Strolling into breakfast at Borgo Santandrea on the Amalfi coast is like stumbling into a foodie fever dream, an Aladdin’s cave piled high with edible treasures. The countertops in the gleaming, stainless-steel kitchen groan with house-made buffalo mozzarella, loaves of bread, and glazed ceramic signs for each offering—even one that proudly touts the exact time the sourdough starter was born (1:51 p.m. on September 14, 2023). The experience is built as a sumptuous morning indulgence, heightened by the swoon-worthy terrace views along the craggy coastline in the gentle morning sun. It’s also a shorthand for what to expect from the luxury hotel: If breakfast is this good, just imagine what else we can deliver.
This example isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, gauging a hotel’s entire promise can be summed up in a single experience: breakfast. A generous buffet is more a mindset than a meal. Too few and/or slightly hungover staffers, or lukewarm, cheap coffee? They’re warning signs that the property may struggle to deliver elsewhere. A study from the University of Aveiro in Portugal underscores the importance of the meal: 81 percent of guests said breakfast was the important meal of their stay, and 64 percent said they would return to a hotel expressly because of an impressive morning spread. Breakfast has become a measure not only of how a hotel expresses luxury, but also of how intelligently it runs—from its design choices to its labor decisions and, increasingly, its approach to sustainability.
Gleneagles in Scotland has a famously lavish breakfast spread.
Photo by Murray Orr
How breakfast reveals the quality of a luxury hotel
Guests encounter this philosophy in very different forms around the world. Perhaps they’re strolling the dual halls of the breakfast buffet at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin, where they’re handed a smoothie of the day upon entry and accept a Berliner doughnut as they leave. Koh Samui’s Cape Fahn Hotel has an array of produce so extensive that there is a fruit sommelier to steer you toward lychee-like longan or sweet-sour snake fruit. Spain’s Ibiza Gran Hotel serves a maze of more than 350 different offerings, including roving mimosa, oyster, and caviar carts. La Mamounia in Marrakech has temple-like pavilions housing its extensive poolside buffet. In Japan, luxury stays across the country, including Hoshinoya Tokyo, set up elaborate morning trays that turn breakfast into a ceremony of care and craft.
Breakfast is such a strategic priority that consultants are rarely allowed to meddle with it, says James Hacon, a former hotel general manager who now runs the consulting firm Think Hospitality and has produced an extensive white paper on the meal. “Whether we’re working on an individual hotel or a brand, they’ll take breakfast out of the brief. It’s pretty much the only thing that’s carved out—we’re told not to touch the breakfasts,” he says. If input is requested, it becomes a standalone project requiring detailed examination.
Hacon points to the larkish study from Oxford University mathematician Dr. Tom Crawford that attempted to scientifically determine the perfect hotel breakfast (start at 8:17 a.m., stay no more than 45 minutes, with two plates—hot first, then cold—separated by exactly 16 minutes). Hacon started his career at Gleneagles in Scotland, another property renowned for its morning spread. There, two staffers worked throughout the night to ready the dining room for the morning service, until it was moved into a custom atrium.
One marker of indulgence he flags: booze. “It’s a big piece in terms of luxury, but in my experience, you never use a lot of champagne or alcohol,” he says. He recalls one luxury hotel where guests were prone to propping up the bar all night, then wandering straight down the corridor to breakfast. If that happened, staff followed a protocol: “Someone working in the bar had to ring down to the restaurant to put the bottles away. Otherwise, two or three bottles of champagne would be gone within the first 10 minutes.”
La Mamounia’s poolside breakfast
Courtesy of La Mamounia
There are operational reasons buffets endure. Larger sites will find it easier to serve at volume if guests are allowed to graze. Hacon says that a room count of 25 people or so is the tipping point when a buffet is likely to be more efficient and pleasant for both staff and guests. Not everyone agrees that the abundance of a buffet is the benchmark of a great hotel, however. Storied chef Charlie Palmer, co-founder of Appellation, the culinary-focused hospitality brand, shuns buffets across the brand’s portfolio, including its Healdsburg property, where rooms start at $509 a night. “Luxury is personal,” he says. “For me, there’s nothing more luxurious than starting the day with something made just for you, with real care and great ingredients.”
High-end travel advisor Jack Ezon of Embark Beyond is similarly buffet shy. “A buffet is very disruptive if you’re having a business meeting. There’s no lag time to have a casual conversation because someone always has to get up and make a plate. A part of dining is connecting, not just eating,” he says. Ezon’s more accepting of buffets at resort-style hotels, but he prefers the Goldilocks compromise, commonplace at many Rosewood properties: a continental buffet plus a menu of made-to-order items. “That’s the gold standard.”
How luxury hotels balance breakfast abundance and waste
Ezon isn’t alone in shunning buffets, and many agree with him for a different but equally vital reason: sustainability. Historically, leftover buffet food was funneled into soup or staff meals, an approach increasingly viewed as inappropriate for the hospitality team. Growing scrutiny—from guests, regulators, and even hotel brand leadership (there isn’t a hotel chain these days that isn’t keen to improve, and trumpet, its eco-credentials)—has turned breakfast into a testing ground for smarter, lower-waste systems. The result is a wave of redesigns that allow abundance and responsibility to coexist.
Nana Kantsa, a tabletop and hospitality design consultant, was hired to overhaul the breakfast buffet at a 1,000-room luxury hotel in Crete. Her recommendations led to a 40 percent reduction in food waste and a 30 percent increase in guest scores. She said the setup was noisy, messy, and inefficient, so she advised creating two standalone zones, one each for hot and cold items. Guest flow between them was smoother, while the new open kitchen overlooking the hot stations could monitor the floor, eyeballing the stock of baguettes, for example, to anticipate baking more.
The other major change: portioning out food, especially in the cold zone. “Monoportions look more luxurious, on a small four-inch plate, and it means the chef can check how many more have to be produced—they’re not just making huge bowls of food,” she explains. Vertical displays, with dishes at different layers, almost like floral arrangements, seem more abundant without calling for additional resources.
Rome Cavalieri donates surplus food from its Sunday brunch to the community.
Courtesy of Rome Cavalieri, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel
Waste from a breakfast buffet is a pressing issue for many hotels, according to Juliane Caillouette Noble, the managing director of the London-based Sustainable Restaurant Association. Instead of offering precooked eggs, she says, follow the model of The Pig, the British restaurant-with-rooms chain, which provides raw eggs and a charming timer so guests can boil them to their exact preference. She also notes the Hyatt Place in London’s hipster-heavy Bethnal Green bakes leftover breakfast porridge into its sourdough for lunch service and folds green and beet juices into veggie-burger pulp. The easiest way to minimize waste, she adds, is to help manage guest behavior. “Once the food is on your plate, if it’s not eaten, it’s wasted. Signage that reminds guests they can come back as many times as they want is vital. It’s better to fill up three different times than have this ginormous plate.”
Some hotels focus on redistribution. The Cavalieri Hilton outside Rome partnered almost a decade ago with Equoevento, a nonprofit that reduces food waste at weddings, to donate surplus food from its Sunday brunch to the community. The hotel even helped to fundraise for a climate-controlled delivery van to expand the charity’s reach. To date, it’s recovered close to 12,000 portions of ready-to-eat meals. The property also sends leftover bread to a local brewery for beer fermentation. Hong Kong–based Chomp is a Too Good to Go–style startup that focuses on the buffets commonplace in top hotels in the territory, piloting its program with the Kowloon Shangri-La before forming a long-term partnership with Eaton HK. It offers prepackaged breakfast boxes for about $6 and a fill-up-your-own-container program during lunch and dinner for about $12, allowing guests to access buffets at a steep discount just before closing to scoop up whatever remains.
Not all waste-reduction strategies are admirable. Stephani Robson, a recently retired Cornell hospitality professor, recalls one full-service chain that deliberately slowed its toaster to discourage use. “They wanted people to give up and not bother making toast,” she laughs. “On the first morning, if you tried and it took too long, you’d say forget it and grab a bagel. So, they purposely slowed the toaster down.” It’s a long way from time-stamped sourdough starters and waste-smart buffet redesigns, yet the conclusion is the same: Breakfast may now be the clearest window into what a hotel truly values.
