MGM Just Killed the Buffet. Your F&B Sacred Cow Is Next.
The MGM Grand Buffet lasted 33 years before the math finally caught up with it. If you're still running a dining concept because "guests expect it," you might want to check whether those guests are actually paying for it.
I worked with a GM once who kept a breakfast buffet running for three years after the numbers said to kill it. Every monthly P&L review, same story... food cost north of 40%, labor hours that didn't pencil, waste that would make you sick if you thought about it too long. Every month he'd say the same thing: "But the guests love it." Finally the owner pulled the trigger. Guess what happened to guest satisfaction scores? Nothing. They didn't move. Not down, not up. The thing he was terrified of losing wasn't driving what he thought it was driving.
That's MGM right now, except at a scale that makes my breakfast buffet story look like a rounding error. The MGM Grand Buffet... open since 1993, charging $32 to $43 a head... closes May 31st. Le Cirque at Bellagio, nearly 28 years of white tablecloths, goes dark in August. International Smoke, Julian Serrano Tapas, Della's Kitchen, Avenue Café... all shuttered in the last 18 months. This isn't a restaurant having a bad quarter. This is a company systematically dismantling dining concepts that no longer earn their square footage. And here's what's interesting: MGM isn't replacing most of them with anything yet. The buffet space has "no immediate plans." They're not in a hurry. They'd rather have dead square footage than bleeding square footage. That tells you how bad the economics were.
The buffet model was built for a casino floor where gambling was 70% of revenue and cheap food was the bait that kept people pulling handles. Gambling is now roughly 25% of casino revenue on the Strip. The economics inverted and nobody wanted to say it out loud because the buffet was an icon. Icons are expensive. The labor alone on a buffet operation that size... cooks, runners, cleaning, the sheer volume of prep... is staggering. Food waste at buffet scale is a line item that would give most independent operators chest pains. And the guest who's paying $38 for a buffet lunch in 2026 is not the guest who's going to drop $500 at the tables afterward. That guest is eating at a celebrity chef concept and spending $300 on dinner before they ever sit down at blackjack. MGM figured this out. The Netflix Bites replacement for Avenue Café tells you exactly where they think the margin lives... experiential, branded, Instagram-worthy, higher check average, lower waste.
Here's what nobody's connecting. MGM is on track with a $200 million EBITDA enhancement plan, with over $150 million expected from revenue actions and cost savings. They bought back $494 million in stock in Q1 2025 alone, then authorized another $2 billion in repurchases. That's a company telling Wall Street: "We know where the fat is, and we're cutting it." The buffet isn't a cultural loss to MGM's finance team. It's a line on a spreadsheet that finally got zeroed out. The Joël Robuchon stays open. CARBONE Riviera is coming to Bellagio. The strategy is crystal clear... kill the volume-driven, low-margin, high-waste concepts and replace them with high-margin, high-experience dining that reinforces the rate premium on the rooms above.
And if you think this is just a Vegas story, you're not paying attention. Every full-service hotel in America has at least one F&B concept running on nostalgia instead of numbers. The restaurant that "defines the property." The lounge that "guests expect." The room service menu that loses money on every ticket but nobody wants to be the one who kills it. MGM just gave you permission. The question isn't whether your sacred cow should go. The question is whether you have the guts to do the math first and the honesty to act on what it tells you.
If you're a GM or F&B director at a full-service property, pull your outlet-level P&L this week... not the rolled-up food and beverage line, the individual outlet detail. I want you looking at food cost percentage, labor hours per cover, and revenue per available square foot for every concept you're running. Compare that to what the same square footage would generate as a grab-and-go, a branded partnership, or even a leased space. This is what I call the False Profit Filter... some of those outlets look like they're contributing because the allocation model spreads costs around, but when you isolate the true performance, they're underwater and they've been underwater for years. You don't need to kill anything tomorrow. But you need to know the number. Because your owner is going to see this MGM headline and start doing the math themselves, and you want to be the one who already has the answer, not the one scrambling to defend a concept you haven't stress-tested since 2019.