Hotel breakfast: Can you stomach $15 oatmeal?
NEW YORK - Oatmeal"s supposed to help reduce your risk of heart disease - but not if you"re eating it at a high-end hotel in the USA"s most expensive hotel city.
In some high-end New York hotels, the price of a hot bowl of oats just might give you a heart attack.
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At the famed Algonquin Hotel in Times Square, for instance, a "bowl" cost $15 - and it"s the cheapest thing on the menu.
The $15 price, by the way, isn"t at all out of line with other high-end hotels. In fact, it just might be on the low end. Via Twitter, reader and Meeting Planner @MeetingRef told me that at the Grand Hyatt New York hotel last week, "room service had a bowl of cereal that was over $20. Oatmeal was similar. Thank goodness for club lounge!"
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And apparently oatmeal comes at a premium outside the Big Apple. In March 2010, @MeetingRef told me she paid $16.27, including tax, for oatmeal at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Milwaukee.
If you"ve seen similarly priced or higher-priced oatmeal on hotel menus, I hope you"ll tell us about it in a comment.
Algonquin"s oatmeal: Good but pricey
When I had breakfast at the Algonquin earlier this month, I found a $15 oatmeal option that was made with cream. I asked for the straight-ahead kind so I could add my own low-fat milk. At $15, by the way, it happened to be cheapest hot meal choice on the menu (see photo).
The bowl I had (see photo) tasted good and arrived nicely presented.
The oatmeal was topped with a few apple slices (yes, those are apples slices), plus sides of rai