Starting off the next part of the trip to Cape Verde series – I am starting off random posts on food and let’s start off with breakfast as that was the first meal we had the next day after we had checked in the hotel.
As earlier mentioned, the dining area of the hotel was rather small – probably 6 small tables that could accommodate 15 – 18 people (sometimes even less). The tables for the food and drinks also took space in the dining area.
On one side is the various types of breads, cookies, pastries and cakes (sometimes pizza) – one of my favourite is a bun with slices of ham or chicken. It is freshly done every morning except for some occasions the restaurant recycles the old ones (you will noticed – it will be cold instead of the usual piping hot). I would usually skip cakes unless I have gotten bored with other food or when I know it is baked fresh.
The reason is for cakes, the guests rarely take them so you can expect the same cake to be served for 2-3 days (we noticed that the staff would put the unfinished cake into the fridge and serve it again the next day). This explains the cold cake in the morning. This is also one area you will find a lot of flies in the morning – so we have to keep a close eye on which food looked fresher.
There were plenty juices, coffee and tea in the morning and this is arranged at the entrance – the best is orange juice is seemed a bit more fresh compared to other juice. The healthier one would be lime inside iced water or black coffee without sugar. I suspect that some of these juices is not done fresh every morning as well – they sometimes add water into the existing bottle of juice so the dilution is sometimes too obvious.
The main dish for breakfast is scrambled eggs, sausages (chicken or pork), cooked egg plant (which is great and I did not mind having it on daily basis) and cooked chickpeas with potatoes (I believe it is called Cachupa frita). Sometimes we will have mushroom stew on the menu in place of cooked eggplant. And basically this is on the menu every day except for 1 -2 occasions when they decided to change it.
For the scrambled egg, unfortunately it is cooked with limited portion so if you are late, there is no more scrambled eggs for breakfast. This was the moment when we will miss Malaysian breakfast where they actually serve rice for breakfast – rice either in form of nasi goreng or nasi lemak. We also miss fried noodles for breakfast.
For the more health conscious ones, there are also corn flakes and oats with hot milk or hot water for breakfast. Personally for me, it is not filling in the morning but some days it is good enough once we get bored with other food on the menu.
And top off the breakfast in the morning is a multiple choices of yoghurts and fruits. I usually opt for plain yoghurts instead fruits mainly because the most of fruits (papaya) served are not ripe (sometimes over-ripe) and the skin is not cut (not sure if the hotel staff is lazy to do this or it is how they serve the fruits in this part of the world). And then there was a moment when we found maggots on the over-ripped papayas.
To be continued in Part 2..