Elaborate 7 to 10 course meals are served, often starting with cold platters then followed by hot dishes such as seasoned lobster, seafood hot pot, and other Vietnamese and Chinese banquet dishes, often ending with dessert or a fruit platter.

A great meal opener and worthy partner for the good bread is the cold antipasto platter for two for $16.95.

She didn't earn much and dinner was usually a bowl of soup and a cold platter at the small restaurant next door to the Goldener Adler.

Other splendid starters are the vegetable Napoleon and the cold antipasto platter, an assembly of meats, cheeses, grilled asparagus and roasted red and yellow peppers.

A cold antipasto platter of prosciutto rolls, salami slices, cheese, roasted red peppers, grilled eggplant, zucchini and summer squash slices, and four huge sun-dried tomatoes made a mundane, if Rabelaisian, appetizer.

And more sophisticated refrigerated dispensing units are enabling operators to go beyond basic sandwiches to offer cold platters and other fresh entrees at ever higher prices.

In his rooms by ten, he summoned a cold platter and a pint of beer and wrote an optimistic, almost boastful letter to Newton.

The cafeteria offers much simpler fare, a variety of packaged salads, sandwiches and cold platters, like the grilled chicken on a brioche ($5.50), which was not bad at all.

The cold antipasto platter, an assortment of Italian meats and cheeses, including buffalo mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes, was attractively arranged on a blaze of radicchio.

Lunch was a cold platter of Easter ham, smoked the old-fashioned way over juniper and hard wood fires.