Yelp Buffet Searches Up 252%: NYC Operators Bet Big on All-You-Can-Eat

Yelp searches for all-you-can-eat buffets jumped 252% from 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal — and New York operators are building units around that appetite. Grocery and restaurant prices keep climbing. Diners want volume for a known price. That's the whole trade.

The economics aren't subtle. A fixed $27 check at a buffet flattens food-cost risk: the operator controls portioning, plate size and the mix of cheap starches versus proteins on the line. When grocery inflation makes home cooking feel less like a bargain, an all-you-can-eat ticket reads as insurance.

Five concepts, mapped by The Journal, show how wide the format now stretches — well past the Golden Corral tier that still dominates the buffet landscape.

Who's selling unlimited right now?

• Good Time Country Buffet opened in September in Manhattan, serving Salisbury steak, collard greens, dinner rolls and peach cobbler for $26.99 unlimited. Co-founder David Yun told the Journal the goal was "something affordable" that evokes "the humble buffet that really brings you back to that memory."
• Tashkent Supermarket, in the West Village since last year, runs an Uzbek hot bar with plov, stuffed cabbage, manti dumplings and pastries — priced by weight at $10.99 to $11.99 per pound rather than flat-fee. Food bloggers have amplified its Central Asian hot bar, The Guardian reported.
• KPot Korean BBQ & Hot Pot charges $36.99 in New York and $31.99 in Oklahoma City, with a $5 upcharge to combine tabletop barbecue and hot broth. It operates in nearly 40 states and ranks among the largest Korean restaurant chains in the country.
• Der Dutchman, an Amish- and Mennonite-inspired heartland operator, runs all-you-can-eat dinners around $20 for adults and breakfast near $14 — pancakes, biscuits, tomato gravy, fried cornmeal mush. One diner told the Journal it has "a good rocking-chair-on-a-big-front-porch type of vibe."
• Fogo de Chão splits lunch into a $20 unlimited Market Table of soups, salads, breads and Brazilian specialties, or the Full Churrasco Experience at roughly $30 more with fire-roasted meats carved tableside. Prices and availability vary by location.

What does this change for operators?

The Fogo number is the one worth watching. The Brazilian steakhouse chain has nearly doubled its U.S. footprint to roughly 115 locations over the last four years, per the Journal, and it's a hit with Gen Z. That's a fast-casual-adjacent growth curve executed at full-service scale — with a $50-ish check at the top of the lunch format. Unlimited doesn't have to mean cheap. It means predictable.

KPot's pricing tells a similar story from the other end. A $36.99 all-you-can-eat ticket with a $5 dual-format add-on is menu engineering by the dollar: the upsell is small enough to feel painless, and tabletop cooking shifts labor from the kitchen to the guest.

Tashkent's pay-by-the-pound model is the quiet outlier. Per-pound pricing at $10.99–$11.99 sidesteps the buffet's biggest risk — the heavy eater — entirely, while a supermarket setting keeps overhead on the grocery side of the ledger.

The pullback risk is real too. Buffets live and die on throughput and waste discipline; a $20 dinner only clears margin if plate turns stay high and the line is engineered around cost-stable items. Der Dutchman's country staples — meatloaf, baked ham, creamed chicken — are exactly that playbook.

With search demand up 252% and formats ranging from supermarket hot bars to $50 churrasco, the buffet category now spans at least three price tiers — and the operators growing fastest, like Fogo, are the ones pricing predictability at a premium.