Home & Away The Breakfast Buffet

I will be the first to admit that I was raised in a mad house – arguments over spilt milk that make Brexit negotiations look seamless and the odd botched attempted murder. I don’t beat my siblings at much, but I can beat them at the breakfast table. I am the earliest riser and boy do I reap the big family breakfast rewards – the bacon still hot, not yet congealed in lardy white fat, the egg yolks still runny, still bright and still beaming all sandwiched in the plumpest bit of bread not the disintegrating heel. Best of all, as the slobs emerge, I can feign firsts when really, I am on my seconds. There are never chances of thirds. 

When all is said and (breakfast) done, I love my family but I would never go into business with them. The Bacchesi-Berti family think slightly differently at Castello di Vicarello, their family home cum hilltop Tuscan hotel. Unfussed by internal politics they have married one another’s strengths to work together and create something straight off the set of Italy’s answer to Mamma Mia. Expect to be welcomed like a new born and drool like one over the interiors; repurposed antiques and family heirlooms perfumed in Tuscan flora and fauna that creeps through windows and up your nostrils. Arrive parched to hydrate on award winning bio-organic wine, straight from the vines that surround you. Most importantly, arrive famished, Signora Bacchesi-Berti has a published Tuscan cook book and after a stay you will want a copy.

Here, food sits in pride of place with all the gravity it deserves in a bid to make you feel at home in a hotel. Unsurprisingly, I, a professional breakfaster, arose ludicrously excited for my morning meal. No family or friends to fend off here. Ferociously doggy paddling laps of the pool to work up an appetite and gargling on chlorine so Colgate did not ruin my palate. I ran-walked through the gardens, a woman possessed, blurred past reception and dived taste buds first into the conservatory where I had been promised I would find breakfast.

No buffet.

Everyone knows the best bit about a hotel stay is the breakfast buffet. Truthfully, the best bit about being on holiday at all. I like to commence my holiday ritual by ordering a coffee that peacocks around the table as centre piece. Accompanying the caffeine, freshly squeezed orange juice so blinding in colour it justifies wearing sunglasses before midday. I stew over the piles of pastry, scoffing at the gluten free section. Finally, I let the waiter guide me through their favourite variation of eggs on the menu and settle on ye old faithful - scrambled.

It took all my strength not to turn on heel and run. I settled for an Anglo-Italian series of hand gestures accompanied by heavy breathing. I double checked, but, there was still no buffet spread of cereal five hundred ways. No queue of people waiting for fresh pancakes. No banquet table of potion coloured juices. No buffet of any type at all. Just a buffet of Brits looking flushed with sun burnt aided alarm.

To save face, I sat down silently at the long banquet table, the irony of its size not lost on me, the breadth of which I could have spread one thousand components of my now imaginary breakfast buffet. Eventually, we were approached by a man who introduced himself as our breakfast waiter. No charm was going to thaw my rage but he looked so excited to feed us I questioned his sobriety and softened. We admitted we had no allergies and no intolerances. In a final attempt to give them the benefit of the doubt, I ordered an iced coffee with oat milk. He looked quizzically at me, like the cow discovering her milk was fast falling out of fashion.

Then, gala like, the meal commenced. A queue of gleaming ricotta pots adorned with berries and freshly kneaded bakes and cakes you smelt before you saw. Each slotted onto our table with the ease of an adult doing a child’s jigsaw puzzle. The result was such stunning tablescaping we were almost too nervous to rearrange. Almost. Two by two; two apiece and each two mouthfuls at most. No fighting over the last one, we were subtly encouraged to cherish our own portion. If people say you are to eat breakfast like a King, this was one of the first times in my life I was also being treated like one.

With each morsel presented, a story of how it had got there. Eggs from the chicken coops and honey from the bees, both presumably drunk amongst the vines. Greens and garnishes from the vegetable garden, so immaculate it doubles up as an aisle for wedding ceremonies. Coffee from a local producer, who it was revealed had just won a national award for his brew. Shrewdly, it seemed they were shaming anyone who claims they do farm to table better than this. Not one for plate waste, we finished every scrap on the table, sharing the final crumbs with Uva, the resident golden Labrador nestled at our feet.

Today, indulgence walks hand in hand with moral consequence. The number one culprit – my beloved breakfast buffet. Food waste in hotels is astronomical, from wasted components in kitchens to plate waste in the hands of guests themselves. Food that more often than not has travelled copious miles to reach its final destination only to not even make the final stretch of the journey into someone’s stomach. At Castello di Vicarello what they presented was a hotel breakfast of the future. A performance and spectacle of what can be made from someone’s back yard into an immersion in space. Most importantly, the opportunity to indulge until you are fit to pop. I tried things I still salivate at the thought of and others that historically I would never have plunged my spoon in. Best of all, just like breakfast at home there were little to no leftovers. Only eggshells returning to the kitchen.