More hotels spruce up breakfast offerings

— -- Move over pancakes and omelets. Make room for lobster hash and five-spiced waffles with duck confit.

A growing number of hotels, particularly upscale ones, are treating breakfast like dinner, offering gourmet specials in addition to common breakfast foods.

Special entrees can increase restaurant revenue, attract local residents and differentiate a hotel from its competitors. Chefs can be more creative and use more local or seasonal foods. Guests also benefit because they have more choices and, maybe, a more memorable hotel stay.

"There's a big emphasis on special menus," says Jeanne Bischoff, publisher of Hotel F&B, a food-and-beverage trade magazine.

"Breakfast may be a guest's only meal at a hotel or the last time a guest talks to a hotel representative before checking out," Bischoff says. "Hotels want a guest to leave with a good memory, and their culinary offerings can accomplish that."

Offering more breakfast specials comes at a time when many hotel kitchens are looking to satisfy guests by adding more healthy foods and organic items to their menus.

Hotel guests are becoming "more sophisticated and discriminating" with their palettes, says Giuseppe Pezzotti, senior lecturer at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration.

Breakfast specials this month at Le Merigot, a JW Marriott hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., include lobster hash with smoked paprika hollandaise and Kobe beef corned beef hash with fried organic eggs. The lobster dish cost $20, $4 more than the Kobe beef entree.

From special to regular menu item

At La Mansion del Rio in San Antonio, executive chef John Brand says he and guests were so pleased with a July breakfast special that it has become part of the permanent menu.

"It started as a blini, but now it's lemon ricotta pancakes with pine nuts and raspberries," says Brand about the $10 menu item.

Brand, a breakfast chef at four hotels in the past eight years, is fond of several entrees that he occasionally offers his morning diners. They include five-spiced waffles with duck confit, smoked salmon crepes and poached eggs over crab and cornbread.