The Last Buffet, Or The First New One?

Revisiting the "death of the buffet"

I guess I like lasts. “The last roadside ice cream stands in America,” headlines a recent piece of mine. Last year I wrote about “The Curious Case of the Last Record Changer.”

I wrote once of aging restaurant concepts:

A place like this is a nonrenewable cultural resource. A restaurant is a business, but it’s almost like an organism too, a living repository, a little compendium of folkways unique to the era in which it was started and the people who started it.

And in a piece about all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, I wrote, “It can be sad and unsettling to watch something that was only recently banal and ordinary inexorably slip away into history.”

Well, I’m writing about buffets again, but this time with a twist. There’s a new one in the D.C. area, in Woodbridge, Virginia. Just a few months old. And I went to check it out and, of course, eat there.

As with the majority of recently opened Chinese buffets, at least in my experience, this one was formerly a different buffet restaurant, an Old Country Buffet. I don’t know the last year when a brand-new buffet of any cuisine was built from scratch in the D.C. region. But I do know the number of buffet restaurants has been trending down at least since I moved to the area in 2015.

What you’re looking at here is, possibly, the last new buffet restaurant that will ever open for business in this metro area.

Or maybe not. It depends on whether the format bounces back from both a long, slow decline and a pandemic-induced shock. This new buffet goes against some of the trends I’ve noticed, since I’ve been writing about buffets here and there since early 2020. So I find it very interesting. Whenever a familiar, sort of tired concept departs from its normal template, it says there might still be some life in it.

First of all, United Buffet is in a somewhat more upscale shopping center, in the newer part of Woodbridge. This is counter to where most of the region’s remaining buffets are located, though it reminds me of the concept’s heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Second of all, the interior has been considerably remodeled. New furniture, new carpets, the steam tables themselves either revamped or completely replaced. Here’s a (poor) image from the Old Country Buffet’s old Yelp page:

And here’s the interior of the restaurant now:

The place is new, yes, but sometimes all that changes is the food. This one has been redone very nicely inside. Though it still has some of the Old Country signs hanging up! (If it was actually Old Country that did the revamp before they closed, it was done well enough and recently enough that no updating was needed.)

A few other aspects of the place depart from the predominant buffet template today. This one has a self-serve drink fountain/silverware cabinet/sauce station (ketchup, soy sauce, etc.) It saves the servers time, and maybe means fewer overall are needed. It means that nobody has to ask about free refills, or keep count. Since the whole ethos of a buffet is you do you, it doesn’t feel like any service is missing. Since it’s built in permanently, it manages to reduce service without feeling tacky.

It also has the classic soft-serve ice cream machine, with a pretty high-quality mix inside, whereas most buffets these days serve individually packaged frozen treats out of a cooler.

And, despite its $18 price tag and brand-new appearance, it doesn’t offer the standard, basic sushi bar that almost every modern Chinese buffet does. I like cheap buffet sushi, but it’s curious that it was cut out, maybe to simply keep a handle on the sheer amount of stuff sitting out. Or maybe, again, to save labor.

I’ve also noticed, maybe of a piece with the locations being less prime, that the people eating in buffets are mostly (I’d guess) working class, and mostly Latino and Black. When I was a kid, I remember seeing people of all races and apparent income levels (e.g. white-collar folks having lunch). Increasingly I don’t see that. But this new place had what seemed to me a broader cross section of the region’s population. My theory has been that more affluent diners have left the buffet behind as gauche or not trendy. Maybe that’s only temporary.

What about the actual food?

Not amazing. Pretty good. Typical Americanized Chinese food. Fresher and tastier than pretty much every other similar place I’ve tried recently. They had oysters, which I skipped. And while the sushi bar is missing, the typical make-your-own hibachi was still there.

It’s a cleaner, fresher take on a sort of stale restaurant format, and with its labor-saving tweaks and somewhat condensed menu size, it’s calibrated for the post-pandemic era.

But at nearly $20, it’s on the fence in terms of value. The value proposition of these places has never been excellent food or refined service. It’s always been tons of decent food cheap. It’s still tons of decent food, but it’s not so cheap anymore, and there are now a lot of other, more interesting options in the same price range, or lower.

We’ll see. I hope this place lasts. I think it’s possible that as the number of commercial spaces set up for buffet dining dwindles, and as new-construction buffet restaurants disappear, that this could end up being the last one around here.

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Related Reading:

Culture, Nostalgia, Cuisines as Living Things

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

Signs of Change

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