This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The Way of Piedmont links the Alps to the Atlantic by way of Narbonne, for almost a thousand years a nexus for pilgrims en route to Compostella. Narbonne’s stupendous 14th century cathedral remains a draw for the devout, but it has some stiff competition in Les Grands Buffets, an all-you-can eat restaurant in a retail park on the outskirts of the town.
The Buffets has been a cult in France for some time, but recently made it onto the Anglo radar, notably via an effusive but slightly baffled article in the New Yorker.
Americans have a morally antagonistic attitude to French food; they know it’s sophisticated but suspect it of sin. Moreover, capitalism isn’t meant to work like this. “Only the best for everyone” is a troubling proposition; mass doesn’t generally vibe with class.
Forget your prejudices: Les Grands Buffets is a phenomenon to which only superlatives need apply. Founded by Narbonne native Louis Privat in 1989, the 200 employees of the 1,200-square-metre Buffets serve 400,000 covers annually, drawing over €24 million in revenue.
Daily, the kitchens produce more than 300 dishes drawn rigorously from Auguste Escoffier’s interpretation of haute cuisine, including 50 varieties of patisserie and a world-record-holding choice of cheeses. Reservations are needed up to a year in advance, making it the Hexagon’s most exclusive, as well as most successful restaurant.
The statistics themselves are impressive, the food even more so. Producing anything remotely edible at such scale is extraordinary, to cook to the level of the toughest tables in France for under €60 per head is positively implausible.
In France, the Buffets has produced scholarly articles and anthropology doctorates, with one scholar describing it as “The post-modern resurgence of Pantagruelism”, yet for all that “buffet” derives from the Italian buffera, to gorge, it’s very much not about orgiastic excess.
Privat, a man whose ambition has been described as “pharaonic”, emphasises that the Buffets is about preserving and passing on an endangered tradition — the restaurant is training a new generation of specialist rotisseurs or maitres de fromage, whilst diners have the opportunity to taste their gastronomic inheritance. Which sounds tremendously worthy, but could it really be that good?
Deirdre had made our reservation last April, for a table in mid-December. She’d planned her route around the stations with the help of online Buffets afficionados who plot and dispute optimal self-service strategy. I remained sceptical, not particularly inclined to schlep all that way to write up a stinker, but she’s a determined woman.
At the entrance, it was difficult to distinguish the punters for the bowling alley or the multiplex cinema from the Buffets crowd; youngish (the average diner age is 40) and casually dressed, but once inside, a twinkling corridor leads one past a waggish weighing machine into Narnia.
The Buffets has four dining rooms, in which wine (at virtually cost price), is served at the tables. We were seated in the “Louis XIV” section, a green and gold striped affair which made as decent a job of transporting one to the Sun King’s picnic pavilion as could reasonably be expected a stone’s throw from Lidl.
Navigating the choices could induce a state of panicked anhedonia, but a huge foldout map is presented alongside the wine list, which naturally offers the widest choice in France. Deirdre chose a ridiculously reasonable Pouilly-Fumé, then shot off like the White Rabbit.
Her choices included “Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow”, a paté en croute containing a Byzantine mosaic of chicken, duck, hare, wild boar, pork, quail and sweetbreads, scallops on the shell, roast turbot and canard a la presse, duck in a sauce of blood and deliquescing bone marrow, served to the Star Wars theme tune from a silver contraption which once belonged to the Tour d’Argent.
I selected six oysters, two herby, crunchy frogs’ legs, then quenelles de brochet, the fluffy pillows of pike dumpling so seldom seen now since they are fiendishly difficult to make.
A foie gras fix by way of tournedos Rossini, the tiniest trou normand of Calvados and apple sorbet and a slice of gateau Saint-Honoré. Everything was exactly as it should have been, prepared and presented to Taillevent standards.
It was, in that horribly overused word, incredible. Not just for the quality, but for the sheer, exuberant, baroque joyousness of the whole experience, the choreographed theatricality of the white-toqued chefs, the towering cascade of lobster tails, the enchanted sense of being out of space and time in a land of Cockaigne to which everyone’s invited.
Somehow, Privat and his brigade have created a magic which communicates to their guests. What was fascinating about the Buffets experience was not only the refinement of the food but the grace of the diners — hundreds of people graciously repeating “After you”, no greedy stampede, but a generous, communal atmosphere of shared delight.
Privat has shaken off all the snobbery and elitism which has dogged French cookery for decades, to create a genuine gastro-democracy. If the Buffets were a small South American state, the CIA would be instigating a coup.
Deirdre texted me next morning from the red-eye back to Stansted: “Seatbelt fastened: was it all a dream?” Hard to know, but the trip was totally worth the trip.
