Rumor: The Buffet at Bellagio to Close for Food Hall

By Scott Roeben, on August 19 2024
4 min read 12 comments
Las Vegas Las Vegas Restaurants

A longtime fixture on the Las Vegas Strip, The Buffet at Bellagio, is rumored to be closing.

The buffet will be replaced by a (wait for it) food hall, as has been the law in Las Vegas since the pandemic.

Casino buffets are famous for being money-losers, so it’s no surprise The Buffet at Bellagio will close. No official announcement about the closure has been made yet, but give it a minute. (Note: MGM says the buffet will NOT close, see below for an update.)

The word “buffet” comes from the Old French “bufet,” meaning “stool.” 1) We are not making this up. 2) There’s a chance this is the funniest thing in the world.

According to our friend Corey Levitan, who also writes for Casino.org, at least 10 of the Strip’s 18 buffets have closed permanently. We are not a math person, but we can confirm it’s a metric hell-ton.

Closed buffets include the ones at Aria, Mirage (the entire resort closed), Paris, Treasure Island, Harrah’s, Horseshoe (previously Bally’s, remember the Sterling Brunch?), M Resort, Planet Hollywood, Mandalay Bay, The Strat and Flamingo, among others.

Which is a shame, because about three of those were actually good.

Casinos were looking for an excuse to get rid of buffets, beloved but expensive loss leaders (Caesars Entertainment famously said its buffets in Las Vegas lost an average of $3 million a year each), for years before COVID, then the pandemic provided the perfect cover.

Food courts, sometimes called “food halls,” are the new Las Vegas buffets. Oh, Miracle Mile Shops calls its under-construction food court, Miracle Eats, a “food collective.” No, really. We can’t convince them to stop.

We’re sure Bellagio, operated by MGM Resorts, will curate a fine collection of “accessible” food concepts for its new food court.

We also trust the hours of operation at the food court will be normal, as opposed to the half-assed hours for the buffet. On Saturday and Sunday, the buffet is open 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., but Monday through Friday, hours are 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. No dinner at a buffet? That was a pretty big red flag Bellagio’s buffet’s days were numbered.

If you could just not ask how we got a photo inside the Bellagio buffet after midnight when it closes at 8:00 p.m., that’d be great.

If you’re a buffet person, there are still some reasonably good buffets in Las Vegas.

Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace is the undisputed champ, but it’s not cheap (you get what you pay for). Also very good is the A.Y.C.E. (all you can eat) Buffet at Palms. It’s prices just jumped up recently.

There was a rumor the Wicked Spoon Buffet (at Cosmo) was closing, but MGM Resorts reached out to put the kibosh on that one. It’s pretty clear now our tipster got wind of the impending Bellagio buffet closure and mistook it for Wicked Spoon, as both resorts are under the MGM Resorts umbrella now.

Other buffets: Luxor, Wynn, Excalibur, Westgate, South Point, Main Street, MGM Grand and Rampart in Summerlin.

We sort of did the list that way just to make our public relations friends at Wynn Las Vegas squirm about being wedged between Luxor and Excalibur.

We reached out to MGM Resorts about the Bellagio buffet news, but haven’t heard back yet.

A little housekeeping you don’t care about, but should.

The tip about the closure of the Bellagio buffet was submitted to us via Twitter direct message at 10:11 p.m., August 18, 2024. We immediately headed to Bellagio for photos of the buffet, which we somehow have never visited or photographed in more than 11 years of blogging. Our friend Las Vegas Locally Tweeted the item at 11:59 p.m. on August 18, 2024. We Tweeted it at 12:30 a.m., August 19, 2024. So, he technically scooped us, which is really annoying. He, however, did not include the fact a food court will replace the buffet, and he also doesn’t have a blog (Twitter can’t really be monetized), so technically, we still win. Fine, it’s a tie. Yes, this matters. It matters because we try to give credit where it’s due, unlike the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which gets its information from Twitter but never acknowledges virtually all its stories are stolen from social media. The Las Vegas Review-Journal believes a social media post isn’t legitimate media, so no attribution to the original source of a story is required. They’re wrong. They also sometimes claim they got a story from somewhere other than social media. In most cases, that’s a blatant and obvious lie. They use social media as a free news feed, confirming stories and presenting them as original reporting. It’s horseshit and they should be embarrassed. In this case, we legitimately did not get this story from Twitter, we got it from a source who also shared the information with Las Vegas Locally. We’re still giving a hat tip to Las Vegas Locally because he was the first to share it on Twitter. The whole situation serves as a reminder that ethics matter, professional courtesy isn’t dead and also the Las Vegas Review-Journal sucks. We all deserve better. It’s the “paper of record.” Yes, in quotation marks, but still.

A meme is worth a thousand words.

Anyway, the Bellagio buffet is closing and will be replaced by a food court. Timeline unknown.

Buffets are sort of a holdover from an era when Las Vegas was trying to be “everything to everyone.” It was also a time when gambling revenue subsidized just about everything at a resort. Shows, restaurants, the whole nine. At one time, gambling revenue even made it possible for guests to park for free. Crazy but true.

Update (8/19/24): We heard back from MGM Resorts and the company says The Buffet at Bellagio will not close. It is odd employees of both Bellagio and Cosmopolitan are telling guests these buffets will close, but MGM Resorts has no reason to misrepresent their plans (unless it’s to retain employees). Here’s what an MGM Resorts rep said via e-mail: “Bellagio Buffet will not close. As of May, dinner service was added on Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 8 p.m., along with daily brunch programming, as the venue continues to be a popular culinary destination for guests and visitors.” You are still free to ridicule the Las Vegas Review-Journal. They were giddy this rumor was shot down. We share what we hear. If you want to be right most of the time, don’t do anything interesting.