Breakfasts of champignons

Sitting in the majestic surroundings of Oxford’s Randolph Hotel dining room last Sunday morning, tucking into perfectly cooked-to-order poached eggs (very soft, please), got me thinking about hotel breakfasts. Why? Because so many of them are terrible. I don’t know what your experience is, but, certainly, if I’m in Paris or Madrid or some other European city where heading out for breakfast is such a doddle – and you can hang out with the locals – then that would almost always be my preferred option.

I’ve simply had far too many lukewarm eggs/fatty, cold bacon/leather-textured omelettes at this stage in my life to trust that the breakfast on offer will live up to any kind of decent culinary standard. It’s just so hit and miss.

And why so many so-called expensive hotels think that it is acceptable to offer a hot breakfast option that is not freshly cooked but, rather, where the various elements, from bacon and sausages to tomatoes and fried eggs, have been languishing under one of those silver, plugged-in hotplates for God knows how long, is just beyond me. I have often lifted the lid on one of those yokes, taken in the view of the fat-congealed bacon, or the fried eggs that look like those rubber ones you can buy in a joke shop, and returned to my table empty handed.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for the buffetstyle continental breakfast option. I’m all for that. I love perusing the various tables to see what is on offer, and then, of course, largely always opting for the same things, whether I’m in Beijing, Berlin, or Belfast.

So it’s generally fresh orange juice for me, followed by a bowl of fresh fruit with a good dollop of natural yoghurt with a drizzle of honey on top.

And for the ‘hot’ option, when it is ordered separately and cooked to order, I generally go for a mushroom omelette, or for soft poached eggs accompanied by either mushrooms or tomatoes.

And on the orange juice front, if you’re staying in a hotel that’s charging an arm and a leg, then to empty a carton of orange juice into a flashy-looking jug is simply not on. It’s funny how often I have encountered this and yet, whenever I stay in a small three-star hotel in Chania in Crete (the Porto Veneziano), they are perfectly capable of serving freshly squeezed orange juice, straight from the oranges. You squeeze your own, actually – plonk your glass under the small machine, hit the button, and watch as the fresh oranges are put through their paces. Delicious.

I’m not really into bread, so I often don’t bother. But tea is important. It’s always tea for me, and never coffee. Watching other people swarm around the cold buffet breakfast tables can be something of an eye-opener. Have you seen how much bread some people pile up on their plate?

In Italy, even though I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth, I always finish my breakfast with a tiny sweet cake simply because they are such a staple of the Italbaked ian breakfast. (Like churros – which I don’t like – are in Spain.) I remember the first time I ever stayed in Hotel Mozart in Rome, a lovely little hotel in a brilliant location close to Piazza del Popolo. I’d noticed on their website that they gave particular mention to their home- breakfast cakes. And what an array there was! So I succumbed to a small taster, but my late husband, a man with an incredibly sweet tooth who also managed, with no effort whatsoever, to maintain the physique of a greyhound all his life, had a field day every time we stayed there.

If you’re staying somewhere where fish is plentiful, or there is some local delicacy, and they are on the breakfast menu – then give them a go. And I admit that I need to listen to my own advice here – you can eat poached eggs, or a mushroom omelette anytime..

But never forget that wherever you are the best breakfast experience is never actually the hotel one – it’s to eat in a café around the corner, jostling for space with the locals en route to work. For those are the breakfasts that you really remember. For me, that’s countless experiences in the Saint-Regis café on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris (what a great morning buzz!) and a oneoff in a little huckster café in the wilds on the Greek island of Zakynthos. The elderly female owner hadn’t a word of English and kept shrugging her shoulders as we struggled to explain that we were looking for eggs. Then my husband leapt to his feet and started flapping his arms in pretence of a hen.

The owner smiled. The penny had dropped. And then, after a bit of a wait, out came our breakfast– but with not an egg in sight.

Instead, with something of a flourish, the owner walked over to us and placed a huge plate of sliced chicken between us on the table.

What did we do? Well, like the time we ordered ‘due lattes’ in Rome’s Piazza Navona 20 years ago, and were then served two glasses of hot milk, we just laughed, and dived in. And it was certainly far more memorable than any hotel breakfasts we ever encountered.

MORNING GLORY: The Randolph in Oxford has a top brekkie, and right, catch the morning buzz in the Saint-Regis café in Paris

ARRIVING into London Heathrow last Sunday afternoon, almost four hours ahead of my flight home, I noticed there were two other Aer Lingus flights to Dublin ahead of my 6.45pm trip. So I wandered over to the woman behind the Aer Lingus checkin desk. Would there be any chance, I asked, of a seat on an earlier flight? I fully expected to be told no.But, no. ‘Let’s have a look,’ she said. And before I knew it, I had a new boarding pass in my hand, for the 4.20pm flight.How much did that cost? Not a cent. Thank you, Aer Lingus.