A hotel breakfast room that is empty at seven and impassable at eight is not badly managed. It is sized for an average that never actually occurs, and the peaks come from the building's own schedule.
Seating is deliberately smaller than the house
No hotel seats every guest at once. Restaurants are built for a fraction of the occupied rooms, because a room that seats everyone would stand empty most of the day.
The assumption is that arrivals spread across the service period, which holds on an ordinary night and fails whenever guests share a schedule.
Space is also expensive on the ground floor, where it competes with meeting rooms and retail that generate revenue for more hours.
Departure times cluster
Business guests leave for the same meeting hour, tour groups leave for a coach time, and families leave for the same park opening.
Each of those produces a wave that arrives at the buffet inside a fifteen-minute window and departs just as sharply.
The waves also stack. A conference and a tour group in the same house create a peak far above what either would produce alone.
The buffet is a throughput device
Buffet service exists because it decouples the kitchen from the arrival rate. Food is produced in advance and the guest does the serving.
Its bottleneck is the line rather than the kitchen, which is why properties split the layout into stations so hot items, pastries and coffee do not queue behind each other.
Where breakfast is cooked to order, the bottleneck moves to the pass, and the visible symptom changes from a queue at the food to a wait at the table.
Clearing tables is the real constraint
At peak, the limit is rarely food. It is the rate at which vacated tables are cleared, reset and reassigned.
Each turn takes a fixed amount of staff time, and staffing was set the night before against a forecast rather than against the actual morning.
This is why a room can look full while several tables sit uncleared, and why a host holding guests at the door is usually managing the reset queue.
Using the pattern
The quiet windows are the first half hour of service and the last, and the difference in wait between the peak and either edge is substantial.
Where a property runs two seatings or takes breakfast reservations, that is a direct signal the room is undersized for the house and should be booked.
Groups traveling with a coach departure are the wave, which is a good reason to eat before the posted assembly time rather than at it.