GAUDYAND GORGEOUS
SARAH LOHMAN
THE EPHEMERAL ART OF THE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET
Public art is a long-overlooked aspect of the allyou-can eat Las Vegas casino buffet. The earliest mid-century buffets offered “garnishes” of swans carved from melons or gigantic ice sculptures. Today, decadent buffets like Bacchanal at Caesars Palace stage food displays that outdo the precision of any Dutch still life and desserts whose vibrant perfectionism evoke Wayne Thiebauld’s paintings. But is the traditional spectacle that accompanies the buffet merely a craft, or are the elaborate piles of crustaceans at Bacchanal as much a piece of public art as the Damien Hirst shark that glowers over the Unknown Bar at the Palms?
Art depicting food has been present in Southern Nevada likely as long as people have been living here; the local petroglyphs and pictographs depict herds of bighorn sheep, antelope, and important plants. Many of these drawings are 10,000 years old or more.
Left Postcard of the Chuck Wagon Buffet at the Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas (Nev.), 1950s. Billie Mae Polson Photograph Collection. PH-00063. UNLV University Libraries Special Collections & Archives. Right Slide of the Chuckwagon buffet at the El Rancho Vegas, circa 1940s. L. F. Manis Photograph Collection. PH00100. UNLV University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
Across the ocean and eight millennia later, still lifes, painted on the interior walls in homes of excavated Pompeii, date to 50 A.D. They depict delicate peaches, apples, lobsters, and game birds hanging to age. The Renaissance saw a shift from art depicting food to making art from food. A recipe from the first printed cookbook, De honesta voluptate et valetudine from 1475, explained how to serve a roast peacock, in its feathers, that breathed fire. Because of advancements in sugar refining and processing— largely in Persia and the Islamic Empire—sweet creations adorned the tables of the ultra-wealthy. According to Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500 �1800, a 2020 exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, Renaissance tables featured “glittering displays of sweetmeats, preserves, ornamental marzipans, sugar sculptures, and culinary
jokes such as edible chess sets and playing cards.” In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, enormous sugar sculptures known as “subtleties” adorned banquet tables, shaped to evoke Roman ruins, romantic grottos, and other notable architecture from across the world. These historical subtleties were referenced by Kara Walker in her 2014 sculpture A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby installed in the slated-for-demolition Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In her piece, a 35-feet-tall and 75-feet-long sphinx with the face of a Black woman was encrusted in sugar; the piece was surrounded by melting “sugar baby” effigies of Black children. Walker reminded the viewer that the sugar both on Renaissance tables, and for most of the history of American sugar, was produced by the enslaved.
The multi-course banquets of the past were served à la française, meaning while there were multiple courses, each course contained both savory and sweet, everything from soup to confections, laid out symmetrically on the banquet tables on elaborate platters surrounded by subtleties. Perhaps the closest thing we have in modern America to this experience is the Las Vegas casino buffet. While “buffet” is a French term for a sideboard where food is placed before serving, the American idea of a buffet probably came from the Swedish smörgåsbord. The mode of dining began in the 16th century as a brännvinsbord, a table of finger foods that welcomed guests to a feast. In the early 1700s, it became a trendy meal on its own, a table spread with hot and cold dishes like herring, lox, cold cuts, and sweets, that required multiple trips to enjoy the many offerings. The smorgasbord first saw international attention at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but hit America at the 1939 World’s
