Cuisine d’hôtel

Well, I said last time that the subject of “hotel food” probably deserved its own column.  It does, so lets go.

It is a great convenience when traveling as part of a group to be able to eat together in the hotel in which you reside. It is an opportunity to get to know your fellow travelers a bit more, compare notes on the day’s adventure and so forth.  Plus the private dining rooms are generally not far from the bar which is always convenient, with no worries about getting “home”.  Our travel hosts included at least one dinner in each of the hotels we occupied, so there was a good cross section to compare.  I would say that the food was uniformly good and generally nicely presented.

All of the places we were to have dinner provided a menu before we left from which you could pre-order your selections (and promptly forget – keep reading).  I think all were kind of prix fixe arrangement, normally giving you a choice of three starters, main dishes, and desserts. 

This one has the Feeder’s chicken scratches on the side (keep reading).  It appears that the Feeder’s standard set of gripes in such situations are not limited to the new world.   Since we all had pre-ordered, each institution knew (presumably by name) who had ordered what for each course.   Well, the first night we all gathered for dinner and the captain of the room had no clue, or at least professed not to as to who ordered what.   And, of course humans being human and most of us generally of an age where memory begins to fail didn’t remember what we chose several weeks before.  That produced a flurry of our tour leader having to visit most everybody with the holy “spread sheet” to remind us we had the…. (prawn tian) or whatever.  Homework:  what is a tian, and how has it evolved over the years?.   Anyway, I (me personally) would think that an accomplished restaurant would have this down.   Provide name cards (or even have the travelers have their own); place them in front of you; server comes to the table, sees she has Mr. and Mrs. Feeder, the Smiths, and the Jones at the table.  Back to the kitchen, consults the posted list, and tells the kitchen staff: “I need three pates, two soups, and a tian”.  Pick them up and deliver them to the table to the proper guest.  Not hard.

Which brings up another gripe.  The kitchen staff knows for starters they need so many of each dish, and has them plated, ready for the servers.  But no… in reality what all too often happens is that the server(s) bring ALL soups for the whole room “who had soup?” then ALL the pate’s, then ALL the tians.  Which then leads to the all too common: “oh, you go ahead and eat” which makes for awkward situations like all the soups are either finished or cold before the rest of the stuff hits the table.  I just don’t get it.   And again, this is all too common.  Watch for it at your next event.

Anyway, as I said for the most part whenever the food got to you it was pretty good.  Starters were for the most part quite good, there was a lot of pate, and a lot of seafood

(Country Pate with Onion Compote)

(Smoked salmon)

Main courses were kind of hit and miss, and it was always fun to see what you got compared to what was described on the menu.  Ravioli, for instance, was as expected and quite good…  

incidentally, as far as I could tell, that little garni of watercress was not the same one following us around, but it sure was common. 

In one place I ordered a “crispy pork belly” got me the following

Which was more of a pork loin with “almost” crispy outside, and the little puck of…. Black pudding puree.  Of course anything pork always tastes good, and it did.  And if the Feeder would be critical he would point out that that little ring of liquid around the sauce cries out: “heat lamp”.

Probably the consistently best course was dessert.  It was always nicely presented and generally quite good.

(Meringue Roulade Fresh Fruit and Almonds)

Oh, and we did run across a unique dessert that popped up on menus, it was called an “Eton Mess”.  It kind of was, but fairly tasty..

And as I always point out, the food is secondary to the good time with friends, and fellow travelers.

Lastly, I am always up for trying new things (to a point), so I have to point out one particularly interesting dish.  On the menu at the top (the "keep reading part"), note the last entry of the main dishes is described as: “Wild Rice and Parsnip Sausages with root vegetable mash & a red onion and cranberry jus”. Well, I thought, that certainly would be a chance to try something (completely) different;  (Monty Python reference here) so I ordered it.  Sounded pretty good.  Anything called sausages can’t be all bad.  Wrong – O, o-culinary adventurer.  The dish set before me was

Certainly sausage-like in shape (with a lone parsley leaf instead of the ubiquitous watercress bundle), and the cranberry/red onion jus didn’t look too bad.  So I cut into the little tubes only to find a dry, grainy substance punctuated by slightly crunchy, chewy, wild rice.  No particular taste or hint of spice, just dry.  When asked how it was, I gamely replied “it must be an acquired taste”.   I didn’t finish it.  But, it was my choice so I lived with it.  Always an adventure..

So that kind of encapsulates the Hotel experience, leaving us to consider breakfasts and lunches.  Next time.. and maybe we'll talk about

DFD