Hotel Breakfasts

Every Thursday morning I walk from home to the Georgetown Washington Sports to teach my 6:30 spin class, then I walk along M Street from Georgetown 15 blocks east to work. Along that route I pass through an area known as West End, which features several swank hotels, two of which have restaurants facing the sidewalk. I always get a little kick out of looking in to see all the business people in there having their breakfasts; it's fun to see who eats what, their body language as they interact, who seems relaxed, who is nervous and kissing up. One restaurant is in the Park Hyatt, which, when I walked by a couple weeks ago, was abruptly closed, and the furniture being liqudated. According to the web site though, they are doing a big renovation.

The other hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, also has a kitchen with big windows, and I like to see the cooks in there milling around. Well today the kitchen was deserted, and the restaurant drapes were all closed. What's up? Not enough business? It all seemed kind of depressing.

Maybe partly because watching these travellers having their hotel restaurant breakfasts took me back to the good old days of ICE, when we could go to GenCon in Milwaukee every year, and almost every time we would stay at the grand old Marc Plaza Hotel (now it's the Hilton Milwaukee City Center). And of course we would have breakfast every morning in the hotel. I would have fresh squeezed OJ. Going to the convention always seemed like such a treat, even though we spent most of the day manning a both at the show hawking games or doing demonstrations. But at night we would hang out with the other game company people, like the very hot Weick brothers from White Wolf, or Fred Malmberg from Target in Stockholm, other other fun people. Working at ICE was often stressful and even enough to give me a nervous breakdown, but it sure could be fun sometimes.

Oh and just yesterday at home while rooting around in my toolbox for a drill bit, I came upon a matchbook from, of course, the Marc Plaza Hotel.