All inclusives: what’s your buffet strategy?

[Juicesausagecake]

Help! I used to be good at this!

Am currently on an all-inclusive, and may have lost my mojo. I blame the need to feed the kids with healthy food (cucumber, tomato, melon etc. on a little plastic plate), and am not rinsing managing the buffet as effectively as I would have in times of yore.

How do you approach it?

This is such a great thread. I've always assumed I'd hate AI but I'm loving the food strategy , right up my street

@FlibbertyGibbitt this 100%!

Anyone else excited about the lack of meal planning involved in an AI. Most days my kids ask me what's for tea before they've even had breakfast. Ugh. Tedious.

This is how you do it:

This thread is ace! Making me very nostalgic for AI buffets

I've never had an all inclusive holiday, starting to think I might have been missing out.
Might take teens next year so we have all experienced it once.

Shot of vodka over a few scoops of lime sorbet. Bloody lovely! 😋

Gotta admit I'm not keen on buffets of any kind at the moment- have seen too many people picking stuff up with their bare hands and putting things back-

BUT if I have to then my strategy is to look what actually makes a meal - so a soup bowl of salad/smoked salmon etc as a stater, then something like lasagna or moussaka or a stir fry or something cooked fresh in front of you and find an appropriate veg or rice or noodles to go with it- plus a maximum of 2 of those tiny desert things

I find when I piled my plate with bits of everything I simply felt sick afterwards for hours.

Stay away from the carbs, I have too many of those at home. And you can fit more in without them

alternate who has to supervise kids and who gets free reign and as many returns as they want. Or one person supervise kids but they’re allowed to stay on after the kids drag you to the mini disco and have a lovely 30 minutes buffet in peace

We found ourselves in an all inclusive resort for one day and night when our flight home was delayed last week. It was crazy, the volume and variety of food available. Sprouts for breakfast anyone?!

It was a bit of a cheap and cheerful place we were bussed off to, very big and horribly busy, so probably not a good first taste of the possibilities of the AI buffet. I didn't take anything just to try it, mainly because nothing looked very tempting, so I did eat bread and boring things. I didn't like seeing entire plates of food left untouched on tables, but I can see how it happens with fickle children and temptation to take loads with no money wasted. The desserts were the best bit and I'm not a fan of sweet things generally, they just seemed the safest bet ie no nasty sprouty/meaty surprises.

My top tip is to use a teapot and fill it with expresso so you don't have to keep getting up for more coffee (breakfast obviously)

Use a soup bowl for pasta.

Oh and pay up for the better wine.

Good tip there, the teapot of coffee.

Teapot of coffee is genius!

Breakfast - glass of cava. All the carbs - pain au chocolate, croissants, lots of sliced melon and some hot chocolate.

Lunch and dinner - I tend to do a full sweep and try everything that looks good the first day or two, then get fed up and eat more simply towards the end of the week, ending with plain-ish meat, cheese and salad by the end.

I don't seem to like many puddings that they have in the hotels I've been to. Which at least saves a few calories - for cocktails.

My top tip is to learn to balance, (and load) extra plates on your wrist like a waitress in a busy diner.

i have got it absolutely down pat, loading 2 plates simultaneously with an air of a dutiful and caring wife getting their DH a plateful.

then sit down and scoff the lot. Rinse and repeat.

Helps also that I can also carry several full pint glasses at a time if need be . I can really rock that ‘frazzled mum being the family waitress’ look.

Absolute top tip is only go 5* adults only. We learnt that pretty early on.

The only AI holiday I've ever been on was to Kenya about 30 years ago.

OMG the breakfasts... you have never seen so much tropical fruit in your life. They also did a very good line in what I would describe as posh 'country house' breakfast food - kedgeree and all.

The dinners were - erm - interesting. Buffalo stew, swordfish, some very strange-looking veg.

Use British economics, the olives and lamb may be cheaper there but your getting your British pounds worth not your Greek euros

Don't worry about economies of scale, that's how they make their money, not how you get your money's worth. No need to use too much maths, just avoid the carbs or you'll be too full for much else.

Ah! Cocktails @DrMadelineMaxwell What do you go for?

What’s the best cocktail? 🍹

The recce is essential, DD has a habit of not going all the way to the end of the hot food section where you often find the more interesting stuff.

My strategy is not overfilling my plate, in the evening I might have a small plate of salads as a starter, then I'll do a first sweep of the hot food, taking only a little bit of any one thing and then I have room to go back and get a bit more of anything that was particularly nice.

Unfortunately at most AI hotels the desserts aren't the best.

@MrsMontyD this is what I mean about multiple colours of essentially the same dessert!! Cheese is the way forward.

My standard breakfast is an omelette with beans and maybe a sausage on the side. Coffee and juice. Maybe a pastry afterwards. Mmmm I could eat that right now...

Not done AI for many years, it was good when the kids were little though, but we used to get bored of it by the end of our stay. My strategy now would be putting all that I wanted on my plate in one visit, so I didn’t have to get up again due to mobility issues. We usually S/C now and eat out in restaurants with a menu, far the easier option in my circumstances. Enjoy OP.

Have just got back from a week in an AI hotel. We booked just B&B and the hotel said we could add the dinner option for ‘only another €100 a night.’ We tried it the first night, and after establishing that we were basically paying €25 for DS to have a plate of spaghetti and an ice cream, we decided to eat out after that. I much prefer a dinner in a little restaurant overlooking a harbour/jungle/ski slope than sitting in some air conditioned windowless cavern piling as much beige food onto my plate as possible. When I say beige food - that’s the breakfasts and dinner main courses. The desserts are of course every colour of the rainbow yet weirdly all completely devoid of flavour.

Also, the work trip I did to the Dominican Republic where everyone who had the buffet lunch in our hotel as their last meal before our flight home is strongly etched on my memory, as we had to have the aircraft deep cleaned once we’d landed, and the captain’s wife had run out of clean changes of clothing. I’ve never looked at a seafood buffet the same way again!

Also, I noticed a new thing this last holiday - families going round the breakfast buffet and taking a massive plate of fruit, a massive plate of fry up stuff, a massive plate of meat and cheese, and a massive plate of bread, and then setting it all out in the middle of their table like some sort of mini-buffet they took from the main buffet. Much of it was left, but in the meantime left the plates on the main buffet short for everyone else because a few families has swiped the lot. Really wasteful. Before anyone says this is the normal way to do a breakfast buffet, I’ve stayed in hotels for on average 8 days a month for the last 24 years and this is the first time I’ve seen this sort of food hoarding.

And those who’ve had disappointing buffets in Barbados - yes, it’s strange, but of all the places I go with work this place has the most sparse but expensive breakfast buffets. I had a better breakfast in a cheap motorway hotel in France recently than I did in the Hilton in Barbados!