Bed and petit déjeuner

Anyone booking up at a B&B would be forgiven for thinking that you only get high-calorie egg, sausage, bacon and fried bread for breakfast. If so, they should get up to speed - the world has changed and the archetypal British serviced accommodation provider has changed with it. Members of The Forum have been exchanging their ideas.

OK, you still get “full English” or “Continental” but there's a whole range of other mouth-watering offerings on the menu if you choose your B&B well:

• Fish - lattice of smoked salmon, smoked haddock, jugged kippers, potted kippers
• Bread - brioches, croissants, muffins, fruit bread, home made bread, pain au chocolat, wholemeal and white toast
• Fruit - fresh fruit, fruit salad, cooked fruit, fruit juice
• Dairy - cheese, yoghurt
• Meat - sausages, bacon, chipolatas, ham and other cold meat
• Eggs - poached, boiled, scrambled, fried, omelettes, eggs Benedict
• Preserves - home made
• American pancakes
• Cereals

We cater for those with special dietary requirements: diabetic, low calorie, gluten-free options and vegetarian.

We are going ‘green’ with organic mushrooms and tomatoes.

We're a mixture of early and late birds. The larks are happy to serve full English breakfasts at 6 a.m. claiming the day is theirs from 7 am. The sleepy-headed owls leave out breakfast trays, set up the night before, for those guests who need to leave early. Me? I just love those Friday and Saturday night wedding party guests who declare they won't want breakfast much before 10 a.m., if at all.

Though the scope for over-catering is vast with such an opulent menu, we go to great lengths to avoid waste. Some of us ask guests to pre-order using a printed checklist. Some of us go to even greater lengths to save paper, and the planet, by laminating these checklists. However, we may not tell the accreditation inspector that we ask guests to pre-order in case we lose a star!

We are mindful of the rising cost of food and the starving people around the world. We do our best not to waste anything but with the best will in the world there are always left-overs. We keep cats, dogs, horses, chickens and goats to consume what's left on guests' plates. I do believe we deliberately starve our spouses, children and grand-children so that they eat anything half-decent which is left-over. I make this deduction because these poor creatures are invariably described on The Forum as HUNGRY in this land of plenty.

Article submitted by the editor.

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