Hotel breakfasts: the ultimate anthropological study

Just give me a hotel breakfast in some foreign climes at 08:18, and I’ll tell you everything that you need to know about civilisation. Nowhere is humankind’s nature more evident than with a moderate hangover, over some stale-looking pastries and a mug of mud-water coffee.

What makes it such a leveller is that it’s meant to be universal. It’s a simple concept: you wake up, shower, go and eat some grub, then get on with your trip. Yet the execution varies wildly wherever you go. It’s not just breakfast, it’s a cultural document, it tells us about the country we are visiting, the quality of the hotel we’re staying at, and the level of self-control you have when unlimited bacon and never-ending Coco Pops are on offer.

The breakfast buffet is one of the few remaining spaces in modern life where total strangers are stripped of their context, with their class, job, nationality and wealth, all hidden from view. Within seconds of those doors opening, you have the first guests, the couple storming the buffet like a Normandy beach in 1944. You have the business traveller, glued to their phone as they try to optimise their time between checking emails and consuming their one boiled egg and black coffee.

There’s the hungover tourist, wearing sunnies and a hoodie, trying their best to force a sausage down without decorating the table in multicolour vomit. Then there’s the family of four, feasting like lions on the Serengeti, trying to maximise the value of what they’ve eaten, piling pancakes higher and higher. Finally, you have the plates themselves.

You have my choice, the full English, it’s beige and greasy, but it’s ours. Fried meat with fried vegetables, fried bread and a fried egg, doused in HP, the remnants of an empire and its aggressive hunt for spices around the colonies. There’s the German choice of cold meat, flavourless cheese and rye bread, a particularly odd bit of self-harm, presumably as a form of self-punishment for all that ghastly stuff of the past.

The rest of the continent is split between the patisserie perfection of the Parisians and the yoghurt and muesli of their neighbours to the East. Switzerland, a country so neutral that they’ve abandoned taste for rabbit food, while the Americans have their diabetes inducing pancakes, bacon and syrup. The reality is that national identity isn’t about shared history or culture, it’s about what you stuff down your gob before sunrise. This might all appear Western-centric, and you’re right, because most of the hotels I’ve visited, regardless of the continent, serve some form of this.

It’s also because I’m too scared to poke fun at the breakfasts of other countries, as well as admit the sad truth that the full English pales in comparison to breakfast in Asia, because rice or noodles for breakfast is actually incredible. What really makes the hotel breakfast buffet such a fertile ground for anthropological study isn’t just the food, but it’s everything around it.

The theatre of taking those first, bold steps up to those hot plates and making your choices, watching the moral quandary in somebody’s head play out, as you can see the cogs in their mind working, when they decide whether to take the last croissant. You have the hushed conversations, the occasional bickering, and those hunched over their free map of the local city centre, poring over it like some grand military plan.

Then there’s the other tell within this whole ritual, such as what the hotel thinks of you and the rest of the guests. They’re signalling their disdain for you via instant coffee sachets, limp sausages and plastic-wrapped brioche buns, but then an actual chef cooking things tells you not just about the hotel’s price point, but also their relationship with good service.

You can also chart the aspirations and hopes of the country’s entire tourist industry, but it depends on how little or much of their native cuisine is available and just how far they’re willing to pander to tourists’ desire for a taste of home. The reality is that hotel breakfasts are mostly pretty bad. They’ll do in a pinch, but you can get far better and enjoy a far more authentic experience of local food outside. The breakfast might technically be ‘free’, but it’s a test in logistics, with the lowest possible cost for the hotel.

While you should absolutely get out early and enjoy where you’re visiting, there’s still a place for the hotel breakfast at least once per trip. The coffee tastes deeper and richer outside, and the food more traditional and cultured, but in that breakfast room, you can be treated to a real natural spectacle, observing the other guests like David Attenborough in the jungle, and besides, you’ve already paid for it, really, so you may as well fill yourself up.

Sam Farley