I am about to run off to some weird part of the
world and may not be paying as much attention as
I ought, so will periodically be making up my quota
with this interloping report from about half a year
ago. It will be interleaved with more contemporary
posts, but first, the final bit of an even earlier
trip report, from the end of 2017.
==
Last but least, my unfavoritest food sublect.

Element Amsterdam
Gordal is the house restaurant, so they use it
for breakfast, which was abundant and ordinary,
I'd say between a US hotel breakfast and a
European one. Cold cuts, cheese, salad, breads.
I had a banana, some prosciutto, and a lot of
orange juice. I'd have had almost the same
thing at any Hampton, substituting spongy
sausage or hard bacon for the prosciutto, so
I guess this was better. One interesting thing
- there was this sad-looking dead-eyed woman
of about 40 who kept getting stuff and bringing
it back to this Svengali type - she must have
made 10 trips carrying plates of food. Eventually
she sat down, and I presume both of them ate.
She was noticeable because we ran into her at
the buffet, and after we sat down, she passed by
our table numerous times with this weird fixed
expression on her face. Maybe she's robowife 0.9
beta or something.

Apollo Amsterdam
Breakfast here was at Bodon, the so-called
brasserie that doesn't have taps and your
starters run E15 for salad to 29 for
langoustines and main courses start at E25
(mushroom risotto) and goes up to 143 for two
(canard a la presse). Breakfast is free with
your gold or platinum status, otherwise 30 or
so. It's perfectly ordinary, your American-
style bacon or Netherlands-style sausage (the
worst sausage I can recall having had this year,
the dreaded frikandel), potatoes, scramble, and
so on. I passed and had a few glasses of juice
and several dishes of pre-sectioned grapefruit,
both very good. No, what I thought was grapefruit
juice turned to be the dreaded juice cocktail,
so I switched to orange, which was very good.
Lilli's eyes were bigger than her stomach, so she
gave me a leftover pain au chocolat, which was
your standard thing. Our table overlooked three
canals, and when the sun came up, it was pretty
glorious for a while before the clouds rolled in.

Hotel Des Indes, the Hague
It's an exquisite dining room, the buffet crammed
off in a side alcove past the men's room, a strange
unfriendliness at an otherwise very hospitable
place. Lots of good stuff, a full English and
a full European both, components first rate. I
had smoked salmon, very good, and prosciutto,
excellent. There were bangers, baked beans,
cooked mushrooms, broiled tomatoes, but no black
pudding, which saddened me. Lilli mistook the
tortilla Espanola for scrambled eggs, and the
tray was almost empty, so she asked them to
replenish the scrambled eggs, and the staff
misunderstood her misunderstanding, and so we
were treated to a tray of scrambled eggs - I
thought 6 eggs, she said no, 8 to 10, with a big
mesclun and tomato salad on the side. They offered
us this as though it were a normal thing, so I
felt obligated to help her out with a couple so as
not to look too too wasteful. The dish was
perfectly seasoned and deeply buttered but done
quite hard. I ate all the tomatoes and ended up
with an estimated 4 eggs in my craw; wanted to
urp for the rest of the morning. They did not
charge extra for the special order. Oddly, here
the orange juice was mediocre from a can. I think
that in these rarefied circles people drink
something other than juice, even though they may
be juiced afterward.

Mainport Rotterdam
The Mainport offers breakfast at a rather
murderous (rather than killer) rate and doesn't
give the Starwood platinum benefit, as it is
only a partial member of the program. Not a
big deal, one can get pastries and coffee all
over, including at the train station. So we did.

Sheraton AMS
I didn't eat here but toured the premises
before skedaddling for my flight. It was your
standard American-style breakfast by the looks
of it. I had a glass of orange juice, which
had that semi-cooked taste of Minute Maid.
After a goodbye and planning chat with Lilli, I
was off - made it to the Aspire lounge for a
glass of the worst Port I've ever tasted.
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