The food sits and withers. The food runs out. The tongs are inexplicably sticky. So many things can go wrong at a buffet, but sometimes — admit it! — the problem is you. I realized this recently at the Buffet, inside the Wynn casino and hotel in Las Vegas, looking down at a plate of things I didn’t want.

My plate: a tiny blini with a mush of caviar, a piece of slightly overcooked cod on celery purée; thick, bubbled chicharron; a single, now dessicating shrimp dumpling I’d pulled from a steam basket then taken on a 10-minute walk; Boursin mashed potatoes pooling with a little fat; a slice of very pink prime rib; a mini birria taco soaking in a bowl of dark broth; a piece of sauced and grilled pineapple; a seeded cracker.

Who did this?

Distracted by the crowds, the warm lights of the carving station and a large mermaid made of fondant that looked a lot like Jennifer Aniston, I’d slipped into a kind of culinary fugue state. Back at the table, I was confused by my choices, but there was no denying that some part of me, revealed by the emotional mechanisms of this extravagant buffet, had made them. The buffet always shows you who you are.

When the server asked how I was doing, I told her I’d panicked and made a mistake (I think it started with the seeded cracker). That mistake had led to me making another and another, and everything I’d brought back to my seat now seemed peaky and pallid. On top of the embarrassment of not being able to make a decently proportioned, cohesive plate, of not strategizing as I’d been advised to do by several buffet aficionados, of thinking it would be chill to walk through the room and wing it — a totally amateur move! — I was full of regret.

The server told me not to worry (though she also said that she personally stuck to the crab and saw everything else as a distraction). “Try what you want, leave the rest, go back,” she said. “You always get a fresh plate, that’s the fun of the buffet!”

She gestured to the bussers all over the room, and if there was music playing, I couldn’t hear it anymore. This was the real soundtrack of the buffet — the constant and resounding clatter of plates cleared into plastic tubs. It was the sweet racket of endless do overs.

Drinks arrived and I felt the real promise of Las Vegas and its casino buffets: not just one more chance at abundance, but one more chance at being the kind of person who knows what to do with it.

The Las Vegas Sun described the city’s buffets as its “regional cuisine” in 2019, when there were still around 70 on the Strip, but since the MGM Grand closed its last one in May, only about a half dozen remain. Walk through any casino to see why.

On my way to Bacchanal, the particularly deluxe buffet at Caesars Palace where a weeknight dinner starts at $86.99 a person, I passed by several posters advertising its other flashier restaurants, the kind of celebrity-run places that slowly shifted diners away from buffets after Wolfgang Puck opened Spago here in 1992. Within Caesar’s alone, there are restaurants from Bobby Flay, Gordon Ramsay, Nobu Matsuhisa, Guy Savoy and Lisa Vanderpump, along with a food court called Celebrity Food Hall.

Early versions of the buffet predate restaurants, and a luxurious banquet format has been part of court culture and elite dining rooms for centuries — a soft way to show off the particulars of your taste, wealth and power. But the modern American restaurant buffet, the all-you-can-eat buffet as we know it, is usually traced back to El Rancho Vegas, the first resort built on the Strip in 1941.

The Buckaroo Buffet was a marketing strategy, a clever way to keep late-night gamblers playing longer with a spread of sandwiches and other unfussy fare (likely inspired by the Swedish smorgasbord display that had recently made a splash at the 1939 World’s Fair).

As the Strip expanded, so did its buffets. Some scaled up to feed thousands of people in a single day. A single night might archive decades of trends with hundreds of dishes — prime rib and mashed potatoes; beet and goat cheese salads; waffles drizzled with hot honey; wands of mochi doughnuts; trays of ube puddings.

If GLP-1s really are reshaping the national appetite — shrinking it, quieting it — the excesses of the ultimate all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet might seem like an anachronism. But it doesn’t look like the twilight of the buffet when you’re sitting in Bacchanal, feeling the gravity of the 25,000 square-foot dining room shift as a cook refills the crab station with hot Norwegian snow crab legs.

The line gets long then longer, multigenerational and multilingual, joyful and even a bit anxious. If the buffet shows us who we are, maybe this is part of it, too: an awareness that this idea of American abundance is a kind of illusion, that it’s temporary. That someone will get the last crab leg, the rest of us will wait and, eventually, our time will run out. (Casino buffets tend to impose a limit of about an hour and a half, which starts after you put in your first drink order and can create a fizzy sense of urgency.)

At brunch at Wicked Spoon in the Cosmopolitan, the walls were filled with a series of screens that ran definitions and pronunciations of a random collection of foods (osso buco, turducken, harissa, orecchiette), none of which actually seemed on offer.

When I finally gave up and asked for just a small slice of the steak, the cook carved me a piece then made like he was going to give me the entire joint left on the cutting board. “At this price!” he said with a practiced wink. I’m sure he performed that bit all day, but it did make me laugh. Everybody was trying to make the most of the all-you-can-eat meal, but every body has its limits.

By now, I was seeing patterns. The more impressive the display, the less structurally sound, which meant shrimp were always tumbling from the tops of shrimp mountains. And it was impossible for staff to keep displays, counters and shared utensils absolutely pristine against the constant flow of people. I found little dishes untouched and abandoned along the lines in ways that suggested someone had stopped right there, not too long ago, and made a difficult decision.

Some tables operated beautifully as units, with each diner in charge of bringing back something different to share. An entire plate of lemons, another four of crab legs, ramekins of melted butter. So many tables were focused entirely on seafood, then moved on together to the carved meat and a couple of sides.

A tween at the table next to me one night delighted in bringing back things she’d never had before and rating them for her family, which was entertaining them — octopus, whelks, shrimp with the heads on, a cut of meat she could no longer identify but thought might be lamb.

This reminded me how much I loved hotel buffets as a child — the magic of wandering with my plate and making important decisions away from my parents, the thrill of seeing something new and being able to try it, or not, then watching everyone come back. Examining their plates, it felt like I could see right into their souls.

Go for the most expensive foods first. Avoid bread and pasta entirely. Make sure to put in a drink order before you get up from the table, every time. Everyone has a strategy so particular to their concerns that following someone else’s might not always work for you. In the end, the challenge and the reward of the buffet are exactly the same: In a limited time, with endless distractions, you must figure out what you really want.

A torched-to-order s’more? At the Buffet, the s’more was built as an open-faced tartine with a small marshmallow, and as a result, both the ratio and temperatures were off. The crème brûlée was set in a metallic fluted cup that recalled an empty espresso pod, but it was smooth, not overly sweet, not overcooked, with the sugar caramelized in a very thin layer. Still, I wasn’t interested in having another — by now I was dangerously close to full — and I was unmoved by the ice cream display or the waves of tiny layered cakes and cookies.

I wandered past a cute off-brand cartoon mouse made of fondant, dressed in stars and stripes, waving the American flag. This was the crepe station. Immediately, I wanted one with lemon juice and sugar inside, my favorite special breakfast when I was growing up. (If the buffet shows you who you are, then I guess I’m still 9 years old.)

It wasn’t an option on the menu board, full of much more elaborate items, but when I asked, the cook nodded like it was no big deal and didn’t miss a beat, already spreading batter onto the hot pan. “Honey,” she asked, “Is that all?”

Tejal Rao, our chief critic based in Los Angeles, writes starred reviews of restaurants nationwide. Ligaya Mishan, our chief critic based in New York City, writes starred reviews of restaurants in New York and beyond. Briefer starred reviews of New York restaurants are written by our contributing critics Mahira Rivers and Ryan Sutton, and first appear weekly in the Where to Eat newsletter (subscribe here).