The Forgotten History Of McDonald's Breakfast Buffet

If you ever found yourself at a McDonald's in the '90s or early 2000s, bleary-eyed and hungry on a Sunday morning, there's a chance — however small — you caught a glimpse of something strange. Not the usual line of customers waiting for Egg McMuffins. We're talking about a breakfast buffet. The kind of thing that sounds made up until someone else remembers it, too.

But finding proof is another story. There's no commercial, no official photo op, nothing in the company's press archives. Google it and you'll mostly find Reddit threads full of people trying to confirm their memories weren't some McMuffin-fueled hallucination. Still, the accounts that exist are oddly consistent — eggs, pancakes, sausage, those crispy hash browns. A few even swear they saw it as late as 2002.

Still, in a world where McDonald's could be bringing back all-day breakfast, the idea of a buffet doesn't seem so far-fetched. Maybe it's time to revisit what we thought we knew about mornings at McDonald's.

While McDonald's keeps quiet, Reddit has become the unofficial archive of the breakfast buffet's existence. And judging by the posts, it wasn't a one-location fluke. One user recalls hitting a McDonald's in Virginia around 2002, just as the buffet was closing — an eight-foot-long bar stocked with the usual McDonald's breakfast menu items: Sausage patties, scrambled eggs, pancakes, and English muffins. Another remembered visiting a location in Central Missouri – trays filled with everything from the big breakfast lineup, plus crispy cubed potatoes that never made it to the regular menu. On another Reddit thread, a former employee recollects working at a corporate-owned location in the mid-'90s, where the buffet quietly ran some mornings as part of a menu testing program.

The setup, reportedly dubbed "Mac's Choice," popped up at a surprising number of locations in the '90s — mainly during the weekends. One post paints the scene of workers behind a table, dishing out your picks onto a flimsy tray — more like a diner line than a self-serve spread. There were even whispers of bottomless hotcake refills, as long as you returned the original lid. For families on a budget, it was the post-church move. It wasn't glamorous, but it was cheap, and there was a lot of it.

Still, it's striking how many of these memories end with hesitation, with one user admitting they weren't even sure it was real — just something they might've dreamed – relieved that someone else remembered. That's what happens when something vanishes without a trace. Even now, McDonald's breakfast ends between 10:30 and 11 a.m. — and no buffet is part of that equation.