Oll-Inzovziv-Victory of Russia

Alexander Karasik, right now dying for a hotel persistent reception, continues to introduce us to the amazing world of international tourism. Hotel foods - for it you can spit with the bloody fragments of teeth, for this sandwich it is worth demanding moral compensation, and this pasta offends your patriotic feelings. Bonus - that in no case is in a catering.

The hotel guests are divided into two categories: those who "always have nothing to eat", and to the opposition, who "there are plenty of food here, what you complain about, damn idiots." The second category is a rare species, almost dying. Sometimes they do not eat at all at the hotel, preferring restaurants away from the toll-like civilization. And only for the sake of the spirit of the contradiction, they a priori do not agree with the overwhelming hungry masses.

Hotel food is a battlefield no worse than the edge of the Winterfell.

You don’t scold - you don’t eat: it is customary to find fault with food, to come up with elegant epithets like “soles for pigs”, to compare her with the diet of concentration camp prisoners (on the theme of the Holocaust and Stalin camps, customers are generally joking quite often) and dab off the full boarding house in last year's hotel. At the same time, tourists show miracles not only of oratory art, but also equilibrics, maneuvering at least three times a day in a crowded restaurant with four plates in their hands - eloquence causes an irrepressible appetite. For several years of work, I heard the phrase “There is nothing” about a billion at all, while I do not remember a single tourist who has lost weight after the vacation. In closed groups of social networks for travel workers, pictures often appear like “Breakfast at home: coffee and bun. Breakfast at the hotel: a kilogram of omelet, three pieces of cake, muesli with milk, ham and two cappuccino, but there is still nothing. ” Figure spitting in plates has long been a seasonal sport, like a beach volleyball, psychological discharge and a way of socialization - you can always discuss with a pretty girl at a neighboring table, what a disgusting carbonar today.

The price paid for the ticket is inversely proportional to the number of claims to Haute Cuisine. In July, when the hotel is already almost filled, but the prices are not yet “hot”, there are much less complaints about food than in August, with the same menu and chef. For some reason, people very often pay not even for quality, but for their confidence and calm that the service provided by them or the issued goods is really worthy (even if this is often not so). And vice versa: the less people pay, the stronger their fears that they will give them shit on a shovel for such a price. If everything suits them, then they just did not understand where they were deceived. The most difficult customers are people who booked their vacation on a Gruopon or on any other such site with discount coupons. With one hand they stretch behind a freebie, the other whims themselves and the staff around, because they are sure that free cheese only can you know where.

If you think that the syndrome of “there is nothing to eat” - an exclusively disease of our capricious compatriots, then you are very mistaken. Of course, sometimes you have to hear a complaint about undercooked pasta, too thin pizza and small portions of coffee from our brother - "I was specially underplored because I am Russian." But in general - there is never nothing to eat. A group of Poles once wrote to their tour operator a collective complaint that in our hotel (in Italy) they had to eat all the vacation, they did not give a single normal, that is, a Polish dish in a week. One German grandfather once after breakfast came to swear at the croissants, about which he broke the tooth. Imagine a soft puff croissant, ok, even a week ago, and even a two -month -old one, it does not matter. They can beat porcelain dolls on the head - it will become tasteless, but certainly not stone and dentist. I do not speak German, and my grandfather did not speak any other language anymore, and in order to clearly explain his problem, he spat on me with this bloodied tooth. One Italian tourist was so disappointed with a sandwich in a beach bar that he immediately came to me to announce that he had never felt so humiliated as when eating this sandwich, and he requires moral compensation. Many guests are wiring the whole vacation so that the ears are cracking, and after returning home, insight suddenly condescends that they were fed with slops all this time, and they are in a hurry to send a complaint about disgusting meals, demanding a refund for the trip. In my practice, the Austrians and Germans most often suffer from this.

Some guests warn in advance about their intolerance to lactose, celiac disease or other food allergies, and the hotel purchases special products for them. But this may not be enough - for example, clients with gluten intolerance quite often complain of food discrimination and the scarcity of their menu in comparison with the number of dishes for other tourists.

Often, who had funny clients ask: “Do you even eat it yourself?!” We eat, of course. If you haven't got it. The staff usually lunch at 11:30, and dinner at 18:30, while the restaurant is closed to visitors. The diet is pork, Findus fish sticks, pasta with tomato sauce and other cheapest food. Tea did not come to the resort.

It is beneficial to be friends with the chef -he can hide for you a tidbit that is not laid for a mere mortal. Or treat your favorite dessert. If yesterday the guests did not reach the fish or risotto, then the scraps can go to us-well, no skirmishes from dirty plates, of course, although they can do it somewhere, but I have not seen this, thank God. But very often these products go to other dishes. The salad under -eater salad can be mixed today with fresh salad leaves - and it will be as new. Uninhabited rice or pasta tomorrow can be a beautiful cold snack. In good hotels, of course, they monitor the freshness of products - they are afraid of checks from the sanitary and epidemiological station - and mix carefully. If suddenly the guests lay down with dysentery, the consequences for us will be the most deplorable, so you should not be scared and hunger. Moreover, it is unlikely that the situation in ordinary restaurants is very different. The only products that I now never eat in the catering are just in case are cutlets and any derivatives of eggs, where you can interfere with the satiety, as well as the boiled eggs themselves, which can be warmed up and served as fresh for a week. Everything else is not so dangerous. In hotels, they do not joke with the names more poial: if it is written that this is a lazy fish, then it is it, not a frozen Pelengas, which every day is called some new beautiful word. If they tell you that the chef itself caught these seafood at dawn, then they are staring over you. Yes, you are opposite the sea, but the fish sailed into your plate, most likely not from this coast, but from where it is cheaper.

The smaller the hotel, the easier it is to calculate the number of servings and the less chance that some food will remain and be on tomorrow. The main rule is to never throw anything away. Saving first of all. Moreover, if you eat on the Swedish table system, and do not choose dishes from the menu more expensive. If the hotel does not have its own confectioner (and if you are not four stars or more in the hotel, then it is most likely), all these fresh buns and cakes are usually purchased in advance tons at a ridiculous cost, stored frozen and warm up in the oven immediately before serving. You remember how much you paid for the ticket, right? In your opinion, the hotel will work at a loss for you and treat the dear guests with black caviar and champagne? No, it won't.

Sometimes “directorship pets”, that is, the reception staff is allowed not to eat in the dining room, but with guests, but this is also a doubt pleasure - be sure to at least one guest will sit next to his plate and begin to feed complaints about a poorly working air conditioner in a room, a dirty sea or high vacation prices. He doesn’t care that now you are not in the workplace. So it’s better to return to the dining room or not eat at all - in a couple of months the stomach begins to hate you, and pants - not to fasten. In public catering, you can eat painlessly for a week or two, but not five months in a row. By the end of the season, no employee will be the same: instead of magnetics and calendars, everyone will take away several extra pounds with him home as a souvenir. When there is a lot of work and stress, you have to move a little (you rarely leave the hotel territory), and there are more than left to get fat, fatty meat and sweets, and there is no choice to get fat or not to get fat.

In early summer, many of us go on a run in their free time, swim, ride a surf and swear that this season they will remain canes, but the closer August, the less free time (the day off is generally a phenomenon on the verge of science fiction), mortal fatigue accumulates, and all the more often the only desire remains to sleep. And we’ll think about all these nonsense like scales and diets later, in another life, when you have to go for food to the supermarket, carry it home, wash and remember how to cook, how to turn on a stove or oven at all. Or how normal people eat there, who, after ten types of hot dishes and a kilometer of snacks, still have nothing to eat.