I’m good at telling whether food is fresh/flavorful/good just by looking at it (it’s not that hard!), and I’m always surprised when people at salad bars or buffets voluntarily help themselves to items that clearly have been sitting out for a long time or look just awful, and then complain about it while they’re eating it. Since these people can obviously taste the difference, why haven’t they learned to detect it before they take the food in the first place?
Once in a while I get fooled but it’s very rare. I know all the warning signs: Breaded chicken slices that are so fat they obviously have an inch of breading on them; “crab” dishes that are obviously artificial crab meat even though the sign doesn’t say.
It’s like people take the buffet as something infallible, like believing everything a doctor tells you just because he/she’s a doctor (also a bad idea)
You can sometimes get an idea of how fresh items are by looking, based on whether they look dry, soggy, wilted, or held in a steam tray too long (gray broccoli). I see this more at my supermarket deli counter than in restaurant buffets, because restaurants usually turn the food over much faster. However, fresh-looking is not the same as safe. Foods held at the wrong temperature can look fine, and salads contaminated with e. coli look just as good as uncontaminated salads.
It’s quite possible to set out a fresh, appetizing, attractive dish that doesn’t taste good. I am dubious of your claim that you can predict taste just by looking.
Yes and no. Wilted lettuce is easy to spot. Rice that has been sitting out for two days is not. With that in mind, I do not like buffets, and only go when they are (1) very popular (2) visibly replenishing empty dishes and (3) well reviewed.
There is a lunch buffet I know in a small city where for a mere four bucks you could eat a selection of the world’s most dangerous foods. Who needs a puffer fish when you’ve got a snuffer dish?
It doesn’t matter how fresh it actually is, my brain insists it’s all rotten infected garbage, thick with the diseased snot of children. No buffets for me, thank you.
I’m pretty good at spotting large chunks of mold like white fur, green-ish/blue slime - or, for the more nuanced - beige/tan mildew-y-looking splotches. If I spot, say, an earwig in the trifle, I’ll demur.
I think people who cook a lot have a better radar for good food at a buffet than those who don’t. Cooks see food in every stage from buying it at the grocery store to cleaning, prepping and cooking it so the food is very familiar at every stage. If you don’t prepare or eat a food you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like so you’re gonna get fooled more often.
I stopped eating at buffets when I witnessed a homeless guy putting a whole hard-boiled egg into his mouth, then spitting it out and returning it to the buffet.
Yeah, I feel like I can tell whether some foods are fresh but not others. That being said, I’ve had mostly good experiences with buffets. I’ve mostly partaken of small popular buffets (the lunch buffet at the local Indian place) and breakfast buffets at hotels. Both tend to have staff constantly replacing items – and are mostly stuff that doesn’t spoil readily, anyway.
I went to one of those giant buffets in Las Vegas that I heard people rave about, and hated it. Hundreds of options of mediocre food, much of which had been sitting under the heat lamps for too long, and was over-cooked to begin with. I’ll just order stuff I want to eat that’s been made fresh for me, thanks.
The problem with buffets is that there are two kinds of people who like buffets. There are the people who want a cheap price for a lot of food and then there are the people who want to try a lot of different foods but don’t care so much about the price. And when you listen to someone rave, you have to know which kind of buffet fan they are, because someone who raves about the $20 buffet is not the same person as the one who raves about the $65 buffet.
A friend’s family runs a Chinese buffet locally. It is a great place to go, always fresh, always tasty. But it doesn’t have 6" deep trays on the steam table; it only has 3" trays. I asked him why.
“That way, we can keep everything fresh,” he said. “Sure, the Singapore noodles, and the spring rolls and the beef-and-broccoli and whatnot need replenishing twice as often, but we’re willing to do that.” It must work, as his restaurant is among the most popular Chinese restaurants in our city.
I went to the grocery store very close to my house last night, specifically to get some bratwurst to cook today for meals for this week. I got the sausages & fixings but wandered back to the deli counter since a tiny seed of an idea had germinated: carnitas tacos. This store, like others, has a hot prepared food area next to the cold cuts, Lorraine swiss and coleslaws and other salads. It isn’t self serve, you point and say how much you want of the maybe 20 items. Honestly, the entire steam table looked really sad and unappetizing, there isn’t much turnover. There was a sort of ‘Mexican’ rice that was clearly all crusty over the top with dried out rice. The potato wedges were shrunken inside a husk of batter. They had a few kinds of chicken wings that all looked glued to the pan (gross but this chicken wing lover actually considered getting some) and the less said about the fried chicken, then better.
I considered the carnitas safe since they dwell in a pool of their own fat and those bits submerged can’t really dry out in the same way those other poor things can. When I got home, I made some bomb tacos but the pork was a bit dry. No surprise since it looked dry, the areas above the liquid line, anyway. The tacos were still great and ultra cheap. I only used about half the $3 pork purchase for 3 generous tacos last night and just ate a few bites of it again now.
Yes, it was easy to tell that this wasn’t fresh food.
I went to a seafood-specific one, I’m pretty sure at the Rio. I didn’t hate it but it was disappointing, especially for the cost which, as I recall, was $50 or $60 ten years ago.
