It's time to kill the breakfast buffet

I've changed my mind

There was a time when I thought that the breakfast buffet or the brunch buffet was one of mankind's greatest discoveries. Breakfast is my favourite meal, and the idea of a long, drawn-out breakfast with friends, copious amounts of coffee and good conversation was a delight. Of course I alsoliked the idea of bacon, eggs, French toast, fresh fruit, yoghurt, fresh bread, country fries, cheese, smoothies, and pastries all spread out with which I could stuff my fat face. Yes, I was that portly youngster going back for plate x; x because I'd been up so often that I'd lost count. Going to and from the buffet was the only exercise I was getting that day. That was almost 20 years ago. I then went through a period of constraint where the buffet became a special treat and I limited myself to one or two plates, one starchy and one fruity. It was then that I started to think that the breakfast buffet was a rip-off. I wasn't eating $20 or CHF 45 of food. I was having two eggs with two strips of bacon and a slice of toast or yoguhrt, fruit and a croissant. That's about $6 at the lower end and max CHF 20 on the higher end for breakfast. I’ve therefore changed my mind. We need to kill the buffet!

There's far too much wastage

I’ve had the good fortune or staying at some of the Europe’s leading hotels as well as numerous 3-star hotels, bed and breakfasts and even youth hostels. I’ve only had a handfull of buffets that were impressive, and I don’t want to know the amount of waste they create as the hotel tries to meet the high expectations of its guests. In terms of size the most impressive was in Istanbul. Imagine a hotel for well over a thousand guests, a breakfast hall for 500+ and a breakfast buffet suited to the diets of most cultures: Middle Eastern, European, American and Asian. From rice to fresh honeycomb and from eggs anyway you like them to halal and kosher meatballs. It was all there.

Therein lies one of the biggest problems with buffets (all buffets). For health and hygiene reasons the food cannot be reused. At the end of the buffet period, loaves of bread are thrown away, gallons of fruit salad poured into the compost, heaps of hash browns tossed into the trash. To make the buffet look appealing the trays of food need to look full because no one wants to take the last sausage. Firstly, most of us want to be polite and leave the last of anything for someone else. It makes us feel less gluttonous. And second and more importantly, we don’t like the thought of consuming something that was coughed on, fondled and avoided, which is evidently what has happened to that lone sausage sitting on the silver tray in a small pool of coagulating fat. For this reason, the kitchen in the hotel is always frying up more sausages, and eggs to fill the trays. The bread baskets are stocked with more rolls as bits of hacked at loaves are pulled and tossed away. Food waste is the environmental and socially responsible reason for tossing out the practice of giving people a seemingly unending supply of food.

Quality over quantity

Not convinced? Well, how about the fact that many breakfast buffets are generally full of lower quality products? You have to consider that if the hotel or restaurant is going to throw away so much food, they’re not going to have unlimited organic, artisanal, slow food products on offer. They’re going to buy the cheaper products and maybe dress them up, but you’re much less likely to get good quality products. Furthermore, think back to that lonely sausage. If you get to the buffet late, often you see butchered blocks of cheese, jam smeared everywhere, blobs of yoghurt dripped into bowls of cereal and spilt juice and milk. The saying goes that there is no use crying over split milk, but when I see this hodgepodge of poridge, batter and butter, I want to scream. It’s a disgusting mess, and it gets even worse if the hotel offers stations where you can make your own pancakes and waffles. For quality and hygiene's sake, we need to rethink our hotel and restaurant breakfast experience.

Stop gluttony

The third reason why we need to kill the breakfast buffet is to stop us from overeating. I speak from experience. It’s a terrible thing that western culture suffers from an epidemic of overeating while millions are undernourished. The fact is that when we’re presented with a nearly endless supply of food, we tend to eat more of it than is healthy for us. This is because our brains are still programmed to help us survive in a world of scarcity. Bacon, eggs, sausages, waffles, pancakes, toast, cheese, yoghurt, sliced meats, croissants, etc. - it all looks so good and before you know it you’ve loaded your plate twice or even thrice. If we were not presented with this limitless selection of ever filling food bins, we would not eat so much.

There is also a lack of value presented with a buffet. For a fix price, we think we're all in. We need to make it a good value. With prices averaging CHF 45 in Switzerland, you want to get a good meal's worth of food. To do that we load our plates. Unfortunately, when there is no price on specific items they lose their value. A slice of bread is equal to a slice of ham, though their monetary values are separated by a large factor and the environmental even larger. Our overeating and overwasting are further reasons that the era of the breakfast buffet must come to an end.

Avoid breakfast rage

The last reason to get rid of breakfast buffets is comfort. It’s morning, not everyone is a morning person, but even if like me, you are, there’s nothing that will put you in a bad mood like waiting in line to get your breakfast only to have the person in front of you take the last croissant, or almost trip over some stranger’s child as they weave in and out of the line touching more things than they take. It’s a terrible user experience as you’re asked to ladle yoghurt from a massive tub into a smaller bowl only to drip it all over the place. This gives me breakfast rage. To be asked to portion out sticky jam from a dish onto your plate with a spoon that has fallen in the jam completely and is equally sticky. I want my breakfast served to me at my seat without having to fight my way through a pack of hungry wolves. 

And then there are the parents not watching their children as they try to pour juice from the machine only to cause a small deluge or orange-flavoured sugar water across the table. That's usually followed by a screaming kid, who has burned his hands on the waffle grill followed by the bickering of the parents passing the blame on each other for not watching little Jimmy. Of course they were both checking in on Facebook and now get to update their status with: "Poor Jimmy just burnt his hands. :-("

My blood is boiling just thinking about this situation. Enough is enough. Let's be mature and responsible adults and let ourselves be served proper portions of properly cooked food at breakfast and stop trying to make it in front of everyone. If I wanted to cook, I'd stay at home. 

What's the alternative?

So if we kill the buffet, what’s left? Last December, I had the pleasure of staying at the boutique hotel Ottmanngut Suite & Breakfast in Meran, South Tyrol. The owners, two brothers, have found the solution to the breakfast buffet, and no it’s not the one croissant and a coffee breakfast that I recently heard a German hotel has implemented. No, they cook up a three-course breakfast each morning and each day is a unique experience. They source local ingredients and with each course tell guests a little something about where the products came from, who makes them and why they prepared what they did. This turns breakfast into a pleasurable experience, and you feel at home.

When we asked the owners what inspired them to offer such a breakfast, they said that they had offered a breakfast buffet but found that they were throwing away far too much food. The three-course breakfast has helped them lower food wastage, and the breakfast is so good that even locals make reservations for breakfast or brunch at Ottmanngut. 

Other hotels have also moved away from the buffet and returned to the à la carte model. Having to order products from a menu, even if the breakfast is in the price of your stay, makes you more cognitive of what you’re consuming. The best is also if the menu does have a price (the price non-guests would pay) so that guests are aware of the cost that food has. I noticed this at the Dingle Bay Hotel, in Dingle, Ireland. When you see that your eggs Benedikt would normally cost $10 you think twice about taking one bite and leaving the rest.

In the end, the breakfast buffet is both the result of poor economics and fosters poor economic thinking. Food is a limited resource that should not be given away at an all-you-can-consume price. That leads to over consumption and a mismanagement of resources. When it comes to breakfast, less is more and quality should come above quantity. Both the planet and we will be healthier for it.