Buffet

Yesterday, I spent a very happy day because our colleage classmates got together. Most of us didn't see each other for almost 3 years since we graduated. We all were excited. We talked about job, further study, life, and everything. We shared happiness, sadness, success, failure with each other. At last we took part a buffet. When I had buffet, an idea came to me that what's the origin of buffet? After the party, I sought many references, and got the following answer:

A buffet is a meal-serving system where patrons serve themselves. It's a popular method of feeding large numbers of people with minimal staff. The term originally referred to the sideboard where the food was served, but eventually became applied to the form. The buffet became popular in the English-speaking world in the second half of the nineteenth century. The 16th-century French term buffet applied both to the display itself and to the furniture on which it was mounted, often draped with rich textiles, but more often as the century advanced an elaborately carved cupboard surmounted by tiers of shelves. In England, such a buffet was called a court cupboard.