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Hi Venture204916, The Signature Seafood Dinner Buffet at The Buffet at Four Winds New Buffalo is $46 for adults on December 29, 2018. For more details on hours and pricing please visit our website. Have a wonderful day. Beautiful casino. Kept very clean. The lady who was checking IDs was wonderful and very helpful. A lot of 1 cent slots which was great. Only negatives was way to much smoke. Needs to have a much larger non smoking section and smaller smoking section. The buffet was not good. Got $3.00 off but they wanted $16.00 more per person for a plate of. But having a buffet is a strong marketing tool for casinos, Freedman said, as amenities like buffets and spas make a casino more of a 'destination' for visitors. The Four Winds marketing budget.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the all-you-can-eat taco bar at Mi Pueblo Mexican Restaurant in Kalamazoo was a fan favorite.

The Friday-through-Sunday buffet had corn and flour tortillas, homemade hard shells, 10 varieties of meat and an endless assortment of toppings – from salsas and guacamole to cheeses and sour cream.

'We'd have five, six, seven cars just waiting outside (before 11 a.m.),' Co-Owner Javier Vargas said. 'As soon as we'd turn on the open sign, boom, people would rush to the taco bar.'

Mi Pueblo reopened this week, as Michigan relaxed its pandemic prohibition on dine-in seating on Monday, June 8. But the famous taco bar remains sidelined.

Self-serve food and drink stations are still not allowed in Michigan, via Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Executive Order 2020-113. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still warns against buffets, salad bars and drink stations.

But even when they can reopen, Vargas and other restaurant owners wonder if buffets can ever return to normal.

Industry leaders agree buffets need to be reimagined – at least in the short term – to be safer while still providing an all-you-can-eat experience that draws in people. Ideas tossed around include concepts like live video streams of food stations, cafeteria-style setups or requiring gloves when customers touch utensils.

Public health experts say buffets are riskier than regular sit-down restaurants when it comes to the potential spread of COVID-19. Four Michigan public health experts rated buffets at an average of an 8 on a 10-point risk scale, while rating other indoor restaurants at a 6 and outdoor seating as a 4.

'You have communal food sources that can be contaminated with hands that have the virus on them, said Dr. Matthew Sims, Beaumont Health director of infectious disease research.

It's also harder to socially distance from others at a crowded buffet, Sims said.

'Now, if you design it right, where there's a flow in and a flow out – you only go in one direction, you can't get closer than 6 feet to somebody – you reduce that risk,' Sims said. 'But you don't eliminate it.'

Businesses with buffets as their centerpiece are on the front lines of experimentation, searching out a mid-pandemic buffet solution. Among them is Krzysiak’s House Restaurant in Bay City.

The authentic Polish cuisine restaurant relies heavily on its buffet, said front-of-the-house manager Jill Krzysiak, so they are committed to making the model work – albeit in a tweaked form.

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'We were primarily a buffet restaurant,' Krzysiak said. 'We're going to have to have some kind of deal where they tell us what they want and we'll serve it for them – so I just have one point of contact.'

It's a shift from buffet style to cafeteria style. And it's not just happening at locally-owned restaurants.

Golden Corral, one of the largest buffet chain in the U.S., still has more than half of its nearly 500 restaurants closed. In Michigan, franchisees have reopened six of the eight Golden Corrals — but with a different look.

All six have cafeteria-style setups, where an employee fills your plate for you, a company spokesperson said.

Most of the Golden Corrals are utilizing the cafeteria-style buffet, right now. But some outside of Michigan have switched to family-style table service – where large dishes of food are brought to each table, a company spokesperson said. Others, mainly in the south, have reopened buffets, but make guests wear a glove when they touch the serving utensils.

It hasn’t been decided if these changes are temporary or permanent, the spokesperson said.

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At casinos, buffets already lost money

The mandates from Michigan's executive orders don't hold weight on tribal land, which is why many Michigan casinos can and have reopened.

But even the tribal casinos that are reopening for guests are pressing pause on buffets, in addition to a slew of other precautions like requiring masks for guests and staff and installing thermal cameras to check temperatures.

As the buffet troughs sit dormant, casino leaders ponder a reimagined buffet – and if might be financially impractical.

Before the pandemic, FireKeepers Casino Hotel in Battle Creek served at least 10,000 guests at its buffet each week, said Mike McFarlen, vice president of food and beverage at FireKeepers. It wasn’t uncommon to have a three-hour wait to get a table, he said.

Cafeteria-style service is an option, McFarlen said. But he's also brainstorming bigger changes – like live streaming the food stations.

High-resolution cameras would capture the food and the video would be displayed on a rotating basis on 70-inch TVs throughout the buffet. Then, customers would check boxes on a paper, indicating what they wanted, and a server would fill their plate.

“Our whole business is people eat with their eyes. It’s not something you can just get away from,” McFarlen said. “The buffet … it’s a visual and sensory overload. You’ve got a lot of smells and a lot of colors and dimension and variety. We just have to make sure that that isn’t lost when we transition to a no-touch buffet system.”

On their own, buffets were money pits for casinos, even before the pandemic. Frank Freedman, the COO of Four Winds Casinos in southwest Michigan and Indiana, calls buffets “loss leaders.”

But having a buffet is a strong marketing tool for casinos, Freedman said, as amenities like buffets and spas make a casino more of a 'destination' for visitors. The Four Winds marketing budget routinely shoulders the losses from the buffet.

'If you go back to the advent of the buffet in Las Vegas, you'd have your $1.99 steak dinners and $0.99 breakfasts,' Freedman said. 'The reason they were doing that is because it pulls people in and keeps them in.'

The pandemic is only making buffets less financially viable. Not only are more staff required to keep spaces clean, but more employees would be needed for any kind of redesigned buffet experience.

Lowered demand is also an issue, on multiple fronts.

There’s the “all-you-can-seat” dilemma, as eateries are forced to cut capacity inside to allow for more social distancing. Even the tribal casinos are making this change voluntarily.

Reducing the amount of options at a buffet will drive customers away, McFarlen said. Without enough people paying to get in to offset the food costs, buffets will lose more money. Not to mention, food costs are up nationwide because of the pandemic.

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There's also the issue of people not feeling safe enough to eat at a buffet.

'I believe wholeheartedly that people vote with their feet,' Freedman said, noting Four Winds is limiting restaurant capacity to 50%. 'So we'll see what the comfort level is in the restaurants that are open. When we see that there's that good comfort level, we'll expand upon the food offerings.'

Casinos rely on repeat customers. If they don't quell coronavirus concerns, the damage could be long-lasting, Freedman said.

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“Are we able to afford a buffet, from a company standpoint? It’s a great question,' McFarlen said. 'I don’t know.”

The future of buffets won't be dictated by government regulations – but rather, how the public feels about coming back to them, said Justin Winslow, president and CEO of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association.

'I think the jury's still out (on buffets),' Winslow said. 'They are in a more precarious position than other segments of the industry, to be sure.'

There is an alternative to re-engineering buffets and hoping the concept sticks – staying closed for now and hoping a COVID-19 vaccine can bring life back to normal.

That might be the route at Soaring Eagle Casino if the cafeteria-style option isn’t financially sound, said Mike Bean, CEO of Saginaw Chippewa Gaming Enterprises.

'If there's a vaccine and (COVID-19) is essentially beatable, then I think the buffets can reopen in their current form,' Bean said.

The prospects of getting pizza, chicken nuggets, crab legs and some chocolate-dipped strawberries on the same plate look questionable for the near future. But industry leaders are determined to try – whether it means bigger sneeze guards covering the food, switching out tongs after every use or filming your food.

“I don’t think buffets are dead,” McFarlen said. “They’re just going to be a little more challenging than they have in the past.”

COVID-19 PREVENTION TIPS

In addition to washing hands regularly and not touching your face, officials recommend practicing social distancing, assuming anyone may be carrying the virus.

Health officials say you should be staying at least 6 feet away from others and working from home, if possible.

Use disinfecting wipes or disinfecting spray cleaners on frequently-touched surfaces in your home (door handles, faucets, countertops) and carry hand sanitizer with you when you go into places like stores.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has also issued an executive order requiring people to wear face coverings over their mouth and nose while inside enclosed, public spaces.

Additional information is available at Michigan.gov/Coronavirus and CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

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