How Expensive Can a Buffet Get?

General Tso never tasted General Tso’s chicken. The dish was created in Taiwan, sweetened and crisped in New York, then carried into America’s 1990s Chinese-buffet boom. Its strange journey also explains why that sticky, tangy, crunchy chicken remains one of the buffet line’s safest bets.

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.