Rethink breakfast

Unexpected flavours, idealistic textures and a new idea of a meal for the daily ritual of breakfast. Tastes, ingredients and culinary traditions are now being mixed up. Here's how catering is riding the change in the history of breakfast.

The Mulino Bianco style canteen was the forbidden dream of our childhood. The situation that we would all have liked to live on awakening but that we would never have dreamed of expecting from our mother; a career woman or alpha housewife always attentive to Sunday lunch but who was less dedicated to the daily routine of breakfast. Now the fastest meal of the west consumed in the sounds of cups of cow's milk, freshly squeezed orange and a roll. Fresh as dew, sunny even in the greyness of winter, thankful to the day that is born and anxious to give smiles and beautiful words to their guests, mothers, fathers, children and relatives acquired of the Mulino Bianco are all gathered around the table, to consume in cheerfulness and devotion the most important meal of the day: breakfast. Blessed are they - you would say - who are able to carve out a moment of joyful eating before the day begins. But who believes it - think a moment before envying them; where do you find the strength to flaunt so much joie de vivre when you are immersed in the timeframe of the school bell and stamp on the card?!

This is the basic paradox that substantiates the indiscreet charm of the bourgeois breakfast: we would like to do it calmly but we rarely find the time and space necessary to celebrate a ritual that coincides with the healthy habit of filling our belly with food at the moment when metabolism is at its maximum efficiency.
In 2016-2017 there was a constant increase in the number of people who consider it a must-have: breakfast is not an optional extra but a tasty apostrophe between good words and the day. 361 meals each in a calendar year is the average consumption, according to surveys by Nielsen, who has investigated the eating habits of citizens from the four continents (Europe, Asia, America, Oceania): breakfast is therefore a global daily event. 70% of the world's population prefers it at home and is reinventing it in their own image and likeness, taking inspiration from the latest trends in Food&Beverage that reveal, in addition to the eating habits of contemporary cosmopolitanism, the most popular consumption trends for breakfast of the new millennium based on three essential paradigms:

Intercultural, interconnected and extremely interested in everything that happens beyond the radius of immediate perception. The world is now within easy reach, or rather, the world of the stomach. And if food and wine tourism is still a ravine, it is true that it is no longer necessary to go to the Himalayas to have pink salt or go to Mexico to eat authentic chili. The streets of food are endless and all converge towards the table in our home.

Foodora, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Glovo, and Amazon Prime deliveries are now a ruthless competition to the ordinary take away. We can eat what we want, where we feel like it and when we like it most. All the main catering chains and smart retailers are now starting from this assumption and have organised themselves to offer their customers personalised, spreadable home delivery services over 24 hours. And so that no desire remains unexpressed, even the cuisine inspired by the principles of slow food lends itself to consumption in fast food mode. The meatballs end up in a cake, the lobster in a sandwich and the avocado reinvents itself in sweet and savoury preparations; always respecting the original essence of the dish and a balanced nutritional contribution.

The sharing economy (economy of services) is rewriting the dictates of the offer in the catering sector: food image consultants, food bloggers, chefs at home, location rentals with restaurant kitchens and provisions include where to make a beautiful display of their culinary skills. Going there to get the ready meal is no longer trendy. In the States food app fashion is raging through smartphones. Some examples? Munchery, which distributes personalized meals cooked with love throughout North America by innovative chefs; Sprig, for the strangest shopping you can imagine; Pasta on Demand that exports pasta democracy between the New Yorkers of Manhattan, thanks to the partnership between Micheal White - the American guru of the first in Italian way - and UberEats; New York Green Summit Group that proposes itself in the virtual catering arena with eight web mini-sites, each dedicated to a specific food trend: Leafage for salads, Butcher Block for meat sandwiches, Maya Blue for Mexican cuisine, Grind for meatballs - employees.

Food Porn

The Babylon of taste and flavour: you could describe in these terms the offer for breakfast at the St. Regis Grand Hotel in Mumba. Every morning fifteen chefs wake up knowing that they will have to run faster than their customers to celebrate their awakening with a succulent breakfast buffet inspired by the principles of Seven Kingdom Kitchen, the kitchen of the Seven Kingdoms. The watchword is contamination: flavours, ingredients and culinary traditions to offer the customer unexpected flavours, unlikely textures and an unusual eating experience for breakfast in the morning, increasingly similar to a lunch in advance. Multicereal as the Dutch like, rich in omega-3 in Scandinavian tradition, spicy for the fascination of the exotic, cruelty free and respectful of the principles of organic veganism and fair trade, lactose and gluten free for intolerants, without palm oil and hydrogenated fats for home-made integralists.

Breakfast at St. Regis, as in other prestigious luxury hotels, is a synaesthetic journey through smells, colours and flavours that requires an exhibition area of several square meters. On the dessert counter there is an abundance of yogurt, homemade ice cream, cakes, croissants and very fine French patisserie, next to the workstation that produces in real time waffles, churros, pancakes with an almost infinite range of syrups, jams, honeys and creams. Travelling from dried fruit and cereals in raw form and processed in wheat, you arrive at the health zone with fruits and vegetables to eat bare and raw or to assemble in salads and smoothies. And finally we reach the hot-zone where we serve hot dishes that are representative of every ethnicity: Chinese ravioli, ramen, sushi, sashimi, curry chicken, bhaji and Indian pores, baked potatoes with tzatziki, baked beans, eggs&bacon, Argentine asado, tortillas and empanadas, and so on.
And as people proverbially eat even with their eyes, implantation is no longer a negligible detail. Cup and saucer blend together in the privileged shape of the wooden or ceramic bowl - acai, pokè and bibimbap - which enhances the mixture of flavours and contributes to a sense of visual satiety.

Yes, eat. But what?

Breakfast has no more standards or prescriptions, as shown by the menus in the 7-15 hourly period of hotels and restaurant bars. In praising the all-day breakfast paradigm - that is, the habit of eating in the early hours of the day a large meal that includes sugars, carbohydrates, vitamins, proteins and fats - several restaurateurs have expanded the offer of food and reconverted their menus with the ambition of intercepting the tastes of a target of consumers who live in the perspective of the melting pot. At the Jam Restaurant in Chicago, it is a triumph of quiche, french toast, omelette, burger and pastrami where ingredients combine according to the logic of sweet-salted. At Seatown Restaurant Seattle, you can eat oysters for breakfast. While in Milan, at the TOM or by IlovePoke, the Hawaiian pokè bowl of raw fish, soya, algae, sesame oil, onions, chili pepper, vegetables, spices of the pacific is ordered. Eggslut, the egg franchise based on eggs, offers a wide range of egg-burgers: bread of every type filled with eggs cooked in all sauces. For breakfast "100% botanical and 99% organic" - as the pay-off that accompanies the logo says - we go from Le Botaniste. And from love for bio to wild passion, the step is short. At Giraffe Manor in Nairobi, guests of the residence willing to get up from bed at the first light of dawn, can have breakfast with giraffes overlooking the hall from the large windows of the dining room in neo-colonial style. And at the Singapore Zoo, before visiting the biopark, there is a snack among the most docile monkey specimens on the terrace of the restaurant Ah Meng, which takes its name from the mascot of the city of Singapore, the female orangotango Ah Meng.

Just coffee, please

The fanatics of the morning espresso, forget the hot black coffee that is served at the bar counter: even a simple coffee can be transformed into a tasting experience, if consumed in the lounges of coffee in London. From the roaster to the consumer: in these multifunctional spaces, the type of grain, the grinding grain and the method of preparation are chosen. Workshopcoffee and Ozonecoffee, in addition to offering free wifi, coworking stations, newspaper library and bookshop, organize theoretical and practical workshops on the art of good coffee, and training courses for aspiring mixers of different varieties of arabica: bases of roasting and grinding of the bean, and methods of coffee preparation with tools and stills in steam punk style, far from the traditionalist imaginary of the Bialetti mocha. And to complete the offer with a good companion, we prefer partnerships with Instagram's best-loved bakers and pastry chefs, such as Fabrique Bakery.