The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show.

I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the traveling public all summer – so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife-edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but not both. Only the French can generally be relied on to eat everything.

As a result, I wait until someone tells me what they want before offering them food. You can, however, have a good guess based on the amount of face jewelry. This Portuguese lady had a nose ring and had just come from touring the bottom end of the Mizen Head, in the extreme south of Ireland, where she had been camping in wigwams and tipis for so long that the child had demanded a night in a bed. When they arrived late, the little boy was so happy that he could be heard leaping on and off the king mattress.

The next morning I cooked a full Irish breakfast for another couple, whose nationality defied me until I narrowed it down to him being Scottish and she French or vice versa. I couldn’t work it out because their accents kept swapping, but they ate everything.

After they left, the Portuguese lady came down to the kitchen with her boy and said she smelled something wonderful. She did not want to sit in the dining room, so I let them sit at the kitchen table. Here we go, I thought, eyeing the self-service buffet.

The builder boyfriend insists this is cheaper, and we should only do the buffet. But he has no idea, because he doesn’t watch what happens when guests descend on it. They strip it from end to end, putting into bags what they can’t force down gullets, until you have to restock it daily, making it ten times the cost of doing everyone a fry-up.

Having successfully steered the Franco-Scottish couple into the dining room to serve them a finite breakfast, I attempted to intercept the Portuguese mother and child as they came down the stairs, but she breached the barricades and wandered about the kitchen, asking what the wonderful smell was. “Bacon and egg,” I informed her. “Would you like some?” She looked appalled. They didn’t eat meat.

I asked her to tell me, therefore, exactly what she wanted. Two eggs fried both sides, she said, explaining that the eggs must be made to look completely white and must not on any account run or be capable of having things dipped in them. Some brown toast. A cup of tea for her, black. And a cup of warm milk for the child… with cinnamon.

I began rifling through the larder and found some, to my amazement. They ate several helpings of cereal while I fried two eggs into a concrete-hard structure. One of these they then judged still too egg-like, so I had to fry it harder, whereupon they tucked into them, on thickly buttered toast.

After that, they went along the breakfast bar again, the child requesting more cinnamon to sprinkle on muesli. The BB came in at this point and gave the dis-appearing breakfast bar such a horrified look that I had to push him out in case he made a sarcastic comment. “Do you see how wrong you are now?” I asked him later. “Your simple self-service breakfast of cereals and toast leads to anarchy. You can’t allow unending bread-buttering and cereal-box-stripping to ensue. It’s anarchy, I tell you. Anarchy!”

Now that he had seen the bottomless breakfast in progress, I felt I was on stronger ground with my business plan of cooking every customer a fry-up, or nothing, and making them sit at a table in the dining room to eat it and then leave.

The Portuguese lady made breakfast so long, serving and re-serving herself and her son cereals and yogurts, that in the end even the child got bored with sprinkling cinnamon and went back upstairs to jump on and off the bed. After an hour, in a desperate bid to make breakfast end, I asked her where she was heading next. I already knew, of course.

They’re all tearing round the Ring of Kerry in a desperate hurry to get to the Cliffs of Moher, before driving cross-country to Dublin to fly home and boast about how they’ve “done” the Wild Atlantic Way, the invention of which is genius marketing by the Irish tourist board, because it spreads the tourist spend around the entire island of Ireland, and inserts an element of panic into it.

The sheer weight and speed of tourism this summer, with Europeans desperate to get from Dublin to Dingle, Donegal and Derry in the driving rain, for reasons they don’t entirely understand, has meant that people like us in the boondocks are fully booked because we take the overflow from more famous places.

The Portuguese lady said they were heading to Killarney next, but she wanted to see castles on the way. “You have to see castles when you come to Ireland, don’t you?”

I said I wasn’t sure that you did. Possibly she was thinking of Scotland. I said there was a small ruined tower nearby. She said she wanted a castle that was big and fancy. Was this nearby castle big and fancy?

What she wanted from Ireland made no more sense than her egg. So I told her the castle was amazing and she’d love it. And with that, she finally relinquished her grip on the Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut and hurried off to see an old turret with the top missing.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.