“The idea was to get them here to have this food that’s abundant and relatively inexpensive and they’ll stay to gamble,” Schwartz said. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)Įven off-Strip casinos appealing to locals would have prominent buffets - ones that would offer a variety of foods to break up the monotony of playing the same games that had been around for decades, he said. “The casino would lose money for everybody who went, but the hope was they would make the money up when people gambled because they had eaten so much,” he said. “You had hot dishes, all kinds of food, and (they) really became a selling point.”īuffets, even amid their exploding popularity, were still viewed as a loss leader for casinos, Schwartz said. “As casinos got bigger, buffets really became a mainstay and evolved into a phenomenon of their own,” Schwartz said. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)ĭecades later, when mega-resorts like the Mirage began to pop up across the Strip, so did the buffets.

“It was just a place for people to go who were gambling, get something to eat quickly, and then return to gambling.” An ad for the Buckaroo Buffet at El Rancho Vegas from 1955. The El Rancho Vegas was destroyed in 1960 in a fire. The buffet, known at first as the “Chuck Wagon” buffet and later as the Buckeroo Buffet, charged $1 (or about $11 today). The Vegas buffet was born in the 1940s at El Rancho Vegas, serving simple foods for people to enjoy before quickly returning to tables and machines, according to gaming historian and UNLV Professor David Schwartz. What happened to the under-$10, all-you-can-eat buffet?īuffets, along with slot machines and mega-resorts, have long been synonymous with Las Vegas’ history, but gone is the era of $5 entry to all-you-can-eat buffets, or every casino on the Strip having its own buffet in general.īut, where did the all-you-can-eat buffet come from, and how have they changed? A collection of small plates at Wicked Spoon at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.

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