In 2019, Eater Las Vegas estimated there were 70 buffets in the area. With the success of El Rancho’s buffet, the concept spread throughout Las Vegas, and people started to associate the city with both gambling and all-you-can-eat restaurants. Don’t touch anything anyone else has ever touched, ever, without sanitizing. Go grocery shopping once every two weeks and make it count.

So much of the last year and a half has revolved around survival and attaining the bare minimum. The buffet takes most of the ingrained fears and behaviors of the pandemic and turns them on their heads. Murphy estimated that diners would go through 800 pounds of crab legs and 18 to 20 prime ribs. “We have a total of 36 desserts, not including our 11 new gelato and sorbet flavors.”

“We have a little over 220 dishes,” Murphy said. In another room there was Roman pizza enough cheese, salami and prosciutto roses to make the grandest of charcuterie and cheese boards assorted nigiri build-your-own congee bowls bang bang shrimp banchan and beet hummus with pita. The Latin station housed a whole suckling pig. Nearby, mountains of crushed ice were sheathed in dozens of pounds of stacked crab legs, shrimp, oysters and scallops on the half shell, lobster claws and snow crab.

The space between the guests was less than six feet. They scooped up individually plated, split rods of bone marrow waiting to be slurped. People lined up at the carving station, waiting for a sliver of Wagyu, a hunk of prime rib and a slice of brisket. That afternoon, diners got the full buffet experience, and the scene appeared shockingly normal. “We decided to hold out and wait until the restrictions were lifted so that our guests could have the full buffet experience,” Caesars Palace executive chef Jennifer Murphy said. The buffet sold out for the evening with more than 1,100 diners. (Clark County allowed traditional buffets to reopen on May 1.) While other local buffets, including the Cosmopolitan’s Wicked Spoon and the Garden Buffet at South Point, reopened as staff-service operations last year, Caesars Palace waited until guests could serve themselves again. May 20, the buffet reopened for the first time since the pandemic shut it down in March 2020. This is the crown jewel of the Caesars Palace Bacchanal Buffet American carving station, a sea of deep browns and char that beckons under golden heat lamps.Īt 4 p.m. The beef clings to what I can only imagine is a dinosaur bone sticking straight out of the top. You can’t help but stare at the 80-pound American Wagyu steamship, a gargantuan slab of meat with a crackly, glistening crust.

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