What do the Hotel Employees Eat?

I started out in the hospitality industry at the very bottom, in a fast food franchise.  I would leave every shift at Subway with a sandwich in hand.  To this day, I have never eaten another Subway sandwich since I quit in junior year of high school.  Not that I don’t like them, trust me, just like everyone else, I think the bread baking in the oven smell is amazing whenever I walk by a Subway.  I don’t know, I just never really felt like I really wanted a Subway sandwich since then.  Then I ended up working in a Japanese restaurant where family meal (the industry term for the meal eaten by employees at the end of the night with everybody) was so amazing and I gained 5 pounds working there.  Eventually, I started working in hotels and this is where the variably employee dining became huge.  I have worked in some hotels where the employee dining is pretty decent and if you make friends with the chefs, they’ll even make you personalized grilled cheeses and tuna melts when you’re craving one.  I’ve also worked in other hotels where you’ll look at the mystery meat that’s probably been sitting there since the morning and you wonder if your starving stomach is worth trying whatever that thing is. 

Although many people reading this may have found it interesting to see my week in the restaurants, many probably didn’t think about what I ate in employee dining after.  So, I thought I’d give a glimpse into what is served at Petatillo, the employee dining “restaurant.”  I was actually really excited and curious about eating here because as amazing as being able to eat in the restaurants at Arenas Del Mar for a week, I really wanted to try some real traditional Costa Rican food that local people would eat on a daily basis, so this definitely has given that opportunity to try that.

All of the food here is cooked by Carmen, who I have deemed my “fake mom” while I’m here.  One constant at every meal is rice, beans, and iced tea or some kind of fruit juice.  There is sometimes some salad as well.  But the variety of the main part of the meal goes from fried fish, to soup, to some type of meat, to noodles.  A lot of the meat is cooked in a curry-like sauce that is delicious or something in something similar to a mix between BBQ and teriyaki sauce.  One of my favorites was the noodles, while the soup and fried fish were a bit more different.  The one thing similar though is that they’re all very tasty.  Although this is definitely not what I eat a home, it has that “home” taste simply because it’s home-cooked!  But, I’ll just let the pictures do the talking!