Food & Wine Luxury Hotels Travel Wellness & Spas

Luxury travel tip – go slow on buffets

Corner of Shangri-La Tokyo's lunch buffet

Corner of Shangri-La Tokyo’s lunch buffet

Don’t get carried away, urges the gal. It is all too tempting at most buffets to gorge a lot of the lot and end up feeling bloated and unhappy with yourself.

Luxury hotels of the calibre of Shangri-La Tokyo make it much easier by only putting out small portions, all of them delectable. it also helps, of course, to have views of surrounding Marunouchi from the 28th floor window, and what you cannot see from this image is the exquisite André Fu interiors of Piacare, which so suitably means ‘pleasure’.

I think of some of the world’s most enticing lunch buffets. The list includes Hotel de Russie, Rome, especially if the weather allows you to eat outside looking up at the near-vertical Giardino Segreto, created by Cardinal Caffarelli Borghese, 1576-1633. Also on the list is the staggeringly-expensive lunch buffet at Costa Smeralda‘s Hotel Cala di Volpe, where you pay an extra eight euros for coffee. Much more reasonably priced, and lots of fun, is the elegant Arabesque in Park Hyatt Dubai, where you are served by lovely people wearing loose white pyjamas.

But oh, my luxury travel trip was supposed to be about food, not gardens, price or servers. Back to Shangri-La Tokyo, and if you can follow an antipasti buffet with cod with an artichoke, you are near heaven.