So you’re staying at one of the many hotel chains that offer a free continental breakfast. Regardless of where you are or what logo is on your key card, you’ll walk downstairs and see almost the same selection of foods arranged in various configurations under the heat lamps or in those little ice baths. But not every breakfast food is created equal, no matter how many tiny Smuckers packets you spread on it or how much hot sauce you pour over those sort-of scrambled eggs. So here’s a definitive ranking of your continental buffet options, because free breakfast is the most important free meal of the day.
20. Turkey Bacon: No matter where you’re eating it, turkey bacon tastes like lies.
19. Muffin, Bagged: There’s a thin line between a moist baked good and one that feels sweaty when you slide it out of its wrinkled plastic wrapper. As a rule, I try to avoid foods that remind me of holding Scott Baxter’s clammy hand while we slow danced to Journey.
18. Cereal, Loose: The worst part about those plastic cereal dispensers isn’t that they inevitably grind what looks like Special K into a bowl of whole grain oat dust, it’s that you have no way of knowing whether you’re about to get real Cocoa Puffs or a serving of generic Choco-Fun Orbs.
17. Scrambled Eggs: Even if someone has just carried a steaming tray of these out of the kitchen, they’re still congealed, lumpy and completely un-egg like. As breakfast, they’re terrible. As a packing material, they’d be perfect.
16.Yogurt: If you say that you enjoy eating yogurt for breakfast, you’re either lying, German or visiting the Hilton Garden Inn from your home in 1982.
15. Toast: The best part about making toast in a hotel is placing the bread on the little rolling toaster and pretending to be a Bond villain forcing a confession out of 007 before he slides down the metal chute BURNED TO A CRIS– no, wait, he’s pretty much still room temperature.
14. Hash browns: Timing is everything with these. Either you nail it and get to start your day with hot, crisp breakfast perfection or you have a congealed glob of shredded potato barf, something that looks like it’s waiting for your high school janitor to cover it with sawdust.
13. Bagels: Sawing through a hotel buffet bagel with a plastic knife always makes me feel like I’m a Civil War doctor performing some kind of battlefield surgical procedure.
12. Croissants: Eat it layer by buttery layer and you can close your eyes and almost pretend that you’re at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, not on a vinyl chair in the lobby of a La Quinta.
11. Fruit: Best case scenario, you can score a giant serving spoon full of strawberries and blueberries. Worst case, there’s one lonely piece of honeydew floating in the juice the strawberries left behind.
10. Muffin, Fresh: Waking up to a tray of fresh baked goods is like staying with your parents, if your parents also made you eat surrounded by strangers, an uncomfortable looking man in a chef’s hat and four kids who are still wet from the swimming pool.
9. Oatmeal: Whether it’s in that hot metal container or the single-serving variety, it’s hard to get wrong. Good oatmeal and bad oatmeal both taste like the same kind of high-fiber sadness, but this is an excellent excuse to order some kind of elaborate three-tiered dessert later. “It’s OK,” you’ll tell the waiter. “I had oatmeal for breakfast.”
8. Pre-Packaged Cereal: I love having my own single-serving bowl of cereal, especially when I manage to score the last box of Trix. Also, I like how there are always three different pitchers of milk arranged in an ice bath, sitting in a circle like they’re NFL linesmen trying to recover after a Thursday night game against the Seahawks.
7. Sliced Meats and Cheeses: Pile a mountain of meat and cheese onto a couple slices of bread and run it through the Bond Villain Toast Roller of Doom and you’ll feel as triumphant as the Wright Brothers on a North Carolina beach. And that feeling will last almost long as their first flight did, roughly 12 seconds.
6. Peanut Butter Singles: Those little single-serving peanut butter discs can enhance even the most haphazardly cut cold bagel, plus they’re the perfect size to pocket so you can have a snack later. I am absolutely not above eating spoonfuls of free peanut butter in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of a meeting or during someone’s wedding.
5. Potatoes: It’s hard to beat breakfast potatoes. They’re good hot, they’re good cold and they’re good even when you’re eating them at the table beside a guy on a Bluetooth who keeps using the word ‘synergy’ during his conversation.
4. Waffles: Pouring a Dixie cup full of pre-mixed batter into the waffle iron is as close as some of us get to cooking (and by “some of us,” I mean me). But that doesn’t mean you can’t lace your fingers, extend your arms and brag about having fixed your own breakfast.
3. Sausage: You should always start your day by doing something you’ll regret.
2. Bacon: If I have to explain why bacon is amazing – especially when you can fill your plate with metal-tonged abandon – then we cannot be friends.
1. Omelette Station: If you’re lucky enough to have picked a hotel that offers free omelettes, pat yourself on your well-fed back. This is the free breakfast jackpot. It’s cooked to order, hot and fresh and might be the only option that’s served on real plate. So walk tall when you carry that back to your table, triumphantly raising your eyebrows when you lock eyes with Bluetooth guy. This, my friend, this is real synergy.
