Why are buffet breakfasts in business hotels such bun fights?

I blame the Architects. If you build a hotel in a city centre with 200 bedrooms and the hotel’s main clientele are business people, weekdays between 07.00 and 8.00, potentially 200 people will all want breakfast at the same time. Result chaos.  In this age of free seating at breakfast, your hotel restaurant may have the capacity for 200 guests in tables of twos and fours, but who wants to share and make conversation at that time of day with people you don’t even know.

It’s happened on many occasions when having collected my food items, I find there’s hardly anywhere to sit.  Usually, I’m confronted with a sea of business suits of the male variety tucking in to the all-inclusive buffet breakfast.  Let me just say, I’ve nothing against men (I’m married to one) but as a lone female faced with this scene, the dilemma is whom do you choose to sit with?

Get it wrong, and your request to sit down to next to an unsuspecting male could look like a come-on.  Plus any colleagues arriving later could misinterpret the situation as: is this the morning after the night before? – Know what I mean!  Sit with a non-English speaker and you’ll find it takes two hands to do sign language, not easy when you’re stuffing your face with croissants.  And don’t ask a colleague from the US why they didn’t knock you up in the morning or you’ll be in for an industrial tribunal. 

I don’t expect any special treatment and would hate a restaurant with a “female seating only” area – how dull! But why is it when I’m dressed in business attire do people assume I work for the hotel? Complaining to me about the lack of plates or the fact the orange juice has run out.

Hotel buffet breakfasts are set out like factory production lines to efficiently guide guests through the multinational breakfast offerings, until finally arriving at the baskets of buns. Sadly the reality is you’ll stand for ages behind early departing leisure tourists whilst they slowly fill up their plates.  Like participating in a treasure hunt, you go from one place to another seeking out breakfast accoutrements, finding surprisingly the butter’s by the hot plate.  Obvious really - to thaw out!

 Not being an IT expert I always have trouble working out how to use the hot beverages machine, but cappuccino and tea are not so bad together. Eventually, you’ll return to your seat weighed down by a mountain of food, asking yourself, do I really want all this? But fear not, because you’ll get a work out endlessly returning to the buffet to retrieve items you’ve forgotten.  However, not in my case, thanks to my catering training I do show off by carrying four plates at a time, this useful skill greatly reduces my buffet breakfast footprint.

The buffet breakfast has been a triumph for hotels.  No longer do they require volumes of staff to serve multiple breakfast items to guests arriving en masse. Restaurant staff are now relegated to being mere witnesses whilst hotel guests render the once beautiful buffet breakfast display to a closing time jumble sale.  The alternative to avoiding the breakfast buffet bun fight is Room Service but that’s another story...