By Jessica Hill and Michael Weissenstein Associated Press
July 1, 2026 - 10:07 am
LAS VEGAS — On a chill autumn evening aft the extremity of World War II, Las Vegas watched “officialdom and ‘cafe society’ crook retired for the opening of America’s archetypal all-you-can-eat buffet,” a section insubstantial wrote.
It was a large nighttime successful a tiny municipality that dreamed of bare visitors. The glazed ham and premier rib successful the El Rancho Vegas were signs that American nutrient was changing.
The abstraction contention and arms contention made Cold War headlines. The farms contention was arsenic important. Genetics, chemicals, and motorized instrumentality astir tripled U.S. workplace accumulation betwixt 1948 and 2017.
What to bash with each that food?
The beginning
At slightest 3 Vegas legends claimed inventing the all-you-can-eat buffet. The best-known communicative says promoter Herb McDonald enactment food and acold cuts connected a barroom 1 night. “Gamblers walking by said they were hungry, and the buffet was born,” work McDonald’s 2002 obituary.
Other casinos opened buffets for eating successful betwixt gambling, says Michael Green, a past prof astatine the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
For 1 lump sum, radical carried a sheet past salads, meats, pastas and seafood, trying a spot of everything earlier going backmost for more. (That past part’s important.)
As the all-you-can-eat buffet became a hit, its root communicative was disputed. Stories attributing the buffet to the El Rancho are dismissed by Vegas historiographer Jeffrey Carlson.
“It couldn’t person been that simple,” helium says, citing different mentation that attributes it to the mob that helped recovered Las Vegas.
In “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century,” Hal K. Rothman pins the buffet connected mobster Davie Berman, who moved from Iowa successful 1944 arsenic Jewish gangsters snatched up section hotels and casinos.
Berman hired a cook to provender gamblers who laid lox, whitefish, herring and different Jewish brunch delicacies connected a agelong table. “A Las Vegas tradition, the buffet, was born,” Rothman wrote.
The end?
However it each started, all-you-can-eat buffets dispersed crossed the republic to restaurants similar Golden Corral and Ponderosa. Then they started losing retired to casual eating outlets similar Olive Garden oregon Chili’s, nutrient manufacture adept Darren Tristano says.
Then, successful 2020, COVID-19 dealt a stroke that persists to this day. Suddenly, piles of nutrient sitting retired for everyone to drawback weren’t rather arsenic appealing.
Longtime Las Vegas nutrient writer Al Mancini, though, says buffets volition ever person a spot there.
“There’s a visceral absorption to conscionable loading up that tray,” helium says. “People inactive emotion that, and I deliberation they ever will.”
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