A Lesson Learned

By Elisabeth Fondell

Upon returning to Malmö, Sweden after a trip to the Baltics, my friend Hilda and I feasted in style at a hotel breakfast buffet. Not surprisingly, it was one hundred times better than a hotel breakfast in the U.S. complete with a Kalle caviar paste dispenser, a table of fine cheeses and meats, a muesli and yogurt bar, perfectly soft-boiled eggs, a multitude of herrings, heaps of fresh fruit, freshly baked breads of all varieties, and bottomless dark Swedish coffee.

Being from a country where it’s more common to encounter a rubbery hard-boiled egg with a graying, powdery yolk than an egg cooked to perfection at anything shy of a sit down restaurant, it was a welcome change.

As we gazed out the windows at the Danish-inspired buildings of Malmö’s historic city center, we recounted highlights of our trip to Vilnius and attacked our crowded plates with the force of hungry travelers back home amidst familiarity.

The lesson learned is this: always say yes to hotel breakfast buffets in foreign countries.

_____

This photo won the Nordic Food Photography Contest sponsored by the Swedish American Museum in Chicago and was exhibited at their gallery as part of Nordic: A Photographic Essay of Landscapes, Food and Peopleby Magnus Nilsson, acclaimed chef at Fäviken, cookbook author, and photographer based in Sweden.