Long before fast food became increasingly designed around drive-through lanes and meals eaten somewhere else, Wendy's tried something almost unimaginable today: a full all-you-can-eat buffet. The SuperBar was inexpensive, surprisingly ambitious, remarkably popular and, for a while, a very real part of American fast-food life.

Across Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, London and parts of France, dessert has escaped the final corner of the buffet and become the reason to show up. From a 16-location Japanese sweets chain to strawberry seasons, durian weekends and bottomless cake, unlimited dessert is a real global dining format.

A new kind of AYCE restaurant is spreading across America, replacing steam tables with individual hot pots, tabletop grills, Wagyu beef and increasingly extravagant ingredients. Here is how shabu-shabu and yakiniku work, what Wagyu actually means, and how all-you-can-eat dining found a luxury tier.

Western Steer was once a major Southeastern family-steakhouse chain, with big purpose-built restaurants, inexpensive steaks and an increasingly enormous all-you-can-eat buffet. At its height it approached 200 locations. Then difficult buffet economics, a changing restaurant market and a search for a new identity slowly sent the brand toward extinction.

Mandarin Restaurant began as a small Brampton Chinese restaurant and grew into a 29-location buffet institution. Behind its 150-foot buffet lines are warm towels, elaborate dining rooms, two-year management training, seasonal programming and even a corporate microbiology lab - evidence of a chain that takes buffet hospitality unusually seriously.

The buffet was built on value. At the top of the market, that logic flips: $200 seafood halls, palace-hotel brunches and unlimited Champagne turn abundance into luxury. These five recurring buffets are among the most expensive Buffet Authority could identify, and none treats AYCE as a bargain proposition.