Buffet dining has a fresh place in the national food pages. An October 25 Wall Street Journal feature by Adam Chandler surveys renewed interest in abundance dining, moving from Southern comfort-food spreads to Korean BBQ, hot pot and Brazilian steakhouses.
The report gives a broad audience a look at a world whose regulars already know there is a considerable difference between returning for another helping of collards and waiting for the next pass of picanha. Both have their constituencies. Some of us maintain membership in several.
One figure receiving attention is Yelp’s reported 252% increase in searches for “all you can eat buffet near me.” The company’s 2026 Food & Drink Trends report supplies the important timing: its analysis compared September 2024 through August 2025 with the preceding twelve months.
That makes the number an earlier signal of growing search interest behind the new coverage. Yelp also recorded increases of 244% for AYCE dim sum, 93% for “sushi bars all you can eat,” and 591% for the combined search phrase “all you can eat Korean BBQ and hot pot.”
A country buffet with a very specific memory
A recent opening gives the conversation a particularly tangible example. Good Time Country Buffet opened September 12 at 166 First Avenue in New York’s East Village, charging $26.99 per adult at launch. Its owners, David JoonWoo Yun, Yong Min Kim and Steve JaeWoo Choi, also operate Kisa and C as in Charlie.
In a Resy interview before opening, Yun connected the restaurant to the Southern buffets the partners knew growing up around Atlanta. He also described the role Korean immigrants played in operating those local country buffets, and his own first job as a buffet cashier.
The food follows that memory closely: fried chicken, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, corn, a salad bar and banana pudding. Carpet and familiar-looking wallpaper are part of the setting, too. It is an unusually deliberate vote of confidence in the country buffet, right down to the dining-room floor.
The current interest also reaches formats with a different rhythm. KPOT’s first restaurant opened in New Jersey in 2018, according to the company. Restaurant Business’s 2026 Top 500 profile lists 132 U.S. restaurants for 2025, illustrating how far the Korean BBQ-and-hot-pot operation had already expanded.
Fogo de Chão offers another established version of abundance, pairing its Market Table of salads, charcuterie and fruit with the continuous tableside meat service of the Full Churrasco Experience. These restaurants share an invitation to keep exploring, while giving diners quite different things to explore.
The new national attention catches that variety. An independent Southern buffet can draw on the owners’ childhood routines while a national chain builds dinner around tabletop cooking or passing skewers. For buffet enthusiasts, the interesting part is how much room there is in the conversation for all of them.
