One of the many debates Tom and I had over the years was about buffets. He hated the idea of all buffets, but he would sometimes acknowledge a distinction between good ones and bad ones, which he would call boofays. Maybe it’s my Kenna upbringing, but I have always loved buffets, but not boofays, to be clear. For example, Fogo de Chão is an all-you-can-eat salad bar, but it is a glamorous spread of first class ingredients. This ain’t the Golden Corral. The salad bar at Fogo de Chão was about the only buffet of any stature for the last pretty many years, but lately these grand speads started turning up again.
When the kids were little we sometimes went to hotel buffets for holidays that were lavish, with choices of great food for all, They were all similarly priced and similarly situated with similar food, stations, etc. But I remember one different one that I thought was special. It was at the Ritz Carlton in the M Bistro, or it might have been in its short-lived predecessor Victor’s. I have always thought this was an underrated excellent restaurant that no one talked about. Their buffet was a series of individual dishes. You could choose what you wanted but it was only one portion of artfully plated whatever. And the presentation itself was very appealing. It was the only time I ever saw such a buffet.
Until Mother’s Day of this year when we booked the only two-top in the River Ballroom at The Four Seasons. It was from the kitchens of Chemin a la Mer. I haven’t even attempted to book a buffet brunch in many years, mainly because they have been out of vogue for a long time. Tom always said buffets were a loss for their hosts and he never understood their existence anyway, so their absence was not missed.
They have recently started appearing again with a much higher price tag, though still very affordable considering today’s restaurant prices. And I wonder about their return at all under the current climate. If they weren’t profitable back then, how could they be now?
Perhaps other people missed them as well, because I got the last available reservation for The Four Season’s Brunch. It was $145pp++, totalling nearly $400 for two.
One person can only eat so much, so this cannot be a value for the customer under any circumstances. At that price does it then become doable for the restaurant? This was definitely an outlier brunch because others were $75, and that fact alone made my curiosity unbearable. What at a buffet could possibly be worth the price of admission?
Tom would not have sneered at this buffet because there were no chafing dishes keeping food warm. With the exception of the jambalaya station, everything else was cooked to order. Or it was cold. There was the raw oysters station, an omelet station, a pasta station, pancake station, and a risotto station. A carver was there, and someone served you ice cream with fixins, as well as fresh handcrafted-in-front-of-you Peach cobbler.
Fancy, fancy. You walk first into the room to see the raw oysters,
then smoked salmon on bagels.
One of the first things I got was from the carving station, because one of the carved meats was a Porchetta! What are the chances? I spent the earlier hours of the day writing about Porchetta and there it was on a carving station, along with a Tomahawk Ribeye. This was fantastic. Perfectly cooked and everything I wanted it to be. The pork belly exterior was a crispy cracklin, and the interior was moist and flavorful, redolent with garlic and herbs. The carver was kind enough to oblige my request for the crusty edges, and I was delighted with this discovery.
The Tomahawk Ribeye was no less spectacular, seared perfectly and tender. This carver's slices were thin and easy to eat. The Chimichurri sauce was also terrific. This was the best carving station I’ve ever seen.
I asked for an omelet and regretted it. With all the veggies I requested it was enormous. Since I can’t waste anything, less room was left for more interesting options. The omelet was fine.
The jambalaya station was disappointing. It was a huge paella pan with a Creole jambalaya. This was surprising because Donald Link is a famous Cajun. Why would he be serving a reddish jambalaya? It was mostly rice and resembled its cousin paella in that it had been sitting in the pan so long it had quite the soccarat.
The pasta station was also puzzling. Billed as housemade pasta, and as rigatoni, I was surprised by the appearance of the pasta, and also by the fact that someone was cooking but there were only two choices, and they were similar. One was marinara, and the other lamb ragu. We got each kind and should have split it, since the portion was a pan. It was nice, though. Shaved Parmesan and crushed red pepper were there as additions.
The mushroom risotto was quite a display. The crates of mushrooms rivaled many I had seen at farmer’s markets in California. The risotto was displayed in a Parmesan wheel, and it was continually replenished by a young lady cooking it in a pan. It had a nice mushroom flavor and a wonderful consistency. I was reminded of something again, and that is that I love mushrooms, but not most of them. Oyster mushrooms, which I run into mostly of the unusual variety (though there are so many more) have a consistency like raw oysters, (hence the name I guess,) an image I don’t like at all.
The menu promised a garden section. This was much smaller than I expected, consisting of little ramekins of Caprese salad, ancient grains salad, and little gem lettuces with Caesar dressing, shaved Parmesan, and a whole anchovy in the center. I was expecting to eat some fresh greens at this buffet but I had to go to the kid’s section to have some carrot sticks, cucumber slices, red pepper, and cauliflower bites with Ranch dressing.
While I was there I took a tiny bit of the macaroni and cheese to taste it. I did leave the nuggets. The macaroni and cheese was dry and light on the cheese. Too bad. They might have had a lot more takers on that had they invested more effort into it.
The little ancient grains salad Mary Leigh got was interesting but not good enough to finish. It had a creamy base, which surprised me.
She also visited the pancake station to have a beautiful little pancake. I was impressed that a station continually turning out pancakes could do as well in a remote location as someone cooking for a family, but this was a lovely thing.
The pancakes were next to a bacon pile, which was the only thing just sitting like this, and I didn’t even notice it until I had finished my omelet (which was probably a good thing.)
What was conspicuously absent from this lineup was basic bread. There was no basket of savory baked goods or biscuits or any kind of savory bread at all. Danish of all varieties were beautiful, and croissants. When I inquired about this and it was verified that there was nothing like basic bread (which shouldn’t be basic at this price,) a waiter showed up about ten minutes later with a dish of thinly sliced French bread untoasted with no butter.
I was grateful that he made the effort and I tried to eat at least some of it but only because he made the effort. But bread should always be toasted, and I left it in the end with the untoasted cold croissant.
Unfortunately for content purposes, I never follow the Jello commercial’s advice to always leave room for dessert.
They were located far enough away to forget them, but the entire wall of ice cream, Peach cobbler, and individual chocolate mousse tarts and key lime pie tarts were ignored by us until we were on the way out.
I left thinking it was an extraordinary display of interesting menu items, presented exceptionally well, but there really isn’t a purpose or value for either diner or restaurant for even a grand display of food served buffet style. And I realized that I can add buffets to the list of arguments that Tom won too late to claim victory.
