The film is a surreal black comedy portrayed as a crime thriller, set in Paris where contemporary urban life has alienated and dehumanized the city dwellers.

The film begins at La Défense station (RER),[1][2] with Alphonse Tram (Gérard Depardieu), a dreamy loner, starts chatting to an accountant who is travelling home very late.

The accountant, a man of orthodox social outlook and standing is disturbed by and fearful of this rambling loner, more so when Tram attempts to give him his bloodstained knife (in order to reduce the chances of him "doing something silly...").

[4] After having won an Oscar for best foreign film in 1977 for Préparez vos mouchoirs, Blier declined all the resulting offers from the US, but did use his success to aid the financing of Buffet froid "Without that statuette, the project would perhaps have been a non-starter".

The scene where Alphonse meets a man at the Défense station and finds him a few moments later in a passageway with a knife in his stomach, was initially filmed with actor Jacques Rispal, but the director felt it simply didn't work; he needed "un monstre de talent" such as a Louis Jouvet.

[9] It has been described as a "Rigorously absurd contemporary film noir which presents every character, incident and situation known to the genre, but none of the customary explanations, motivations or consequences",[10] and as a "Black comedy about solitude and the dehumanization of the modern world".