Les Grands Buffets in the south of France has a seven-month waiting list for its spread of limitless lobster, foie gras, pressed duck and chocolate fountains. Forget the carvery - buffets are going gourmet.
Ever since the cabaret singer Edith Piaf first sang her valedictory hymn, Non, je ne regrette rien, in 1960, the song has been one of France’s unofficial anthems; a declaration for living life with no regrets.
I wonder if Piaf would have sung the same tune if she’d ever dined at Les Grands Buffets, the totally bonkers all-you-can-eat restaurant in the south of France with a seven-month waiting list, where diners can pillage the best of French gastronomy — foie gras, caviar, frogs’ legs, you name it — for just €57.90 ($105) a head. Because I have. I went this week for lunch and let me tell you, I have a lot of regrets.
I regret starting my meal with a round of a dozen oysters and two Atlantic lobsters, which meant by the time I moved on to the hors d’œuvres I was already feeling cosy in my dress.
I regret plunging from my crustaceans entrée to the pressed-duck main course, which I then chased with a portion of coquilles St Jacques and moules.
I regret not leaving enough room for the cheese board or the sweet bread vol au vent, and I regret prioritising a second portion of chocolate profiteroles over a crepe suzette. I regret getting distracted at the ice-cream stand and not trying the tarte tatin. And I absolutely regret the baguette basket.
Ultimately, I regret my entire strategy. And if you’re going to eat at a luxury buffet like this you need a strategy, otherwise you risk turning into Le Grand Bébé. Somebody call the midwife — and get me a Rennie.
While food snobs and critics have been cooing over multi-Michelin-starred restaurants likes Alchemist in Copenhagen, which has a waiting list of 10,000 people, or Ynyshir in Wales, voted the best restaurant in the UK, where tables are booked up two months in advance, real foodies have been rolling up their sleeves at the latest fine-dining phenomenon: luxury buffets. Forget tasting menus and tiny portions; these restaurants are all about eating as much as possible.
Leading the way is Les Grands Buffets, which opened in 1989 and has been a shrine to classic French food since. Every year some 400,000 people arrive in the small Roman city of Narbonne to eat either lunch or dinner here: 600 at lunch, another 600 at dinner, 365 days a year.
Traditionally buffets have been the fodder of weddings, funerals and service stations. Plates piled high with a grotesque mess of cuisines: noodles dolloped next to curries and risotto. These places are cheap as chips. At the Toby Carvery, one of Britain’s buffet establishments, guests can tuck in to limitless breakfast — sausages, fried eggs, bacon, Yorkshires — for £6.49 ($13.73). Some call it heaven; I call it a fast track to heartburn and an advert for Gaviscon.
However, the new generation of buffets is anything but tacky. The ingredients are top quality, the dishes refined and they come with a much bigger price tag. The Sunday feasts at the Ned, a members’ club and hotel in the old grade I listed Midland Bank in the City of London, are legendary. On the menu for £100 ($212) are bottomless lobster, 38-day dry aged Hereford beef, pork from rare breed Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs and Jersey rock oysters. If you want to enjoy free-flowing Thienot Brut NV Champagne it’s £65 ($138) extra.
Last week the Ned launched a new unlimited beef menu at its Lutyens Grill restaurant on Fridays, served from midday to midnight. That’s bottomless 44-day aged rare-breed prime rib, carved tableside from the trolley, for £100.
Arguably the country’s most famous all-you-can-eat is the Grove, an upscale hotel in Watford that starred in the Netflix documentary Million Dollar Buffet, which came out last November. Here guests pay £82 ($174) to feast on a ludicrously generous array of international foods, from fresh sashimi to stone-baked pizza.
“It’s absolutely crazy. Anything you could possibly want to eat, done incredibly well, under one roof,” a friend who visited last year told me. Perhaps that’s why the Grove’s buffet has gone viral on TikTok, with videos of its stands racking up 23.8 million views.
The biggest sign that buffets are now cool is the Dover, a sexy, très chic Italian in Mayfair that opened discreetly at the end of last year. I am sure that the owner, Martin, would wring my neck if I called it a buffet, but this week I heard about the Dover’s Sunday Lunch Club, a monthly event where for £85 ($180) you can eat as many tartare bites, smoked salmon blinis, servings of lasagne, cauliflower cheese and gelato as you want in your two-hour sitting. When I browse for a table at the next meeting, there is just a handful of sittings left.
And that is largely the point: a seat at an all-you-can-eat restaurant table is hot property. The Ned’s feasts sell out months in advance. When The New Yorker reviewed Les Grands Buffets, the writer had to wait five months. When I browse online before my lunch, the next available table for dinner is in November. Once you’ve booked, guests are reminded that they can’t change the time, date or size of their reservation. And if they fail to show up, they’ll be charged 50 quid ($105) a head anyway — plus an administration charge.
Now I may not be the smartest person, or the sportiest person. I’m terrible at maths and, aged 30, I still can’t drive. But one thing I have always been very, very good at is eating. When I was a child my friends’ parents would always remark to my mum and dad how much I could put away. I used to think they found it endearing. Impressive, almost. Hannah the Hoover they called me. In reality, they probably were deeply concerned. And their faux surprise concealed how pissed off they were that I’d cleaned out their fridge in just one sleepover.
I am proud to say my ability to eat has not waned as I’ve aged. And so all I can think as I arrive at Les Grands Buffets one Wednesday in April for lunch with a companion is, “Buckle me up, baby. I am ready.”
Arriving at Les Grands Buffets is just as surreal as exploring it. Sandwiched between a Lidl supermarket, a KFC and a leisure centre, this is not where you expect to find France’s most coveted restaurant. When I was growing up I was always told not to go swimming on a full stomach or I would drown from indigestion. That message clearly wasn’t relayed in France because the restaurant is right next to a water park.
As soon as you walk through the double gold and black doors, though, you are transported into a palace of gastronomy. Inside is vast. There are four dining rooms, each extravagant in its own peculiar way. For example, the Salon Doré Jean de la Fontaine was created by the people who restored the Palace of Versailles. They applied 18,000 gold leaves to the finishings.
We are eating in the Tente d’Apparat Jean-Baptiste Nolin, an indoor tented room that looks like a mash-up of a set from Game of Thrones and a scene from Beauty and the Beast. The only thing that breaks this façade is the huge helter-skelter water slide I can see out of the window.
In here the atmosphere is a bit more mature. It’s giving Saga Magazine: Live vibes — the tables surrounding us are filled with groups of retired couples, though it’s Les Grands Buffets policy that it does not accept coach tours. Listening to the chatter as guests file in, I don’t hear a single English voice.
Unlike most buffets where emptied plates stack up as diners wade through courses, waiters at Les Grands Buffets clear the debris. Alcohol, which costs extra (£24 for a bottle of bubbly), is served at the table.
The food is inspired by that of Auguste Escoffier, a 19th-century chef considered the godfather of traditional French cuisine.
Generally speaking you can divide the buffet into three sections. The first chamber is where you’ll find the starters. Tucked in one corner is a tower of lobsters stacked up in the shape of a giant Christmas tree. There are two platters of oysters on a bespoke silver sculpture, and a station of crabs and clams. Next door are five varieties of pâté en croute including one called Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow, made with a mind-boggling mix of meats including wild boar, hare, sweetbreads and pork. “We are one of the few restaurants in the country who make all their pâté en croûte by hand,” Pierre Cavalier proudly tells me. He is Les Grands Buffets’ director general, though he reminds me of Willy Wonka.
In the centre of the room is the foie gras station, with nine varieties including one made using port, with a caramelised top like a crème brûlée.
“This always has the longest queue,” Cavalier says. I can feel my arteries clogging just by looking at it.
Directly opposite is the world’s largest cheese board. That’s not me being dramatic; I am totally serious. Guinness World Records has sanctioned it — there are 111 varieties of cheese.
The central room is the rotisserie, ominously lit up in red. From here you can order anything from whole roasted veal kidney to escargots.
And then there is the dessert parlour. Or palace, should I say. Displayed on the counters are every French dessert or sweet you have ever heard of: rum baba, Black Forest gateau, îles flottantes, eclairs, rice pudding, chocolate mousse.
Guests get through 800,000 macarons a year, each handpiped by the chefs who begin work at 7am, Monday to Sunday. You can even pick up a trou normand, a shot of Calvados served over apple sorbet that gets rid of the sensation of being full so you can go for another round of food.
It’s all very jolly, a bit like toddling around an adult’s theme park. When you place an order in front of the rotisserie, a chef wearing one of those funny tall hats announces it over a microphone. “Oui, chef!” his team shout back and when your plate is handed back to you — “All within three minutes,” I am told — a loud bell dings.
The pièce de résistance, though, is the canard au sang, a traditional French dish in which duck is pressed to make a sauce from its own skin and blood in a silver press that costs €50,000 ($90,500). Every 45 minutes, the canard is paraded from the kitchen and carved up in a ceremony that feels like something from a Monty Python film. As Ride of the Valkyries plays loudly over the sound system, a waitress marches out from behind the pass, holding a flaming duck on a skewer above her head as though she is about to knight the chef, who waits ready with two razor-sharp knives. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in a restaurant.
“We are the only restaurant in France to serve duck like this on demand. All other restaurants require you to book your duck in advance,” Cavalier tells me.
The average diner at Les Grands Buffets eats just under eight plates of food during their visit. I find it alarming how easily I have nine.
My final visit is to the chocolate fountain. Anyone who tells you they’ve never had the urge to stick their head under one of these is lying. And this one is huge — almost two metres tall. It takes every ounce of self-control not to let my eyes glaze over and take the plunge.
Les Grands Buffets prides itself on never running out of food. When I ask Jack Cohn, who is the director of food and drink at the Ned, if they ever get close, he says the same.
“We know exactly how many people are coming because you must book in advance. We study the statistics and the data. We have it planned right down to the number of potatoes each person eats on average,” he tells me.
Back at my table, I am beached. Stick a fork in me. My companion tells me that he often digests meals at home by walking 1,000 steps straight afterwards. I am probably going to have to walk to Paris to process this meal.
Ultimately, I was overwhelmed. I adopted the approach of an inexperienced raver in Ibiza. I took all the pills and went straight to the front. In reality, less is more.
“I felt the same after my first buffet,” a friend says sympathetically when, at home, I relay my feast. He works in the City and is a regular on Sundays at the Ned. “But you will go back. Just give it time.”
Why does he love the concept? “I like that rather than quantity, they’ve picked one genre of food, the Sunday lunch, and have just gone hell for leather on making it as enjoyable as possible.”
I agree. Suddenly all the food you’re often served in tiny portions or restricted to eating just one day of the week is available in huge quantities and you are given permission to dive in.
And as disciplined as you might think you are, a visit to a luxury buffet makes any notion of self-restraint impossible. Les Grands Buffets throws your senses totally out of whack. Are you hungry, or are you just ready to move on to the next course? It’s addictive. “We want people to lose their inhibitions,” Cavalier tells me.
“I have seen someone eat eight lobsters at Sunday lunch,” Cohn adds. On average at a feast guests will get through 650 lobsters, 80kg beef, 1,500 oysters and 140 litres gravy.
Aside from Les Grands Buffets there are plenty of reasons to visit Narbonne. It has a rich Roman history, an award-winning covered food market and a beautiful canal that runs down to the Med through nature reserves where thousands of pink flamingos can be seen.
But when I post a photograph of the city’s magnificent 13th-century palace on Instagram, a friend quickly replies, “Is that the place with that crazy French buffet? I’ve got a table booked for this summer.”
Is Narbonne about to see an influx of buffet tourists? I think it’s highly likely. And I can’t promise that I won’t be one of them.
Written by: Hannah Evans
© The Times of London