Miami restaurants may be reopening soon, but are buffets gone forever?
The buffet line is closed.
Roxana Nicula had to keep reminding her longtime customers of that when they started calling last week, after they learned Coral Gables’ popular POC American Fusion, a pan-Asian buffet, had decided to reopen as takeout and delivery.
The buffet line, where customers could serve themselves heaping portions of king crab legs, plates of oysters and a rainbow of sushi rolls, may be a thing of the past.
“It will take time for people to adjust,” said Nicula, the 10-year-old restaurant’s longtime general manager. “It’s a different concept now. We had to switch it up.”
The coronavirus could very well mean the end of buffets.
Garden Fresh Restaurants, the parent company of the national buffet franchise Sweet Tomatoes and Southern California’s Souplantation, will close all 97 restaurants and fire its 4,400 employees, it told the San Diego Union-Tribune Thursday.
And even as Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said Friday he’s aiming to reopen restaurants May 18, buffets and other self-service stations have been explicitly prohibited in the first phase of reopening, according to the latest guidelines the Miami Herald reviewed. Dining out will look vastly different, with masked diners and tables set six feet apart.
That may be a hiccup for restaurants which only had weekend brunches.
But it poses an existential crisis for restaurants whose entire model is based on customers serving themselves.
“We need to figure it out,” Nicula said.
For 10 years, Ginza Japanese Buffet has been a staple in North Miami Beach, at 16153 Biscayne Blvd., with its polished dark wood counter of hot, fresh dishes encircling a separate dining room.
But only this week, after nearly two months, have they planned to reopen — as takeout and delivery. They’ll take their first orders Saturday.
“We all have families to feed so we had to come up with something,” manager Jonathan Chen said.
Partners have met virtually more than 20 times in the past two months to discuss how to pivot, Chen said. They’ve started discussing how to retrain their staff to cook and serve first to-go and then how they might operate as a traditional restaurant.
Buffets work on one-price and volume, so Chen said Ginza is considering a model where they would offer one price for several dishes. For now, they’ve signed up for all the delivery apps and are offering “walk through, like a drive through” outside their restaurant.
The changes have been wholesale at POC, which stands for Ports of Call.
Owners had to create whole new menus based on dishes they could sell in personal or family-style portions. They retrained their chefs to cook in smaller batches. Though the restaurant had never sold through delivery apps, it now has signed up for five. The new plans were posted on social media.
POC, at 2121 Ponce de Leon Blvd., is preparing to open as a traditional restaurant when guidelines are final.
Some buffets are having a harder time making the switch. Calls to Shinju Japanese Buffet near South Miami go to recorded message, saying they are temporarily closed due to the coronavirus.
“Everybody’s health is important to us,” the message says. “We will reopen soon.”
Several buffet owners said they imagine a scenario where eventually waiters take orders, scoop the ready-made food at serving stations and serve patrons. But Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisories say the nature of the coronavirus’ spread through respiratory droplets means that day is a long way off.
But whereas Sweet Tomatoes folded, Nicula said small mom-and-pop buffet restaurants can’t think that way.
“You need to put your heart into it and try harder,” Nicula said. “It’s not just about you. There’s a lot of people counting on you. “It’ll be hard, but nothing is impossible.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 2:49 PM.
