The best part of any hotel stay, I have always maintained, is breakfast. If you are a frequent traveller and have tired of living in hotel rooms, which despite their butlers, concierges and housekeeping, can get fairly claustrophobic, no five-star comforts can match up the pleasures of your home, except perhaps breakfast!
In India, breakfasts have usually comprised carb-rich poori-aloo-jalebi or idli-sambar-dosais or then again aloo- gobhi or mooli paranthas. There are also the occasional poha, halwa, as indeed nahari and paya in winters in the old cities of the Mughals, but by and large any of these meals are more akin to ?brunches?, to be enjoyed, in this day and age, at leisure on a Sunday or holiday. Everyday breakfasts, on the contrary, for the cosmopolitan workforce tend to be sparer?a toast grabbed in a hurry, a solitary cup of morning coffee and tea, a convenient bowl of cereal or unhealthier fried eggs and, sometimes, if you have an indulgent mother or spouse, a bowl of immaculately cut fruit.
As a harried professional, most of the times I forget to pick up any fruit for the home and at any rate would find it impossible, early morning, to summon up enough enthusiasm to slice papaya and apples, or god forbid, take out pomegranate seeds. Which is why I love hotel breakfasts. Not only do you have enough options to customise your own fruit bowl and decide on which freshly squeezed fruit juice you?d like that day, you can also let go and indulge in all your cravings for sinful bacon, sausages, cheese omlettes, buttered (multigrain) bread, croissants with coffee and so on? all the things that you?d reject as either too rich and full-of-calories or too impractical and time-consuming to have on your own breakfast table back home.
Living in a hotel, even on work, on the other hand, tends to put you in another mood. For one, since in most cases you don?t even have to pay for your morning meal, you wake up well in time to enjoy it; read your papers, work the laptop, finetune that presentation just a bit over, well, breakfast. For another thing, hotels themselves tend to take their breakfast spreads most seriously. This is the one meal that all their guests are likely to partake of and the one meal, most likely, on which they will eventually judge their stay experience. So breakfast buffets are invariably lavish with enough live counters and choices to keep everyone happy in such a diverse country as ours. In fact, because F&B managers will want to give you everything, from north Indian to south Indian, from American to European breakfasts under one setting?Indian hotels tend to have the best spreads as compared to anywhere else in the world. Certainly, breakfasts in hotels in Europe, for instance, are much more spartan and matter-of-fact. In America, you may get excited about the pancakes or not. But it is only in other Asian cities like Dubai or Hong Kong that you are likely to be presented with so many exciting options as you have in India.
Of late, the two most interesting additions to the breakfast ranges at most hotels in India that I have noticed is by way of flavoured/frozen yoghurt and dimsums. The last, I would imagine, have made their presence felt on breakfast menus, thanks largely to the substantial presence of industries from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and so on in our cities today and frequent visits by business travellers from these countries. Dimsums, literally meaning ?little hearts? and a staple of Cantonese style of cooking from south-east China (Hong Kong falls in this region), are after all more of breakfast or tea time snacks, even though restaurants regularly list them in their ?appetiser? menus for lunch or dinner. With congee, dimsums make for a typical Asian breakfast, whether you prefer the translucent, prawn filled har gau or the Japanese pot stickers, cooked in a pan from one side only. In Hong Kong and Singapore, pan-fried noodles also make an appearance on breakfast buffets, but I haven?t really found them early morning in Indian hotels, save on Sunday (or Saturday) ?brunches?, which is just as well.?
Infinitely healthier than everything else on the menu are flavoured yoghurts. Packaged flavoured yoghurts are not exactly new to India, even though retail companies, more recently, have announced plans to put out more of the probiotic stuff on supermarket shelves. But what is interesting is how chefs all across are now making it a point to give you an interesting (and interestingly presented) range of home-made, fruit-filled yoghurts in the morning. Apart from the synthetic-y strawberry, blueberry and pineapple flavours of the packaged stuff that you routinely pick up, what is fresh are tiny shot glasses or in one case, mini ?dahi haandis?, set with fresh yoghurt-mixed-with pureed fruit. And all easonal fruits are included. At the Park Hyderabad, for instance, this summer, there was jamun-flavoured yoghurt one morning (!), never mind mango and melon flavours that you find chefs whipping up routinely. And while papaya-flavoured yoghurt may not sound strictly appetising, for the health freaks, it surely is a gift from heaven!
While retail brands like Cocoberry and Kiwi Kiss, the Canadian company, that have recently entered the Indian market busy making frozen yoghurts a trendy dessert (or anytime) option, nothing stops us from blending our favourite fruit with home-set dahi in the nigh and letting this cup of goodness rest in the refrigerator till morning comes.
?The writer is a food critic