Colm O'Regan: That hotel buffet breakfast, magical, and 'included'
Breakfast buffet at the hotel or restaurant
The hotel buffet breakfast: Itâs often on a list of Important Things That Were Lost During the Pandemic. Iâm here to say: Donât despair. I understand why people mourn it. The buffet was that magical of things. Free, and unlimited. Technically a hotel breakfast isnât free. But the whole capitalist system is based on us perceiving âincludedâ as free. Like how Facebook is âfreeâ but itâs included in the cost to us of electing Trump.
But the hotel buffet was definitely unlimited. And it is there that we made an absolute show of ourselves. First, a brief virtuous offering at the altar of the fruit and natural yoghurt before then slavering and rolling around in sausages. Then there are the second and third trips up and the final abasement â wrapping up 15 little Danish pastries in a hanky or in our jumper.
All this has changed. The looting of the buffet has stopped. Now, someone comes over to take our order and forces us to be honest with ourselves. âDo I really want that that Fruit Thing?â. The waiter takes our order but also our confession. âFeckit gimme the Full Irishâ.
Breakfast is the most intimate of meals, the most personal. The one that most accurately reflects how we spent the night. If youâre groaning and asking for offal, then at some stage the night before, Someone Said Lets Do Shots. If youâre sucking grapes from a bunch and wafting around in linens, then you want people to think you were riding. So it makes sense that a trained professional is there to help you through the morning.
There are other benefits. The toast arrives to you properly toasted. Not like from the mediaeval torture machine of the toast conveyor belt, where slices were either charcoal, unscathed or just went missing.
There isnât the awkward shuffling past the bassinets. The rage you feel when someone takes the last fried spud. The slime of spilled beans. And above all, all the germs we caught off ladles. No, this is free-form village life that I can do without.
The whole hotel morning has had manners put on it. You need a time slot for breakfast and a timeslot for the pool. You might think this is terrible. The lovely languid morning harnessed and structured. Yeah? Well if youâve small children, youâve long since lost the languid gene. If theyâre not on the trip, all you care about is extracting as much out of the time as possible. And anyway it takes away the awful nagging feeling that youâve missed the hotel breakfast. Or you arrived down for the food-lamp dried end of it with the coprolite sausages. This wont happen. Youâve set an alarm. And while you might think eating eight rashers at the buffet is amazing, in reality your body canât process the salt and your mind canât process that much animal misery.
Itâs more labour intensive sure. But thatâs what we need to be spending our money on now. Other peopleâs jobs. If a hotel needs to hire another few people for breakfast, then Iâm happy to pay for that bit of free but included. But be respectful to the staff who are bringing your breakfast. Itâs a stressful operation to get that many unwanted fried tomatoes out to a hungry hotel. They need your support.
Two words of caution though. Scrambled eggs. Donât expect them to be nice because someone brought them out to you. Theyâre in exactly in the same place they always were. Quivering on warm metal. Unhappy. But just out of sight. Most scrambled eggs are not nice. The best things in life are not free or included.
