I recently received an invitation that made me happy for about 10 seconds until I noticed the words guaranteed to instil dread in my heart: “A buffet lunch will be served.” I felt a sense of outrage, too, because surely, since Covid, buffets have been consigned to the food waste bin of history.
Something weird happens to me when I am confronted with a trestle table groaning with UFOs (unidentified food offerings). Rather than being rational and deciding on a sensible food combination, I abandon all culinary common sense and behave like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep.
On this one occasion, my competitive instinct will rise to the fore. I will race to be first in the queue, elbows out, then move at speed in a misplaced need to beat my fellow diners to all the “good stuff”.
This is ridiculous, because – newsflash – this is a buffet. We are talking about plates of curling, hard-to-identify cured meats, deep-bowl salads hiding problematic ingredients, such as raw onions and pumpkin seeds, dressings that appear benign until you realise, too late, that your entire plate is swimming in a lake of pungent blue-cheese slime. To compound the problem, buffet lighting is invariably poor; mistakes will be made.
I still shudder at the memory of attending a conference where I was keen to impress my fellow attenders. A group of us went up to the buffet together. When I returned to the table, the woman next to me glanced at my plate.
“What’s that?” she asked, gesturing at a lovely golden wedge of quiche perched on the edge of my pyramid of sausage rolls, garlic bread and beetroot slaw. “I didn’t notice that one.”
Feeling smug, I took a big bite and nearly choked. It wasn’t quiche – it was lemon tart. Too mortified to confess my error, I had to force it down between mouthfuls of vinegar-doused garlic bread.
“Anyone for dessert?” asked my table-mate. For the first and only time at a buffet, I was forced to utter the immortal words: “I’ve had quite enough to eat, thanks.”
•Anita Chaudhuri is a freelance journalist and photographer
