A Life in Chafing Dishes

Marvin “Marv” Holcombe started his career running the freight elevator at the Holiday Inn on Route 22 in Springfield, New Jersey, in the autumn of 1978. He was nineteen. The hotel had a Christmas brunch buffet that ran for eleven hours.

By the third hour, he understood something the kitchen didn't. The shrimp came out cold at 9:15. By 10:30 it was room temperature and curling. By noon it was structurally compromised. He started telling guests on the elevator: get to the brunch room before 9:30. The shrimp won't last.

Forty-seven years later, Marv has worked, observed, or been adjacent to buffets at: 14 hotels (most of them with carpeting that has seen things); 9 cruise ships (3 Carnival, 4 Royal Caribbean, 2 he won't name on legal advice); 31 weddings (eight of them his cousin Linda's); a Reno casino with a 24-hour sushi bar; and a Golden Corral in Tulsa during a regional manager visit.

He developed a theory of plate geometry. He timed restock intervals with a Casio. He learned the food cost percentage of every line item on a hotel breakfast — the $14 a person ticket, he'll tell you, runs roughly $2.40 in actual cost, and the spread is in the breads. Always the breads.

“The buffet,” Marv says, “is the everyman's stadium. You either know the geometry or you fill up on dinner rolls.”

Now retired from elevator work — though he still rides them, professionally, for what he calls “reconnaissance” — Marv consults via this website. He does not own a smartphone. The plans you receive are reproduced faithfully from his dictation. He charges $1.99 because that's what shrimp cost in 1981 and he refuses to adjust for inflation on principle.

— as told to the editors, on a fire-escape landing, with the elevator humming behind us.