Thursday 31 May 2007

Hotel Arsinoe - Food

Breakfast at the hotel is a bit of a bun fight as the buffet area is a tad cramped for the number of guests (I'd hate to think what it'd be like in high season), with the big toasting machine inconveniently positioned at the end of the gangway between buffet tables. This means that there's always a crowd in the way here waiting for their toast, but vary when you come down for breakfast to find a quieter time. The breakfast area is out the back of the hotel and there is indoor seating for when it's raining but mostly everyone sits outside when it's fine. The food itself is OK, not brilliant, but then this is not an expensive hotel, and there's a fair variety so that most people will be able to find something to enjoy. There's the usual hot eggs, sausage etc. together with, breads, cheese, ham, tomatoes, yogurt, fruit, cereals, tea, coffee and fruit juice. It's not a hugh variety, but completely adequate to find something you can stoke up on for the day.
Dinner too, is a buffet, although in the main indoor restaurant, and is well made with not a vast of choice on the menu but certainly enought to suit most tastes. Again it gets quite crowded round the buffet tables and the fair is obviously aimed at the tourists, with very little in the way of local dishes (there's a cypriot night once a week which has a few more local dishes, but apparantly us Brits complain if we can't get food like at home!). There's normally a carved roast meat and a couple of other meat and fish choices in the buffet trays together with a couple of choices of potatos and veg each. There's also always a decent variety of salad dishes, and a soup of the day. For desert there's a choice of about 4 different cream cakes or profileroles or creme carmel or the like, or fresh fruit. All of the food changes each evening and it's generally very tasty, the salads often tasting a lot better than they look for change.
In the second week of our stay (last week of May) they moved the evening dining out the back to the same place as breakfast which was so much better to be able to sit outside in the evening. The main dinning room having to cater for 200 roomfulls of guest's feels more like school dinners than a holiday evening meal. But, you get what you pay for, so if you want intimate dinning in your hotel, then up the star rating of where you book. All in all, I'd say the food was excellent for the price we paid, and once the dinners moved outside the atmosphere for eating was much better too.
One other really good point is that if you are half board you can change your evening meal for lunch by letting the reception know in the morning. You have to do this either first thing of the day before as they need to know how many they are catering for before they start preparing lunch, but it does provide a good way to make the most of your money when you still want to go out for evening meals every now and then.

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