Suitcase Full of Tupperware

What is your go-to complimentary hotel breakfast?

It says a lot about who you are as a person.

Some people believe it is the most important meal of the day. And others, like my husband, think it is a meal made up by the “cereal people” with no value whatsoever (unless a Bloody Mary is involved).

When it comes to hotel breakfast. You have a few primary personalities.

You’ve got the cereal people. They like routine and are not willing to break away from it just because they are having breakfast away from home- no shame in being boring. You’ll generally find them watching the local weather report on the hotel’s flatscreen TV while simultaneously reading today’s top story in the also complimentary newspaper.

“The high today will be 70 degrees with mostly cloudy skies and winds southwest at 5-10 miles per hour.”

“Breaking News! A 7-Eleven is proposed to be developed 5 miles away from the local high school – our children will all start doing drugs!”

If you’re getting cereal, you may also be a child under the age of 12 whose goal is to make a super gross concoction for your cousin that combines every cereal option available topped with a blend of juices instead of milk. “Jordan! No, we talked about this, you need to stop poisoning cousin Sarah! Hey – points for creativity.

Then you have your eat-for-convenience people. No time to sit and eat, they need to maximize every minute of their travel. They quickly snatch up a banana and an apple while they fill a to-go cup with coffee and race out the door. They’re the reason all the fresh fruit is bruised if you try to find any at the breakfast buffet post-8 am.

Bagel and cream cheese people. You have to have a bit of patience to be one of these breakfast-goers. Some people think they are bagel people, but all of the abandoned bread products in the hotel toaster will tell you otherwise. It’s quite common for people to grow tired of waiting for the bagel to toast and just grab a yogurt or something instead. Moms tend to do well with this option. They plop down their bagel while they dish up for everyone else and then the bagel is ready to go. Isn’t using single-serve containers of cream cheese satisfying? It’s the breakfast of multitaskers – easily balanced while saving your niece from severe cereal-induced diarrhea. But don’t try to make your own bagel after hours - did you know many hotels remove the lever from the toaster to prevent people from toasting whenever they please? No late-night bagel snack for you, Mom.

You also have the hearty breakfast eaters. They are likely to pick up a full plate of the hot breakfast du jour. Biscuits with gravy paired with bacon, sausages, and roasted potatoes. Condiments piled high. If food’s around, they are going to eat it, even if it does make them a bit sluggish for the rest of the day. “Marg, let’s just lay be the pool today and order some nachos – seeing the Grand Canyon seems like an overrated idea.”

In contrast, there are the health-conscious eaters. They spend an hour or two at the hotel gym before heading down for breakfast – boosting high-end Lululemon leggings. They are the few odd souls who scoop out luke-warm oatmeal and pair it with the few hard-boiled eggs hiding behind the half and half (looking at the big picture of health, this is likely a setup for food poisoning, but to each his own).

There are 2 kinds of waffle people. There are the waffle people who need to enroll in special waffle training. They have missed the memo about how to get the waffle batter into the waffle iron without creating an explosion of soupy yellow goo on the walls or being on the verge of causing a mini waffle fire due to improper use of waffle iron spray. Then you have the people who hold up the waffle line to make a waffle for every member of the eight to ten-person family. If you don’t fit into one of these two categories and want a waffle, you are likely to end up defaulting to cereal after doing some serious eye-rolling when little Jimmy’s dad says it’s no problem to cook up another stack of waffles from the kids to have a waffle-eating contest.

Finally, there are the hotel breakfast elitists. They view the complimentary breakfast as a sport. One that requires careful planning and strategy.

In 2023 I was well on my way to the hotel breakfast championship. I was in an ever-developing mid-life crisis (you know the ones that start when you’re thirty?) and decided I could no longer tolerate being in my perfectly good, rewarding, well-paying, 10-minute drive from my house job. I spent the better part of every day on Indeed. Refreshing the app every few minutes both to make sure my job wasn’t being posted and to see what new positions I could apply for. I was an Indeed-Machine.

Somewhere within the frenzy of all of this applying, I landed a job in the Bay Area. I told the hiring manager I planned to relocate when the housing market shifted - which was more or less a lie because who would reasonably move from SoCal to SF?

I don’t think they picked up on my fib… apparently, it is a lot more “reasonable” for the average cereal eater to move within a sensible driving distance to where they would be working and have some sort of stable housing there - you know an apartment or a house. A place to store all the cereal bowls.

They didn’t realize they were dealing with a breakfast elitist.

I had this grand plan that I grew more and more excited about - hotel living. I was going to pack my full life in a suitcase each week and live two lives. I spent Tuesday-Friday residing at my carefully selected hotel of the week. Then I flew home each Friday night to spend a few days at home with my husband who strangely supports my elitist habits despite being one of those weird characters who bypasses the free breakfast altogether (my mind just cannot understand this!). Please note that I also earned A-List status on Southwest Airways; a prime accomplishment of my life.

I quickly learned that the highlight of my hotel selection would be the breakfast. After my first hotel stay, I realized that complimentary breakfast can be so much more than breakfast. I found I would never be hungry for all of the breakfast food I picked up. And that I could easily turn this into a full day’s worth of meals. Now I had complimentary breakfast, lunch, AND dinner. You might be surprised how many different meals you can make from a breakfast buffet - I had English muffin egg and sausage sandwiches, bagels with a combo of butter, peanut butter, Nutella, jam, and cream cheese, yogurt parfaits, sausages, potatoes, and fruit, the list goes on and on. I learned when the good times were to go for waffles and had them weekly like a champ. Ideally, you want to align your timing with those convenience eaters who don’t even have time to glance at the tired waffle iron.

Obviously, I had to come with supplies to make this happen. I found out pretty quickly that I could travel light when I headed up to SF. I just needed 2 outfits that I could find a way to mix and match over the 4 days I was working, a pair of PJs, and chargers for my electronics. That’s all the life belongings I really needed. I could easily get complimentary toiletries from the hotel and there was always DirectTV to watch for mindless entertainment. So, what did I fill my suitcase with instead? Paper plates, paper bowls, Ziploc bags, and Tupperware.

Each morning, I would plot out my plan of attack. Sometimes it was simple. If I was staying at the Extended Stay America (very economical, but you get what you pay for) - all I needed was my handbag. I would load up on the only available options muffins, oatmeal packets, and Nature Valley Granola Bars (the crunchy ones that only have one stick in the pack). If I was staying there, I would be sure to be prepared with my leftover peanut butter from other hotels.

Other hotels, had many more options to work with and required multiple trips. I would make my first round armed with my extra-large dinner-sized Hefty paper plate. I would fill this with my hot items of choice for the day. Meanwhile, I would throw any available spreads into my bagel. Once my plate was ready to go, I would head back to my room and Tupperware it up and stuff it in the mini-fridge. I also made sure to put all my spreads into a plastic baggy. I once exploded peanut butter all over my bag in transit and it was such a gross experience trying to de-peanut butter-ify my laptop before hopping on my Southwest flight. For part two, I would grab another of my Hefty plates and made my selection of dry goods (English muffins tend to be the most versatile, mini chocolate muffins, the most delicious) or anything I wanted to eat on my commute to work (which was provided via the chauffeur of Uber or Lyft - living the dream!). I put together my coffee and out the door, I would go. I got so good at my looting and breakfast food creations that I had enough to eat while I was in SoCal too. I hardly bought any groceries all year.

While I did certainly get homesick from time to time, especially during the weeks when the shower had alternating arctic-level water with the scorching heat that could have given me third-degree burns or when rooming across the hall from a group of teenagers who had been kicked out of prom or those guys that like to make the most fragrant of curries at all hours of the night, I always found comfort in the morning breakfast. It was the spark in my day and it made me feel like I had accomplished something. It made me special. I was the elitist.

I am sure there are many people reading this who find this grotesque, an abuse of the hotel breakfast, and wasteful. We could debate that all day long, but I don’t think I am the only one in the club. One of my favorite movies is Up in the Air. I so relate to George Clooney’s character - his whole world is traveling around the world, collecting miles, and staying in hotels. It becomes his identity. While probably not the healthiest of life strategies and there were probably a lot of things we were both escaping (for me, it was dealing with an infertility diagnosis), there can be a lot of value in leaning into the simple joys of life, like complimentary breakfast. I guess I should feel fortunate that my “mid-life crisis” focused on getting free things instead of buying Ferraris and I actually found myself being much more of a minimalist. I was just as happy spending heaps of money on Amazon living in SoCal as I was living with just chargers and Tupperware. Everyone needs a game they can win - it’s worth a lot more than a suitcase full of gold.

Anyway, food for thought. Munch on that over breakfast.