London’s top hotels are now selling breakfast leftovers from £3.99 – I put them to the test

The NYX served Greg a pain au chocolat atop a pile of fried mushrooms

I suppose when you buy a “breakfast buffet surprise bag” you should be prepared for anything. But as I stood outside the Hotel NYX in Holborn and opened my suspiciously weighty box, nothing could have prepared me for what I found inside.

The Too Good to Go app offers food outlets the chance to get rid of their expiring produce before they legally have to bin it. In turn, it gives thrifty individuals the chance to purchase cheap food at strange hours.

It’s an important service. According to the UNEP’s Food Waste Index Report, 1.05bn tonnes of food is wasted globally per year, and hotel breakfast buffets are up there with the worst offenders.

Some London hotels have cottoned on. Increasingly, four- and five-star hotels in the capital are selling “surprise bags” to be picked up at the end of their breakfast services, usually between 10am and 11.30am.

The price of the boxes ranges from £4 to £5, reduced from as much as £22.99. Recently, I put in an order for five leftover hotel breakfasts in one of London’s smartest quarters to see what I could find.

The results were, well, a mixed bag.

Mercure Hotel – rubbery scrambled eggs eaten with your fingers

£3.99 (usually £12)

First up, the four-star Mercure Hotel on Southampton Row. New to this lark, I walked to the reception desk waving my phone and the receptionist pointed me into the buffet area. She knew my type.

I peeked through the kitchen window and watched as a chef piled food into the box. The full English portion was generous, although the eggs appeared to have been first scrambled when David Cameron was prime minister.

The Mercure Hotel offered a generous full English

Crucially, when I asked for disposable cutlery, they could not assist. A problem, unless you are the sort of person who has a spork in your bag at all times, or who is willing to steal metal crockery from a four-star hotel...

The verdict?

6/10

Bedford Hotel – a ‘help yourself’ system

£5 (usually £15)

Across the road, the Bedford Hotel was a rather different experience. As I walked into the breakfast area, where one couple was finishing up, a member of staff handed me a box and simply pointed towards the self-serve hot containers.

“Help yourself,” he said.

Were I so inclined, I could have filled up my box with 30 sausages and eight rashers of bacon. Instead, I opted for a more reasonable array of deep-fried morsels. Perhaps pushing my luck, I asked if there were any pastries or fruit, to which the man said no. This was the only hotel that offered me the chance to select my own breakfast. For this, the gift of sweet, sweet autonomy, it gets a good score.

The verdict?

7/10

The NYX – a breakfast abomination

£4.99 (usually £22.99)

One day, in the future, a therapist will ask me when I think things started to go downhill. “August 20, 2025,” I will tell them. The day I bought a surprise breakfast buffet box from the Hotel NYX.

In the foyer there were arcade game machines, colourful lighting and a bronze lion’s head stuck to the wall. It was like what comes up on Pinterest when you search “funky design”.

When I opened my surprise buffet offering, I was indeed quite surprised to find a heavy box of boiled potatoes, sitting on top of a row of sausages, served with a sprinkling of fried mushrooms. Plonked on top, with the mushroom juices seeping into its backside, was a pain au chocolat.

Greg Dickinson tried five leftover hotel breakfasts in one of London’s smartest quarters

What was this, a sick joke? Was the chef trying to recreate the closing scene of Se7en using his or her limited resources at the buffet counter?

It was the first pastry I had received all morning, for which I was grateful. But it was infected with mushroom slobber.

The verdict?

3/10

Citadines – a lunch box and a coffee

£3.99 (usually £15)

Citadines Apart’hotel in Holborn impressed on multiple fronts. The staff were exceptionally friendly at all junctures, and while I was waiting for my surprise box, the lady in the buffet zone invited me to make myself a coffee using the machine.

Fine, the cappuccino wasn’t exactly a double-shot flat white served by a man with neck tattoos in a Hackney cafe called Bean Bros, but it was a kind gesture.

In my box were other “firsts” on my London breakfast buffet quest. A piece of fruit (a green apple), a bag of multiple (non-mushroom-infused) miniature pastries, a hot boiled egg, and a ham and cheese sandwich. Given I picked this up at 11am, a lunch box actually made more sense than a full English.

The verdict?

9/10

Radisson Blu – a generous two-box effort

£5 (usually £15)

By this point, I was admittedly breakfasted out, which wasn’t ideal considering that the Radisson Blu Tottenham Court Road’s offering was by far the most generous.

They supplied not one but two boxes: the first containing a full English (with my preferred cherry tomatoes, rather than beef tomato halves), and the other containing a real-life, full-sized croissant alongside chocolatey mini-pastry swirl things. For £5, this breakfast surprise bag could happily feed two people. Bravo.

The verdict?

8/10

So is it worth trying?

Too Good to Go is a fine idea and an example of technology solving a problem: namely, needless food waste. And, in this specific case study, it solved a secondary problem: Telegraph travel editors and writers getting hungry at around noon.

All of Greg’s hotel breakfasts

One snag is that all of the breakfast pick-up times were after 10am, and some were as late as 11–11.30am. So you are not really getting a breakfast in the traditional sense of the word (unless you are a student, or jet lagged), but rather a brunch or an early lunch. It is worth noting that many other chains, like Pret, Pizza Express and Gail’s, are also on the app.

What’s certain is that you’re getting a lot of food for your money. Not one of the hotels scrimped on this front. For the widest variety, a piece of fruit and (maybe) a coffee, Citadines is the best option. If you’re ravenous and want to fill your own box, it’s the Bedford, or the generous double-box offering at the Radisson Blu.

As for the NYX? I think I have said enough.

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