Breakfast is probably, in well over 90% of hotel stays, the last meal someone eats before checking out. It might even be the only meal eaten on-site. It is therefore all the more important that breakfast stands out. What is its differentiator?
At CHEWTON GLEN HAMPSHIRE, the hot part of the buffet, above, in the Wine Room. There’s something rather enticingly empathetic about taking a portion of scrambled Flambard’s eggs observed by a bottle of Haut-Brion that you nearly chose for dinner last night.
What a splendid buffet it is. The main display includes Greek yoghurt and pots from Hot Jam Lady, and fresh fruit galore, and juiciest smoked salmon and cold cuts, all meticulously labelled in Italic. Make your own toast or get your teeth into just-baked sourdough half-baguettes. Look out at the croquet lawn.
At PARK HYATT SYDNEY look out across the harbour at the Opera House. Immediately in front of you exercisers pound the boardwalk. At SIX SENSES SHAHARUT look out across the endless pink Negev Desert (the buffet is displayed on upturned boats and other wooden paraphernalia). At BELMOND LA MAROMA in Riviera Maya, a granny in embroidered local dress topped by a black hairnet sits cross-legged on a floor cushion making and cooking breakfast flatbreads.
Cusco’s MONASTERIO, one of Belmond’s two palaces in town, has Gregorian chants, recorded, in the subterranean breakfast chamber. St Petersburg’s GRAND HOTEL EUROPE, or whatever it is called now, always had a live harpist on the stage overlooking a gargantuan buffet in the grand hall. Differentiators do make a difference.
