Sunday morning at the hotel breakfast. On weekends, they keep the buffet open for an extra 30 minutes. A silent offering to those who engage in revelry and still want scrambled eggs. Some hotel breakfasts have a manic quality. Others are quietquiet, serious. Diners read the daily news from those oily grey and black pamphlets.
Here, we see freewill calculated in our choice between self-serve espresso and filter coffee held at 200 degrees.
Do you take a spoonful of the yogurt? Tong up the tater tots? Do you press a slice of bread into the toaster? These thing are high powered, the culinary equivalent of those rapid UV finger cabins for manicures. Do you know enough to hover, to jump the bread before it burns?
After a few years of being a true hotel novice, I’ve learned to approach breakfast sensibly. There’s usually an underrated bowl of mixed greens, you can make a nice little salad with corn kernels and if you’re lucky, avocado. The tiny waffles? Fair weather friends. To be strategic at a hotel breakfast, look past the screaming novelty of Nutella in a gravy boat. You must regard the food as fuel.
The first time we learned about carbs and calories in school, the teacher used that word, fuel. Imagine your breakfast as the fuel to start your day. Calories are quick fuel, carbs last a little longer. Your body likes protein and fat is the hardest fuel for your cells to break down. Everything you eat becomes energy. This idea—that my bowl of cheerios was nothing but a certain amount of energy bars, that food was simply a means to an end? I found it deeply depressing.
We didn’t make different flavors of gasoline for cars, we weren’t putting artificial colors into our AA or AAA batteries. The T.V. remote didn’t really care if I gave it the flashy Duracell or store brand.
For me, food was sacred. Give us this day, our daily BREAD. Or in my case, our daily Family Size! bag of Chex Mix.
The whole entire day led up to dinner. The food didn’t have to be special, or even good. I’d lose my mind over a hot plastic tray filled with mashed potatoes, a la Lean Cuisine. Consuming filled and engaged my body. Halfway through my meal, I’d reach a certain melancholy—the realization that dinner was almost over. Now what.
For my family, food was not so much fuel as an experimental art medium. In college, my mother famously lived off Advil and TAB (think Coca-Cola but more caffeine). Fresh to LA and all out of money, my dad subsisted on oranges plucked from the generous trees in West Hollywood.
When I came around, they decided to raise me healthy. I drank goat milk. I was kept away from sugar. This admirable lifestyle lasted for two years. Then I swung the pendulum hard, developed an apple juice addition and rotted my first set of teeth.
As things got more complicated on the family front, we discarded any nutrition strategy. The kitchen was a confusing place, with the contents of our cupboards and refrigerator shelves sending wildly mixed signals.
We had whey protein powder, canisters of green life force mix, Yerba Mate loose leaf tea in bulk bags. Vitamins and tinctures, too many to name. Open the icebox and you’d find I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, margarine that seemed to be scientifically color matched with the Yellow Brick Road. For some reason, butter was the enemy, but hydrogenated oils were not. We were trying.
The infamous protein fuel took the form of rotisserie chickens, stacked atop several paper boxes from the Whole Foods hot bar. I loved their salad bar, loaded up on shredded cheese, cherry tomatoes and and and…until it gave me food poisoning. Never could touch that chopped romaine without shivering. Probably didn’t help that my dad and I took to calling anything wilted or grey or moldy Salad Bar.
All of that fridge stuff was fine. The freezer was my true weakness. Within lay the Sarah Lee Cheesecake Bites. Four perfect cubic inches of cold creamy dairy, covered in hard chocolate. Each delightful bite was individually wrapped in a stunning gold foil, upping the luxury factor by at least 10 percentage points. We were blessed to live during a time where you didn’t have to buy a WHOLE cheesecake. You could get 10 bites in a box. Coated in chocolate or white chocolate, sprinkled, even, with bits of nuts. This was the type of innovation that made the early 2000s special.
Cheesecake bites served many purposes. Junk Food but also…A Treat…and Actual Fuel. Every night, I’d present my mother with 2 or 3 bites as her dinner. At this point in her illness, she was on a special combo of pills that rallied her metabolism to a super human speed. She could eat an entire pecan pie in 1.5 days, or a bulk aisle bag of jelly beans, or endless Honey Bunches of Oats, without gaining a pound. These were the wonder years, and I did my best to keep pace.
Unfortunately, I was not chemically supported to live that life von dutch cult classic but I still pop. The only thing popping were the seams on my leggings, which is a very hard thing to do. I was ingesting too much fuel, without any real form of output. Moving my body was so odd, it felt like controlling a puppet with shared pain receptors. And the cheesecake bites were always there for me. I started slipping my hand into the freezer first thing in the morning. My parents were fast asleep, only the cat knew about my secret errand and she didn’t care. I was the one responsible for my mother’s dinner. In this household, I was in charge of the cheesecake bites. Of course, I learned to skim some off the top! Chaos has its perks.
Now at hotel breakfast, I am a grown up. I’m still tempted by the mini croissants, the baclava, the soft crepes folded into perfect triangles. But there’s something less magnetic about the treats, a platonic offering without any risk. Because how fun is a sugary blast without the furtive glances? The reckless abandon? The sneaky strategy of stuffing the gold wrappers back into the box in the freezer? Ensuring no one will catch them piling up in the trash??
I still get my thrills. Now I like to call it foraging.
Here’s how you do it.
Go to the hotel breakfast, try to blend in
Select a pack of yogurt, a piece of stone fruit, maybe even a sturdy pastry (something that can be wrapped in a napkin)
Walk to the table, slow but not sluggish
Drink the coffee, have actual breakfast
Before taking your last bites, fold the bonus food into a napkin
And drop it into your bag—this also works with a big coat, deep pockets.
When we went to Marseille in March, I lived off my foraged items. Kids sized boxes of cereal, apricot yogurt in glass jars, even jasmine green tea that they only offered at breakfast.
Food is not purely physical fuel. It is less about the calories, the carbs, the coveted protein. There is so much emotion behind every bite.
There’s pleasure in getting away with it. Getting to taste. To be, for that moment, fully in your body. Getting to eat, to be so lucky.
It’s all sacred. Our daily bread—or cheesecake! Our chance to fuel the spirit and its mortal house, all in one bite.
Loved this :)
The greek yogurt Clio bars are mine!