Michelle Spinei

The Breakfast Buffet

5:50 a.m. in Reykjavík is as dark as when you went to bed. You put on a pair of black pants, rubber-soled boots, down jacket, and shuffle past the cemetery. The Norwegian forest cat that haunts your neighborhood darts out from behind a parked car and your foot slides on black ice. The walk takes ten minutes. Your shift starts in seven.

Clocking in, you head to the basement to get changed. Someone stole your black polyester button-down from the dry cleaning rack so you take Gosia’s and head to the laundry room for an apron which smells like old milk despite multiple washings.

Upstairs you hear the kitchen buzzing and know the chef is heating frozen croissants in the oven, chopping pineapple, melons, and oranges, and brewing a large carafe of coffee for the staff. The chiller stinks like ham and overripe fruit, and you take out the tray of white chrysanthemums, the flower of death, to place on the tables where hotel guests will eat breakfast before adventuring in the Icelandic countryside. Usually on a bus tour. Hopefully without becoming one of the ever-increasing statistics of tourist accidents. You set the flowers on the tables as your shift manager passively-aggressively puts out the cutlery. She knows you were late.

Whitney Houston’s music is blasting which means your favorite breakfast chef is working. You slip into the kitchen and take a piece of bacon off the sheet pan, something the other breakfast chef would never let you do. 

The schedule says you’ll be working with another student, a former journalist who either left his country because he wanted to or because he had to. He’s late like you and has a sleep line running down the left side of his face.

“Mig vantar,” he says. “It means ‘to want,’ and it’s the polite way of ordering something.” He forgot to brush his teeth this morning.

“I thought it was Ég ætla fá,” you say. 

He corrects you. “It’s definitely mig vantar.” There are no Icelanders working this shift to verify, so you add this phrase to your collection, like a magpie adding bits to its nest.

Whitney wants to dance and you want to drink your first cup of coffee. But first, the breakfast buffet must be assembled. The daily performance of abundance despite the fact that according to the ancient Norse calendar it’s Mörsugur, the fat sucking month, a time of scarcity. You wordlessly move heavy plates, cups, and serving dishes to the front of the house. You set out salt and pepper shakers and light candles. The morning is inky black, the trees across the plaza are still dressed in Christmas lights.

Every shift is the same: slices of tomato, cucumber, and hard boiled eggs, strips of smoked salmon, a platter of chopped fruit. Baskets of croissants that look better than they taste. Jars of skyr. Bacon. Sausage. An omelette that you’ve learned to avoid after seeing it poured from a plastic jug. 

There’s one hour to set up before the guests arrive. It’s in this moment, the calm before feeding time, that you sneak into the kitchen for coffee and a quick gossip session with the chef. The music changes to generic lounge. It’s time.

Being a breakfast attendant is like watching children. You ask for the room number, direct half-asleep guests to the coffee, bring extra napkins. They’ve dropped their fork and need another. They didn’t find the type of tea they like. Do you have oat milk? Yes, it says it there on the label. 

They’re sleepy. You’re sleepy. They eat the food you’ll get in three hours, when it’s cold and there’s no protein in sight. But now, they’ve settled deep into their breakfast. 

There’s something beautiful about a room full of forty people performing a synchronized choreography of chewing and slurping. Europeans tuck into their plates with fork in left hand, knife in right. Americans use a fork for everything, even to cut their omelette. The low murmur of conversation. The coffee refills. The second helpings. The lull in the dining room.

If you were a smoker, you’d head to the alleyway, where your friend at reception sometimes catches drunk people having sex. But you’re not, so you slip into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. You palm a strip of bacon on your way to the dishwashing station. 

The dishwasher winks when he catches you eating crouched near the garbage cans. It’s you, the bacon, and the coffee. A trinity of oneness. The crunch of the bacon. The bitterness of the brew. In a moment you’ll become aware of the baked bean smell wafting from the trash and the sound of water spraying and plates clanging, but you savor the stillness until all you’re left with are greasy fingers.

The journalist scrapes fruit rinds into the bin and you jump to your feet. Back in the dining room, the squeak of chairs pushed back from tables is the signal to clear plates, clean, and reset. You overhear clips of conversations about where the guests will be going: off to the frozen waterfalls, geysers, and the greenhouse tomato farm. When was the last time you left the city? 

The sky is tri-colored in wide bands of blue, pink, and white. Soon you’ll be able to break down the buffet and walk past the frozen pond to the university for a day of classes. The geese and swans honk as you pass. There are crowds of tourists taking pictures of the birds and venturing out on the ice. Maybe you waited on some of them this morning. You try to see the scene as they do, as you did when you first moved here. The sunlight bouncing off City Hall, the green roof of Fríkirkjan, Mount Esja covered in snow, ice skaters lacing up their boots—a frozen landscape you told yourself you’d never take for granted.