Aria buffet

A few weekends ago we were wandering around City Center and the new Cosmopolitan and got a little hungry. Most of the fancy restaurants aren’t open for lunch; we didn’t want a $18 sandwich, so we thought we’d try out the Aria buffet. We aren’t too big on buffets, don’t eat enough to make all of that feasting worthwhile, but since there were several with us we thought it would be worth a try, after all, City Center is a fancy place, the food should be good.

City Center and Aria from the fountain courtyard.


The Sunday Brunch was running, cost around $26 per person, with a few bucks extra if you wanted champagne. It looked OK, and was one of the few buffets that actually had windows. Most of the time the buffets are located in the middle of a casino, under hotel towers with slots on one or two sides. A place to stock up and get back to gambling. But this one looked OK.


We were initially seated in the middle, but then pushed for a place by the windows. We ended up next to the dessert line.


My favorite part of the meal.


Food surrounded the main area on three sides, with cold crab legs and oysters over on one side. The ladies immediately headed for that, while I tried the meats and salads.


Unfortunately it was the Sunday Brunch, which meant a combination of breakfast and lunch, so a lot of space was taken up by breakfast stuff, such as eggs and meats and eggs Benedict and sweet rolls and cereals. I tried some eggs and bacon, but mostly hit the carved roast beef and ham. Not many salads were out, but that left more room for dessert.
Overall I wasn’t too impressed. Perhaps because it was the breakfast combination, but the variety wasn’t that great, and what was out there was not very impressively good. I want to be wowed by the food, and I wasn’t. Have to get back to the Rio and see if it’s still as good as I remember. My suggestion: skip the Aria Buffet. We had tried the Bellagio one a while back, and that was small, expensive, and not very good either. So if you are in the middle of the Strip and want a lot of food, I hear the Paris buffet is pretty good.

But there were windows. It was cold, but the big hot tub was just outside our table. No tiny bikinis, just a bunch of younger guys getting drunk, so the ladies had something to look at.