Discussion keeps the world turning.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Feifei, together with Xinyu and Steve Haverly.
Coming up, once upon a time, the buffet in China meant luxury.
The special occasions splurged, and then it vanished, stripped off its glamour and left for dead.
Now is back, especially in shopping malls and at a much cheaper price point.
So what's changed with buffets now?
And are diners still showing up for the same expectations?
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And now let's come back to today's discussion, buffets.
Lately, buffets have been making noticeable comeback in China.
You walk into almost every major shopping mall in China these days, and chances are you will find at least one.
One buffet restaurant with a very long line of customers outside, they offer different food from seafood buffets to all-you-can-eat barbecue to hot pot.
New restaurants keep opening, diners keep filling the tables, and on the surface, it means businesses are booming.
But behind this renewed popularity is a tougher reality because while modern buffet restaurants are opening, many are also closing just as quickly.
So one has a dining format that looks so popular and so easy.
It becomes so difficult to sustain Xingyuan Steve.
Do you know Steve?
Buffet restaurant used to be very popular in China, but somehow it's sort of dead for a few years.
Kind of disappeared.
Canada too.
We used to, my family used to eat at the Ponderosa.
What kind of foods that they offer
It was a buffet and it was my dad's favorite restaurant so we would go there like once a month and he loved it
And then after he turned 65 years old oh that was like life-changing for him not because of the number 65 but because then he got a discount card to the ponderosa
And we started going more and more often.
I'm very familiar with buffet restaurants.
The techniques behind how you stack your salad bars used to be a very trendy topic in China.
People sharing different tips, how to fill in the plate with as many food as possible.
Why would you need to do that?
It's a buffet.
You can just keep going back and going back.
Because when in the prime times of buffet in the past, a lot of restaurants also offering like a small section of buffet services within their restaurant, so that they have like, oh, you can eat salad, or you can eat fries.
And then people are finding ways to stack up all the salads.
So
Because it would run out, I guess.
Yeah, so that's one of the trendy topics, at least when I was, I won't say young, but in my 20s.
And this is the interesting part because same thing happened in China because around...
In 2003, we used to have a very popular buffet brand called Golden Jaguar, Jin Qian Bao.
Wow.
Xin Yu, have you heard about this?
I've heard about it, but I have never tried it.
So it was very expensive
I heard it's very luxury
Yeah yes or got you know sushi lobster sashimi very expensive ice cream and then it costs about 300 400 even 500 yuan per person
You know 20 years ago yeah that's very expensive
Way nicer than the ponderosa
There was no lobster at the Ponderosa.
I think 20 years ago, when people, especially, for example, in Beijing are saying we need to, you know, eat something fancy this weekend, golden jaguar would be one of the options.
So that was kind of the hot place for a long time.
And then it just vanished.
Yeah, it disappeared in the year 2017.
In fact, it wasn't just one location.
Every one of the Golden Jaguar locations just closed.
And that would have been shocking for a lot of people, I think.
And it kind of said something about the buffet industry at that time.
Yeah, exactly.
I think the first time Golden Jaguar started to face this downward trend is because they have a lot of scandals when it comes to food safety.
But that also, I think, paints a bigger picture of what the buffet industry, the buffet restaurants are facing around 2017.
From 2017 to 2020, buffet consumer interest had cratered to just 6.1% of China's catering market.
That is a drop of roughly 10 percentage points from its 2016 peak.
Beijing was closing buffet restaurants every few years.
And it was just a sign of the times.
What used to be kind of the hot luxury thing to do suddenly became very, very low on people's lists of where they wanted to go, when they wanted to eat.
And coming to recent years, very surprisingly, actually, these buffet businesses are coming back because according to this leading Chinese catering business observer,
They suggest the market hit 130 billion yuan in 2024.
That's about 18 billion US dollars and the number is still climbing.
And at that time, they suggest the market will reach over 130 billion yuan in the year of 2025.
And that really, I think, happened.
And even the number is bigger than 130 billion yuan in 2025.
More buffet stores are opening nationwide.
By the May of 2025, there were 66,000 buffet stores opening, operating nationwide.
That's a net increase of over 10,000 in a single year.
So somehow...
People start to fall in love with buffet again.
And that's why we're calling it a recovery.
A comeback.
Yeah, it's a comeback.
So is this...
Niche recovery or the buffet industry is finally coming back but I feel like they're coming back in a different form I mean in the past when you mention buffet it's like there are hundreds of dishes
A great variety of dishes that you can choose.
But nowadays, the buffets are more focused.
Like the very recent example in Shenzhen, the city in Guangdong province in southern China, a new buffet restaurant focused on beef hotpot.
Is about to open.
And in this mall, the shopping mall already has nine buffet restaurants covering everything from seafood, Korean barbecue, to pizza, to vegetarian food.
And also in the city of Jinan in Shandong province, they also have like a five-story shopping mall and is home to 11 buffet restaurants.
Also covering a wide range of cuisines yeah a wide well so the new thing with the buffets is before if you went to a buffet restaurant i'm not sure about china but this is the way it was at the
Ponderosa and many other buffets, is that you might have some Italian food.
You might have some sushi, which is Japanese food.
You might have some Korean food.
So you have lots of different...
Food genres represented there.
Now, though, the styles are changing.
So, Xingu, you just said a hot pot buffet restaurant.
Well, their focus is hot pot.
So it's kind of like a redesigned hybrid idea where you'd have a restaurant that would focus on one item and one item only.
It's just done in a buffet style.
So you have these two concepts put together.
And that seems to be satisfying customers.
Pizza, like there's pizza examples as well.
You go to a pizza buffet and all they really serve is pizza.
All kinds of pizza.
But it's all kinds of pizza.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's never ending.
You can eat whatever you want.
And so that's what I mean.
Yes, it's kind of hybrid model.
You know, the moment I realized buffet is coming back is because I got a request from a daughter a couple of weeks ago.
She said, why haven't we been to Big Pizza?
Do you know Big Pizza?
It's a very famous pizza buffet in China.
I've only heard of it last week, but it's on my list.
So when I was a college student, like 20 years ago, we used to go to Big Pizza.
And it also, like Ponderosa, offers a variety of food other than pizzas.
Even though it's called Big Pizza, you can find different foods in the...
Restaurant at that time and then my daughter said I need to go to big pizza I mean like why do you need to go to big
Was it so special about big pizza she said all my friends been there I haven't been there
I need to be there I was like for the for my love of you we can go to big pizza for one time and one time only
Why one time only, mom?
Because I was so, you know, the big pizza in my mind was from 20 years ago.
It, yes, it offers a good variety of food, but it's kind of boring.
The food is kind of mediocre.
Stop projecting your life disappointments onto your child.
So that's why we went to Big Pizza anyway, and I found it's completely different from what I remembered.
Pizza is the star in that buffet right now, and also the size of the restaurant.
Is much much smaller than i used to remember and i they also offer so many different like um xiao long xia fei flavored pizza sweet pizza with marshmallows durian pizza
Um beijing duck flavored pizza barbecued lamb flavor
You know i think the italians would be not very happy
Yeah the marshmallow and durian might not be found on a rome pizza restaurant i don't know um but it sounds like you're more impressed than you were 20 years ago
Definitely because one thing the price hasn't changed is still about 60 70 yuan for per person exactly the same 20 years ago
The size of the restaurant much much more smaller and I think that happens to a lot of other buffet restaurants as well
It's not as big as like what Golden Jaguar used to offer like I don't know hundreds of
Square kilometers of size of restaurant
It's much smaller it's much more concentrated and maybe that's why it's that the reason this buffet industry is making a recovery is coming back
Yeah um yeah we talked about the pizza
When are you going by the way
I tried, I was so full.
I tried a strawberry and chocolate.
Oh, you went already?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We went already to fulfill her dream.
Yes.
To enjoy some strawberry and chocolate pizza.
What?
Strawberry?
Was she happy with the experience?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She loved it.
That's one example, but it's hot pot buffets that claim the top spot in the market.
29.3% of buffets.
Are now hot pot.
Barbecue is next at 19.6%.
Steak and seafood at 18.5%.
But again, the biggest change is how the restaurants are designed.
The problem in the past with the kind of horizontal bloat that restaurants used to use...
Sorry, what's a horizontal bloat?
So that's how your menu is designed.
So it means that it doesn't mean that you have a lot of different menu items.
It means that you have a lot of different types of cuisine on your menu.
So like I said before, like Italian, Greek, Chinese, whatever, you have all these different types.
And the problem with having that type of menu is
Well, there's a lot, but within the kitchen itself, you need teams that are specialized in different types of cuisine, right?
Not only that, so that those are different skill sets within the kitchen, but then beyond the kitchen, then you've got the logistical side of things.
Because you are now ordering from different suppliers to satisfy the Chinese food menu and also the Italian menu.
So it's just a kind of a nightmare to deal with.
And the opposite of that horizontal bloat is what they call vertical specialization.
And that's where you take one menu item and that's your kind of focus.
And, you know, for example, the hot pot buffets.
And that's what that's the hot that's the hot thing right now.
That's what there be.
That's the new successful model.
Yeah, a lot of hot pot buffets are popping up in pretty much everywhere these days.
Yeah, and I feel like for customers, one of the reasons why they think they want to go to these buffets
I mean, it can be, it offers them a sense of certainty.
Because with a certain amount of money, whether it's 59 yuan or 79 yuan, you know, with that exact amount of money, I can get what kind of hot pot or what kind of barbecue.
Unlike other restaurants, you go in there and you don't know how much I would spend by ordering each different kind of menus and what kind of taste that can offer.
But for these buffets, it's almost like certain.
So you have this certainty that guarantees that the price and the choice.
But that doesn't mean that opening a buffet restaurant now doesn't come without any tensions.
There are still...
A lot of challenges and because if there are more, you know, it seems like we are seeing a lot of buffet restaurants opening everywhere, but also at the same time they're also closing at a very fast pace.
So many, for example, mall-based buffets are falling into the cycle of opening quickly and shutting down just as fast.
And I think there is a retail industry observer saying the average lifespan of a buffet restaurant in a mainstream shopping mall is only 6 to 12 months.
Oh, really?
So it's not that long.
You are seeing a lot of new brands popping up, opening and then closing very fast.
So there are many challenges, I think, when it comes to running a buffet is not as rosy as we are pictured here.
But somehow...
The market number is saying that people are loving buffet and they are expected to reach 148 billion yuan in the year 2026.
That is up 6% from the year 2025.
So we'll keep an eye on the beloved buffet restaurant.
Yeah, I think one of the challenges of these buffet restaurants in the past is the size, the overhead cost, right?
So a lot of these places, if it's in a shopping mall, for example, these are huge spaces.
These are huge restaurants.
And you can just imagine how much the rent would cost, right?
So that's something that you have to cover each and every month.
Also, it's a restaurant that serves so much food and so many different types of food.
Inevitably, you're going to have food waste at the end of the day.
So you add up all of those costs and it's very difficult for a restaurant of that size and that scale to make money consistently.
So the secret now seems to be that less is more.
So that could be the number of people in the kitchen even.
So that's why they're mostly specialized in one type of food.
Yeah, you get these highly skilled chefs that are working with simplified menus and they're using central kitchens and standardized food preparation and they're designing things in a more efficient way.
That's just one example of how the restaurant itself can help to cut down on costs.
You know, that reminds me, around my neighborhood, we have a new hot pot buffet opening very recently, I think a week ago.
Every time we went near that area there was a line of people outside of that hot pot restaurant and sort of a in a conveyor belt hot pot
I don't know, situation going on there, that you pick up your vegetable and food off that belt.
And that's one of the very popular, and I think that can anchor, sort of echo what Steve said about cutting down your cost.
You don't need a lot of people cooking food in the kitchen.
You just need people washing the vegetables, chopping up vegetables, and then put on the plate and put on the belt.
You don't even need waiters that much.
I remember after I moved to Korea in the very beginning, my best friend who I moved to Korea with, Trevor, shout out to him, every night we went to the same buffet restaurant for dinner.
You know what bulgogi is?
Yeah, Korean barbecue.
Korean barbecue meat, and it's really delicious.
And you enjoyed it?
Well, the reason we went there is because we could see it, right?
We lived in a place, this is the year 2000, so there was no English on the menus in anywhere we went.
And we didn't read Korean and we didn't speak Korean, so we didn't know what we were ordering.
So we found this restaurant, this bulgogi restaurant right behind our school.
And we ate there every single day.
And it was $7.
It was a $7 all you can eat Korean barbecue restaurant.
And we ate so much.
And in the beginning, the restaurant owner was so happy to see us.
The two guys.
The two white dudes.
Like, who are these people?
And they welcomed us and they were excited.
And then, like, after six months of us just demolishing their bulgogi stocks every night, we'd show up and they were like, oh, hey.
Not again.
Hey, yeah, go ahead.
Have a seat.
I would put up a sign watch out for this two person two people i haven't eaten bulgogi in like 15 years because i can't
Because i ate it every day for like the first eight months of my time which is amazing
That's fun
