GAUDY AND GORGEOUS: THE EPHEMERAL ART OF 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.

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 Fair in New York City. Many foods in American history have become national sensations after their appearance at a World’s Fair, and the Swedish Pavillion’s traditional smorgasbord was no exception.

Buffets arrived in Las Vegas shortly after their World’s Fair debut. The first casino founded on the Strip also had the first buffet. The El Rancho opened its doors in 1941, and launched the “Buckaroo Buffet” in 1946 (the innovation has been attributed to employee Herb McDonald). The all -you-can-eat buffet cost $1. Early casino resorts, like the El Rancho and the Last Frontier, had a Wild West theme, and often called their buffets “chuck wagons,” after the mobile mess halls that followed cowboys on roundups. According to Gourmet’s Gamble, a 1962 guide to Las Vegas with accompanying recipes:

Since the hotels are open 24 hours a day, with gambling going on continuously, all have chuck wagons which serve a delectable spread at midnight. Many of them have buffet fare until the wee hours of the morning … The typical chuck wagon display consists of a waiter dressed in a chef's uniform with a high, white hat, serving from a vast choice of items including lobster in aspic, shrimp, remoulade, Danish ham, fine cheeses, salads, fried chicken, roast beef, curries, stews, all forms of vegetables, potatoes, and dessert. This abundant spread is conveniently located close to the casino, so you can eat and run back to your wagering.

The Flamingo, which opened in 1946, was the first casino to add “a new level of sophistication to the Las Vegas resort experience,” according to historian Geoff Schumacher, author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas. The resort focused on attracting a glamorous clientele from Hollywood. In a 1950s postcard promoting the Flamingo’s “Fantastic ‘Chuck Wagon’ Midnight Buffet,” a tuxedo-wearing man gestures excitedly to the laden table, as if to say “look at all this food!” to his delighted wife. A chef in whites is ready to serve them. But on theme for the Flamingo, the spread consists of only pink and white foods, with garnishes of green: piles of marbled slices of ham, rolls of lunch meat, creamy seafood salads, peeled tomatoes, and crustaceans. In the center, a 2- to 3-foot-high cave made of molded, shaved ice cools piles of shrimp and creamy dip. The cavern is topped by a pink and white effigy of the casino’s namesake.

Several contemporary artists have dabbled in monochromatic meal art: a 1998 photo series by Sophie Calle called The Chromatic Diet documented her daily eating ritual of same-shaded foods. Her pink Saturday meal included ham, strawberry ice cream, and rosé. Brooklyn artist Jen Monroe hosted monochromatic meals in 2015, including a meal of “briny shrimp mousse in Barbie-pink, beet-stained deviled eggs.”1 Either meal would have been at home at the Flamingo chuck wagon.

In the 1960s, buffet displays got even more elaborate. The Sunday Brunch at the Sands invited guests to walk “the ‘Miracle Mile’ of gourmet goodies, hot and cold, endless varieties.” In an advertisement, chefs stand at attention behind a long table filled with silver platters and tureens, and one gigantic swan carved from ice. A buffet at the Desert Inn sports similarly enormous, if harder to identify, ice sculptures. One appears to be two cacti flanking a mesa, the other a smiling, disembodied head. A private party buffet at The Dunes had two-foot-high people made from melons and carved eggplant.

In his 1966 novel The Muses of Ruin, William Pearson wrote of the Vegas buffet: ”We marvel at the Great Pyramids, but they were built over decades; the midnight buffet is built daily.” Pearson’s quote speaks to the ephemeral nature of buffets and the carved ice or produce adornments that accompanied them. Only intended to last for the few hours of an evening’s service, the sculptures will melt and wilt, as will the food. All are ultimately destined for the dump (or for a brief time, the pig farm) before being recreated again the next night.

The same year Pearson commented on the ephemeral Vegas buffet, Yoko Ono placed an apple on a podium. Over time, the apple rotted. The apple could be replaced and the process begun again, but the original piece could not be kept or sold like traditional gallery art. Part of buffet presentation is about the constant recreation of the moment the apple hit the podium. You will never see rot at a buffet; the food whisked away and replaced before it can even look dry. The buffet-goer, as a participant, eats away at the presentation; the hotel pans slowly give up their contents. In the 1990s, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres created deeply sad and resonant sculptures like “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 175-pound pile of wrapped hard candy that gallery visitors were encouraged to eat, one at a time, mimicking AIDS slowly eating away at the physical body of his partner. But buffet food never reaches the point of disappearance. Constantly replenished, we are assured of eternal abundance and immortality.

While food is often presented as a skill or a craft, it’s sometimes laughed at when it dares to cross into art, in large part because of the ephemeral quality that dares not to be commodified. French pastry chef and ice carver Gabriel Paillasson sought to elevate his art by publishing a collection of his work in 1991 under the title Art éphémère. Although Paillasson declared an ice sculpture revival, the elaborate buffet decorations have disappeared from displays in the last twenty years. Perhaps a more educated public is sensitive to waste. A buffet is always wasteful, but the obvious food waste in swans created from melon or a “kale waterfall” (as a friend once described a display at the Green Valley Ranch buffet) is too offensive. While it’s rare to spot an ice sculpture nowadays—although ice luges are making a comeback—today it’s the displays of food, “laid out with reverent artistry,” to borrow a phrase from Pearson’s 1966 novel, that aim to impress.

When the Bacchanal restaurant first opened in the 1960s, diners were allegedly “fed grapes and given massages by beautiful servers,” according to Schumacher. A piece of over-the-top performance art, but the contemporary displays in the Bacchanal Buffet equally invoke indulgence and excess. The current Bacchanal Buffet opened in 2017, cost $17 million to build, and features over 250 food options including an Asian station with Korean and Filipino offerings, and a separate sushi bar. But it’s the display of seafood that is particularly extravagant, and strategically situated so that it transverses the threshold between the casino and inside of the buffet, visible to any passerby. The dining hall’s most desirable food invites you to cross over: whole lobsters, brilliantly red, slump over mountains of crushed ice, their enormous claws—bigger than a human hand—just touching the display glass. Whole fish are in the next case, their surfaces perfectly spotlighted to bring out their liquid silver scales. St. James’ scallops are arranged like jewelry next to a mosaic of conch, snails, and seaweed. Pamela Thomas-Graham’s analysis of Thiebaud’s bakery cases for Dandelion Chandelier gives the arrangement context: “the depiction of food and consumer goods behind shop windows or cases makes them both simultaneously omnipresent and completely out of reach. Tempting but ultimately unsatisfying, (the piece) juxtaposes the ideas of abundance and scarcity.”

Part of the thrill of the buffet is spectating, whether you’re peering over a partition from the outside to catch alluring glimpses of the carving station, or peeking at your dining partner’s plate and judging their selections. Eat Art artist Daniel Spoerri once choreographed a dinner party in which the diners were separated “into two groups placed at opposite ends of a long banquet table,” according to Sleek magazine. “Throughout the evening, he had waiters serve tiny portions of haute cuisine to the first half of the table, while the second half had to help themselves to simple food such as bread and stew. Members of the first group deemed themselves lucky, but throughout the evening they grew increasingly unsatisfied with the small portions that left them hungry and began to long for their opposite's food that, although simple, turned out to be surprisingly delicious.” But at a buffet, the diner can have both the stew and as many tiny servings of haute cuisine as they like. As Chris Rauschnot wrote in the Huffington Post, the scale of Bacchanal allows a diner to “sin efficiently.”

A new buffet hasn’t opened on the Strip since Bacchanal, and even it was a revamp of the space that formerly held Cafe Lago Buffet. The 2020 pandemic expedited the permanent closure of many buffets, but it wasn't the cause of it. Like most massive cultural shifts in America, it’s Millennials that are driving the closure of the classic Vegas buffet. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “Millennials— those born between 1981 and 1996—made up 48% of the visitors in 2022.” Since there are now many places to gamble legally across the country, Millennials come to Vegas to do a “fun thing” and drink while doing it. Vegas moguls that want to target a younger generation have shrunk their casino floors and focused on alcohol sales in places like night clubs and day clubs, shows and concerts, national sporting events, even in art spaces like Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, an installation of a fictional supermarket that exits into a cocktail bar that serves whimsical smoking drinks. Buffets were always a financial loss to casinos, designed to keep gamblers on the floor, so many have been scrapped for food halls, with on-trend venues often recruited from foodie centers across the country—from Nashville’s Hattie B’s Hot Chicken to Portland’s Shalom Ya’ll’s vegan Mediterranean cuisine.

But 10,000 years after those first artists scratched antelope into stone, Southern Nevada artists still depict food. Vegas-based artist Justin Favela often “camps the consumable” by creating massive food sculptures using colorful piñata paper. In 2013, Favela created Celebration, for the Las Vegas City Hall, “a McRib sandwich resting in a piñata manger.” Meow Wolf commissioned depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins in 2021; gluttony is foodlike, a sort of dripping hamburger ball or a glittering meatball shibaried in spaghetti. It’s like a post-perfect buffet, the careful presentation masticated and rolling around in our stomachs.

Favela’s work often showcases beloved but overlooked culinary contributions. As gaudy as it is gorgeous, Favela’s aesthetic feels grounded in what makes Vegas … Vegas. Las Vegas buffets are a beloved, overlooked, gaudy and gorgeous part of Southern Nevada’s public art scene. We can admire a monochromatic pink feast, or a mound of perfect lobster, for free from afar. But if we desire to participate, we must present our bought and paid for dining ticket for entry. Vegas can commodify anything.

Sarah Lohman

Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling book Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Her current book project, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods will be released with W.W. Norton & Co. on October 24, 2023. Lohman is currently based out of Las Vegas, Nevada.