The Food / Das Essen

Most hotels and pensions on Europe offer bed and breakfast. Many have a half board option with breakfast and dinner provided. It is harder to find an all-inclusive hotel like we stayed at in Turkey, but the Hotel Sonnwies comes close.

The day begins with a breakfast buffet: breads and croissants, homemade jams and local honey (five varieties!), bowls of various yogurts and an entire buffet line devoted to muesli and grains and seeds and dried fruits to sprinkle on it. Another section is devoted to fresh fruit: kiwi, melon, pineapple, and fresh fruit salad. Cold cuts and cheese and hardboiled eggs round out the regular fare, but there is also a hot station offering eggs of your choice and other specials like waffles. The muesli bar is repeated at kids’ height so that the children can help themselves.

A few hours later, it’s lunch time. It’s a smaller meal with a salad bar, breads, soup, and a hot meal buffet. One day it’s turkey in a delightfully light and tasty sauce with a mashed potato bake and peapods and the next it’s fried chicken with homemade French fries and stir fried vegetables. Kids have their own buffet, if those options don’t suit them with a simplified version of the hot option as well as a pasta bar with a couple sauces to choose from.

At 3:00 o’clock it’s cake time, three different cakes, all home made, served in the ‘small’ dining room. Coffee and tea is also on hand. In case you are thirsty or hungry between any of these official meal/food times, the juice bar is open all day (with glasses and carafes so that you can juice or water outside with you to the patio). There is also a basket of Sonnwies orchard grown apples for the taking around the clock.

And then comes dinner. Cleverly, the children’s buffet has food for the kids ready as soon as they arrive to quell their hunger. Nikolas delights in serving himself juice and salad and choosing out his main course. Later he goes back to pick out a dessert, usually ice cream.

The adults have a totally different experience. We are used to delicious, hearty fare at the hotels we have stayed in. The Sonnwies serves delicious, hearty fare but turns it ino first class cuisine. There is an expansive salad bar to help yourself to, and then the waitress asks if you are ready to begin. This starts a succession of four exquisitely prepared courses – soup or fruit milk, an appetizer, a main course, and a dessert. As Peter says at each meal, “It is the prettiest food I have ever eaten.” Each course is like something you’d see in the final rounds of Top Chef or some other gourmet TV show – small portions (that add up to a more than satisfying meal) that are as elegant as they are tasty.

It takes at least an hour and a half to work through the meal, something that can be a challenge when the kids’ buffet allows Nikolas to whip through his meal in a fraction of the time. Obviously, that’s one of the perks of the Mini Club. Kids can eat with the Mini Club or be delivered to the Mini Club when they are finished eating with you so that the adults can eat an amazing meal in peace!