The perils of the buffet
This is not the buffet from our hotel - I stupidly didn't take any photos, but it gives you the idea. It's a breakfast buffet. The one here is actually relatively modest. There is not a whole table of different kinds of bread, as in Dubai. There are not many foreign treats, and there were only about five different types of pastries. But yes you could have your eggs any way you like, there was heaps of fruit - but no mango - David was disappointed - prawns, smoked salmon and cold meats and all the usual 'healthy' stuff. For this morning we decided to treat ourselves to a buffet breakfast - just to compare really and to stock up for lunch!
This hotel also does a buffet dinner - which we had on our first night, and we were going to do it again tonight. I'm not really quite sure why. Personally I think it's just because David wants to talk French to the French waitress. But interestingly they had so few takers for the buffet in the last couple of nights that there is only à la carte tonight. So we are going to have that instead. And I'm guessing the French lady might be there so David will be happy. And they have Caesar salad with chicken on the menu so he has decided to have that. It's a favourite of his - well once you've removed the egg and the anchovy, which is really what makes it a Caesar salad.
However, a la carte rather pleases me. I don't really like buffets, for a number of reasons. Well - breakfast maybe. I remember when we lived in Adelaide we would very occasionally go to the Hilton for a buffet breakfast with the kids for a treat. The pastries were divine, it didn't really cost all that much - I seem to remember a sum of $10.00 - I am talking about 30 years ago - and occasionally you would see someone famous or semi-famous, because this was Adelaide's best hotel at the time I think.
Club Med had massive buffet breakfasts too. This is where I found the perfect breakfast food - crème caramel - the leftovers from the previous night's dinner. Smooth, so you didn't have to chew, a good sugar hit to get you going, and delicious too. Not to mention that it goes very well with coffee.
And the buffet breakfasts in Dubai are to die for. And because we have usually pre-paid for them, we can pretend they are cheap. This time we have not pre-paid and so we are aware of the cost, and so there is pressure to maximise what you have to get value for money, Which is not good is it? I'm actually not a breakfast person, but this morning I had two very modest bowls of fruit with toasted muesli, two almond croissants and some scrambled eggs tomatoes and potato cakes. Well they were sort of potato cakes. I could, of course, had lots more, but I resisted, and just swiped another almond croissant for lunch. Even so, that is not $39.00 worth really is it? And I felt pretty bloated. So much so that I went for a long brisk walk around the vast grounds of the hotel, ruminating on what the people who stay in the 'villas' which are huge houses - 3 or 4 bedrooms in their own little estates, mostly facing on to the golf course, have for breakfast and dinner. Do they cook their own (they can) or do they employ a cook. Here is one of them.
As I returned to the main part of the hotel I felt a bit like a poor cousin - an outsider - and yet here we are living in the lap of luxury. Actually I think some of them are owned by other people and rented out individually.
But back to buffets. Apart from the obvious eat all you can thing which is disastrous for the waistline, I also don't think it's a really good way to eat. You can end up with a plate, loaded with three or four totally different dishes, all colliding with each other. Though I suppose this is what the Indians do with their thalis, and lots of other cultures do as well. I guess you just have to be judicious and keep going up and down to try something else. Also not good. Moreover, although the food sits on hotplates or something else to keep it warm it's not freshly prepared and served is it? And it certainly doesn't look beautiful on the plate. Here is another photo gleaned from the web of a dinner buffet somewhere - actually another Sheraton hotel. But you can see that it's difficult to keep it looking attractive, particularly once people have started diving into the different dishes.
It was interesting to hear that the hotel here has abandoned the buffet dinner tonight. You tend to think that it's a cheap way for a hotel to provide food. Lots of cheapish things like salads for example. But I guess it's true too that it can lead to massive wastage. Mind you would think they have got some sort of algorithm by now that will enable them to predict how many people on average will eat their buffet offering. Indeed what proportion of their guests are actually going to eat in the hotel rather than elsewhere.
We're going back to the lobby café tomorrow where we can just have a coffee and croissant.
