comment!
Our last buffet of the trip, a dinner, was on one of our last evenings in my wife’s home city. We didn’t stay, but it was also a hotel. And it was such a cool place that I’m going to do a little illustrated follow-up just about that building/hotel/buffet dinner. Stay tuned!
Related Reading:
Buffet Chronicles: Back to the Beginning
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This looks just like the breakfast buffet I had in Japan recently, and there it is definitely NOT because the quality of other food available to travelers is low. So I don't think that's it. I'm gonna go with "that's just how it's done." Not everyone has the low expectations of food that we sadly seem to have in the US.
Same (maybe better even) in Japan...