I'm a breakfast buffet burglar! The hotel breakfast hacks that save me a fortune on holiday: ROSIE GREEN

See more Daily Mail on Google - save us as a Preferred Source Updated: 20:11 EDT, 4 September 2026 My children know that ordering lunch on holiday is an activity reserved for other families. Families with euros to burn. They have been trained from a young age in the art of nicking their next meal from the breakfast buffet, learning early (while still in possession of baby teeth) that they must survive till dinner on what they’ve managed to squirrel from the hot food station, pocket from the pastries section or filch from the fresh fruit basket. Think contraband croissants, boosted bananas and smuggled sarnies. Not for them a €30 hamburger and a €10 smoothie come 2pm.They’ll be eating what they’ve foraged. It’s a good life lesson in resilience and ingenuity.All this requires training and, after many years frequenting fancy hotels on minimal budget, I consider myself a mistress in the dark art of petit-déjeuner pilfering. You need the right equipment: a roomy beach bag must be taken to breakfast. It needs to contain a small towel (we will return to this later), three or four Tupperware boxes and some sealable sandwich bags (at a pinch, you can use the ones they give you at airport security though, caveat, they are a little small).The covert operation goes like this. Find a suitably located table not too far from the action (you don’t want to be traversing the length of the restaurant with your loaded plate but, equally, you don’t want to be highly visible when stashing away your contraband foodstuffs). The aim is to acquire a main meal, pudding and afternoon snackI have learnt that one in the corner is optimal. Then you go about selecting your breakfast as any normal person does, wafting around the pancakes and considering the merits of the fruit salad with an air of insouciance. This is the reconnaissance mission, sussing out where staff are located and what foodstuffs are compatible with being stuffed in a bag and left to sweat in 35-degree heat for three hours. Then, after you are satiated, you order another hot beverage. The time spent waiting for, and then drinking, said beverage, is when you refresh tactics with the troops and send them out on their mission. One lookout remains at the base, sounding the alarm if waiting staff come too close. Once at the food counters, you need to think strategically – the aim is to acquire a main meal, pudding and afternoon snack. For this you require bread to form a sandwich (butter it at the table), layering in hard cheese or sliced meat (refrigeration is often not possible so the key is nothing with squidge).For this reason tomatoes are not advised. Nor mayo. These sandwiches can be constructed at the table and it doesn’t look too suspicious because the Germans (astoundingly) really do eat this sort of thing before 10am. For pudding you want a muffin or dry pastry – pain au chocolat at a push – as moist things will melt and unidentified mush is not so appetising (though obvs you will have to eat it if that happens). A yogurt pot is useful. I also like to ask for a couple of hard-boiled eggs as the shell is nature’s own packaging. My family do complain about the smell if I eat them in a confined space, to which I say ‘by all means buy me a €23 club sandwich with your own money, kids’.This all needs to be surreptitiously placed in the Tupperware (sandwiches) and bags (pastries) and dropped in a casual way into the beach bag. Said bag is located under the table, right in the middle, to make it accessible to all contributors. My mother (82) is excused from any activity on account of her age and lack of mobility. I tried to enlist her as a lookout but she was, how do I say this, rubbish. When we have accumulated our stash the towel then comes into play, as it is placed on top of the Tupperware to conceal our spoils.If we think we’ve been clocked we deploy a number of tactics. My daughter taps into her pretty privilege. My mother feigns innocence and I just style it out. As we leave there’s always a frisson of excitement. Then the dry cheese sandwich eaten surreptitiously poolside tastes like god’s own food.I’ve now brought my boyfriend into the gang. But men are the major flaw in the plan. Both he and my son have generally eaten their entire haul by 11.32am so I need to order that bloody burger anyway.