How do you make a profit (or even break even) when you’re serving guests literally as much food as they can eat? The newly reopening buffets have some ideas. The buffet format has long been one of the stickiest financial propositions for the casinos.

(Enter the buffet strategy of loading up on crab legs and forsaking filler items like pasta salad.) By a couple of years ago, there were more than 70 buffet restaurants in Las Vegas.Īs circumstances have changed on Vegas’s culinary scene, the great buffet shakeout has left the Strip with eight buffets. In the years that followed, buffets exploded-offering more quantity than quality in many cases, but still at relatively low prices. According to the UNLV Center for Gaming Research, the Buckaroo set the buffet precedent for the city, and by the 1950s, most Strip casinos had midnight buffets for $1.50. For $1, hungry gamblers could fill up 24 hours a day-and the casino could keep its players playing. That all-you-can-stuff-in-your-piehole experience has evolved since the El Rancho Vegas opened its chuckwagon-style Buckaroo Buffet in 1941.

With the opening of Wally’s in the new Resorts World Las Vegas, the city also now claims the most expensive steak ever served (a 60-ounce Porterhouse aged for 195 days, covered in black truffles, and sold for $20,000). But if one dining symbol that epitomizes the Las Vegas experience, it’s the buffet. There are more restaurants here serving certified Kobe beef than anywhere in the world, and more master sommeliers than any other city. The $1 shrimp cocktail, for instance, and the classic Vegas prime rib dinner (extra points if you have it at The Golden Steer). Las Vegas has given the world a certain number of cultural culinary icons.

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