Having been a journalist for 25 years and specialised in hotel business, Maria Pütz-Willems travelled the world for 16 years as a freelance journalist for leading hotel and tourism publications. Always with a certain feeling for trends and ideas and staying in permanent contact with international dialogue partners. In 2005, she launched the online magazine www.hospitaliyInside.com, a bilingual network for international hotel business.
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Breakfast -- A matter of taste
Breakfast is simply a matter of taste. This is especially true for hotels. Sometimes it just melts in your mouth, sometimes it makes your stomach churn. We are not talking about horrendous prices of 25 or 40 Euro for a breakfast buffet in a luxury hotel. This is much more about the small details concerning the word "breakfast culture".
As is generally known, dining is also for the eye, but one hour into the buffet, hotel staff normally have their eyes firmly closed when it comes to the food's presentation. They no longer see lightly wavy sausage, shiny cheese and spilled jam. This is a fact in five star hotels as well as in four and three star houses, as I had the sad honour of realising once again during my summer trip through Germany and Switzerland. Even the strictest hygiene regulations are worthless if employees don't see the necessity of preventing such buffet massacres...
My favourite breakfast types have become the combinations of buffet and waiters. I like getting the "basics" such as bread, juice, müsli and fruits myself, while I enjoy egg dishes as well as cheese and sausage being brought to the table, just like tea or coffee. The main point is to get it fresh, and for this goal, I am naturally willing to wait three minutes longer. The perfect solution is to have service culture as a part of the buffet's philosophy: I am not only talking about the egg-man, who prepares omelettes and fried eggs on request, but primarily the "bread-man" and the "sausage-lady"! Have you ever seen that before? A Romance Hotel in the Engadin region serves up to 15 kinds of bread every day -- from dark to light, from grainy to crispy, from juicy to dry. A gentleman in uniform slices the bread with a sharpened knife and places the slices in a bread basket. Extra service like this one just makes you want to stay forever. Another culinary highlight is the mountain of cold cuts in a private hotel in the Austrian city of Zürs am Arlberg: Just like in a butcher's shop, big chunks of ham are properly stacked on a table and wait for the hotel's friendly employee to explain sorts before carving them with his smooth designer slicer and setting them on your plate the way you like it.
Now that is tasteful service! It could be so easy. And nobody would even ask for the price. Only one hotel out there managed to reach my personal breakfast peak: A four star house in South Tyrol served my boiled egg with a suggested cutting spot in the upper half... What a pleasure for eyes, stomach and soul -- and that's only the morning...
Maria Pütz-Willems
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