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The Perfect Breakfast
WOW.travel searched 12 seasons for the perfect breakfast
By: Mary Gostelow
At Four Seasons Hotel Milano, you breakfast in La Veranda, looking into what were the cloisters of Convento della Santa Maria del Gesu, built in 1432.
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Today this is a garden that could be billed green-lovers' heaven, with lush grass, and topiary bushes, and trees like round lollipops on stalks. Come back into the restaurant, with its marble floors, and tables covered in sunflower and white damask linens (Frette of course), and green stalk arrangements in square gold boxes. This is an ambience of natural color and feel. Add blue and gold-edged Richard Ginori china and the morning scene is set. The Italians have their newspapers, and there is intelligent reading - namely the Financial Times (the pink one) and the International Herald Tribune (the white one) for anglophones.
This is service, Four Seasons Hotel Milano-style. You are shown to your seat, and you stay put. Continental breakfast includes your choice of plain or fruit yogurt, nicely tart, the Mediterranean rather than sweetened, custard-like American-stayle yogurt. The juice was so so tart it was divine. I had two squares of fabulous very-white butter, and a selection of indivividual Azineda Agrimontana preserves, from Piemonte. The china pot of extremely flavorful coffee held two pots. I wondered if there was time to head for Brioni next door (there was not, sadly).
On this trail of twelve seasons, would I find similar breakfasts at each of the trio of Four Seasons hotels on the itinerary? The answer, apparently, was not. Guy Rigby, the opera-loving Brit who is Toronto-based Four Seasons' guru when it comes to food and drinks around the world, says there is no corporate policy. Every one of the luxury hotels and resorts can do what it thinks best for its discerning customers.
In Florence, I could also have eaten in a convent. Four Seasons Hotel Florence, includes a separate, detached Conventino building, a conversion of the Suore di Maria Reparatrice Convent, dating back to the 15th century. People staying in the convent's 37 rooms and suites have their own separate club-like dining room, Il Magnolio. For the rest of us, in the divine Palazzo della Gherardesca, breakfast is served in the gracious, soar to the ceiling, Il Palagio restaurant or, during summer months, out on the terrace, looking straight at a centuries-old Cedar of Lebanon and some of the urban resort's 11.2 acre garden, behind. Alessandro B is the perfect morning host (his phrase Absolutely, comes with a beaming smile). He brings the requested pink newspaper, and later his second china pot of coffee is as excellent as its predecessor - it comes, without request, with a new cup. The juice is, again, sunshine sharp. The buffet, inside Il Palagio's 28-seat wine-surrounded private dining area, includes Cinta Senese cold cuts, pecorini cheese from Pienza and schiaaiata Tuscan bread (from the à la carte, if you have Heinz 57 back home here you can order Tuscan zolfini baked beans). On the buffet, fruits come whole, or cut and mixed, or cut and served alone, with tongs as well as spoons - so useful for whole berries. Butter is a white round, in a china beurriere, and preserves, again, are from Azienda Agrimonta.
After I had finished reading the increasingly depressing financial news of our beautiful world, I switched to this luxury hotel's selection of things to do, right here in fabulous Florence. The concierge suggests visiting Lorenzo Villoresi perfumery, or the silversmith Paolo Pagliai in Oltrarno. On Ponte Vecchio there are 19th century antiques at Giovanni Melli and on offer too are Pampaloni silverware at silverware and antique paintings and drawings at Damiano Lapiccirella. For bespoke leatherware, the concierge suggests Mannina, on via Guicciardini. I put them all on the list, to quote Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado. Next time.
On to England. I arrived at 10pm precisely at Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire, half an hour from Heathrow. As soon as I turned off the road to go up the gracious drive, winding up through the 580-acre estate that is Four Seasons Hampshire, immediately a calm came over me. I relaxed. I was home in the green pastures of England. After eight minutes of this euphoria I pulled up in front of the Georgian house, originally built in 1728 for the Mildmay family - sadly, they then had to
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sell on in 1933 to pay off an adultery case. Those were the days. As I pulled up, Duty Manager Liam, or was he Lee?, appeared miraculously through the front door. Welcome, come on in, how was your day? I did not tell him about the ghastly traffic on the Italian motorways or the crowds at the airport. It is lovely to be home, I said. All I can remember initially of room 1102, in the main manor house, was a sense of cream calm, with the green of the carpet pattern and a pink hydrangea flower arrangement and bottles of water and real coffee 'because we know you like it'. I delicately cut into the white peach that sat on a slate slab, thinking back to Florence and its Bellinis. This whole fruit's perfume lasted all the way down my throat. It needed something with which to drink a toast to the night, and fortunately a half-bottle of Ridge 2003 California Monte Bello waited. I somehow managed to remove its silver seal and pull the cork - gosh I hate bottles with corks. A glass of that wine - 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 8% Merlot and 7% Petit Verdot, made by four Stanford Research Institute engineers, led by Dave Bennion - tasted really really good. I knew I would sleep well.
Sure enough, at 6:30 the following day I was already up and away. The spa, which is run by the hotel with consultancy advice from ESPA International, opens at six, and the lovely oh-so-friendly Carol was alert and helpful. Would I like some coffee before going cycling? A display in fact offers fabulous judt-squeezed orange juice, real and decaf coffee, and little mini muffins. Carol's colleague escorted me into the hotel's herb garden, alive with frolicking rabbits. I had my choce of well-maintained bicycles (they even have kids' back-wheel seats, and extenders). I was given a helmut and the saddle was adjusted. I set off, along the banks of the Basingstoke Canal, a mile away. I cycled along a narrow towpath, under 18th century brick bridges, nothing but me, overflowing rhododendra bushes and other greenery, and tall trees. Back at the spa half an hour later, it was time for a few laps of the lovely in-conservatory pool, and I showered there before main breakfast.
Breakfast at Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire is in Seasons, an elegant lavender and brown room with big windows looking out at the rolling landscape. Manager Clement welcomed me, shared news of his baby daughter. An enormous buffet seemed to take up half the room. Wood tables are set with saffron-colored mats, Wedgwood china and pots of Tiptree preserve, and a purple protea in a glass dish. I loved the choice of Loseley real-cream fuit yogurts, from the Yorkshire Dales in the North of England, or home-made plain yogurt on mango coulis. There were enough different fruits, and cereals, and cold cuts and hot items to feed Napoleon's army - I say this, deliberately, because one suspects that the French eat better on the move than the meals-ready-to-go that many militia today apparently have to suffer. The muffins here are maxi size, the juice was bright sunshine yellow. Coffee was nicely strong, background music was à la Diana Ross, there was a choice of serious or monosyllabic daily newspapers.
Lasting breakfast memory here? The mini-baguettes and the fabulous, absolutely fabulous fresh butter. This is specially made for Four Seasons Hampshire by the Smales family's Lyburn Farm in the nearby New Forest: the Lyburn Freisian Holstein herd also produces a range of artisan cheeses, which if the butter is anything to go by must be equally outstanding. One of Four Seasons Hotel Hampshire chefs, by the way, says that right now the Lyburn butter is particularly good as 'the cows have been feeding off so much lush summer grass'.
My 12 seasons' breakfast tasting was just an appetizer. I will go on to more.
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