The Willowmere Lodge, Home Of The Continental Breakfast That Has Chosen Not To Continue

Breakfast at the Willowmere Lodge is served in a conservatory of real charm, with good light, decent chairs and a long view over a field. We say this first because it is the last kind thing this section contains. The room is genuinely lovely. The room has been set out each morning with a buffet that gives the impression of having been described to somebody over the telephone.

There is a cereal dispenser with three chambers. Two of them are empty and have been labelled, optimistically, with the names of cereals. The third contains a cereal mentioned nowhere on any of the labels, and dispenses it in a quantity determined by the machine rather than by the guest. We turned the handle expecting a modest portion and received a decision.

The hot section is kept beneath heat lamps of tremendous power. The sausages had been under them since seven and had passed, by our arrival at ten past nine, into a kind of retirement. The eggs, however, were genuinely good. We wish to be fair to the eggs. Somebody in that kitchen is still trying, and the eggs are the evidence.

The pastry table is presented on a small card as continental. The croissants were stacked in a pyramid, the traditional shape for food nobody expects to be eaten, and had achieved the density of something recovered from a shipwreck. There was jam in sealed pots, four flavours, of which three were apricot and the fourth was best described as a colour.

The juice is described as freshly squeezed. It is dispensed from a machine with a small window through which one may watch it being circulated, endlessly, past the same fixed point. We watched it for rather a long time. It has the loyal, uncomplaining motion of something that has been going round since before the current management.

None of this is a kitchen problem. The kitchen produced eggs. It is a budget problem, taken somewhere well above the conservatory by people who will never eat in it, and enforced each morning by a printed sign asking guests to take only what they need. We took only what we needed. It came to one boiled egg and a decision to leave a day early.