School’s almost out and the holidays are here, which means for millions of Britons we have arrived at the start line for what might be called our biggest annual event: Wimbledon and the World Cup are one thing, but the all-inclusive and all-you-can-eat buffet olympics remains, I would argue, this country’s strongest competitive sport. Arriving at Luton airport before dawn last year, my children walked past the bars and with the innocence of the American-born said, owl-eyed, “Are they drinking … alcohol?” They are, my darlings, and will continue to do so from first light in the terminal until the last coach leaves the resort.
This is how it is now. Since Covid, vacation trends in Britain have skewed increasingly towards formalising this country’s latent maximalist instincts when it comes to enjoying our holidays. Between 2023 and 2024, bookings for European all-inclusive resorts rose by 30%, and the latest figures from Abta suggest that a quarter of British holidaymakers will now opt for the all-inclusive – meaning bottomless canteen-style food and drink, which, no matter how much we paid for it up front, I defy any of us not to experience as “free”.
The reasons for this rise are, ostensibly, because holidaymakers want to fix costs in a wobbly economy and to enjoy “zero decision” holidays in an era in which many of us feel we have no more decisions left in us to make. But while both explanations might be true, they overlook what I would suggest is the bigger draw of the all-inclusive – the pleasures of cracking the Challenge of the Buffet. Namely: how do I extract maximum value from this spectrum of options in a way that preserves both my dignity and my desire to actually eat what I’ve piled up on my plate?
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How successfully you tackle this challenge will rely on your familiarity with the History of the Buffet and also your ability to quickly and accurately put a mental price on each dish. Perhaps, like me, you have the advantage of growing up during the stone age of buffet dining, by which of course I mean the 1980s salad bar at Pizza Hut. Like eastern-bloc gymnasts, those of us who came up in the Pizza Hut era honed our skills in an environment in which diners taking food home were restricted to a single, highly pressured visit to the buffet.
This is how we did it: lightweight leaves and shredded cheese on the bottom, building up through incrementally heavier and less compressible layers (croutons; ham cubes) until the strategic use of bread sticks propped up the cardboard lid on the carton, allowing for a crucial extra half inch of salad. Hated artichokes aside, the highest value item in the salad bar was the tinned pineapple ring, which would be balanced, wetly, on the lid of the box and presented defiantly at the cash desk for payment.
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Historically, of course, the greatest buffets of all time have been in Las Vegas, where hotels on the strip would offer multiple adjoining rooms featuring course after course of high-end all-you-can-eat fare. The New York Times this week did a deep dive into these particular buffets as their numbers dwindle, dipping in the past few years from about 70 in 2019 to just half a dozen now. Those old buffets were single-pay, ultra-luxe experiences in which you could be charged up to $100 for two hours of free rein and which have fallen out of fashion as food prices in the US have risen. (I went only once, to the buffet at Caesars Palace, where like a child emerging from 1940s Britain I was brought almost to tears in the cake room.)
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By contrast, the Euro model returns us to a more modest spread in which volume beats all. The restaurant critic at the New York Times takes the view that, when it comes to buffet strategy, one should avoid cheap, filling fare like pasta. This is sensible advice, to which I would add: when the buffet is dominated by beige foods and bad salad, laser in on the single luxury item, for example the one-night-only ibérico-ham station at our Spanish all-inclusive last year.
There it was, the best ham in the world, with a dedicated server carving it slowly and beautifully on to tiny plates that were replaced every time someone took one. I don’t know how many times I went up, but by the end of the night I had a cracking headache from the salt, which was totally worth it. Spiking prices, global warming and the obscenity of food waste will, at some point, probably take these options away from us and I suppose we should say rightly so. We will still have our memories. At the end of the holiday, one of my children said to me, “You have to stop talking about the ham.” But I won’t. I’ll never stop talking about the ham.
