Buffets can be either sideboards (flat-topped furniture with cupboards and drawers for storing crockery, glasses and tablecloths) or dining systems where food is placed in a communal area where diners serve themselves.A buffet is a form of French service that is served in a variety of settings such as hotels, restaurants, and many social events.Cafeterias usually offer all-you-can-eat food for a fixed price,but some restaurants charge prices by weight or number of dishes.A buffet usually has some or most of it hot, so the term cold buffet (see Smörgåsbord) is used to describe a format that lacks hot food.Hot and cold buffets usually include cutlery and utensils, but a finger buffet is a collection of foods that are designed to be small and easily eaten with just your hands, such as cupcakes, slices of pizza, food on cocktail sticks, and more.

An essential feature of all buffet formats is that diners can directly see the food and immediately choose what they want,and usually how much they want to eat.Buffets can efficiently serve large numbers of people at once and are often found in institutional settings, business meetings or large gatherings.

Home entertaining 

Because buffets involve diners serving themselves it used to be considered an informal way of dining, less formal than table service. In recent years, however, buffets have grown in popularity among family dinner hosts, especially in households where limited space complicates individual table service.

As displays of wealth

While possession of gold and silver has always been a measure of a regime's solvency, displaying it in the form of plates and utensils was more of an act of politics and a gesture of conspicuous consumption.The 16th-century French term buffet applied both to the display itself and the furniture on which it was mounted, often covered with rich textiles,but as the century progressed the word described more of an elaborately carved cabinet with many shelf.In England, such a buffet is known as a court cupboard.The extravagant display of plates was probably first revived at the fashionable courts of Burgundy and adopted in France.Baroque silver and gold, influenced by Louis XIV of France, is immortalized in paintings by Alexandre-François Desportes and others, followed by Louis' plates and his silver furniture had to be sent to the mint to pay for the final war of his reign.

In the 18th century, people preferred more subtle displays of wealth.Buffets were revived in England and France towards the end of the century, when new ideas of privacy made small amounts of self-service at breakfast time attractive, even among those who could have had a valet behind every chair.In The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803,Thomas Sheraton proposes a neoclassical design, noting that "the buffet may, in some suitable cases, be restored to modern use, and proves to be an ornament of the modern breakfast room, as a china cabinet/ The pantry's answer to the tea set."