Why you should always raid the hotel buffet - and go back for seconds

At home, my breakfasts are inevitably dull and dutifully healthy, but while travelling overseas, it's a no-holds-barred, no-calories-counted, free-for-all at the breakfast buffet.

Not only are buffet breakfasts the stuff of childhood fantasies (cake for breakfast!), they're also educational, giving an insight into how other cultures break their fast. Or at least that's how I justify my multiple plates.

In Italy, breakfast fare is unequivocally skewed to the sweet. "Crema o ricotta, signora?" the owner of a B&B in a small town in Sicily asks as she stands waiting to fill my cannoli. Also part of the buffet offering are jammy apricot or blackberry crostata, semolina cake, pistachio-custard-filled croissants known as cornetti, and assorted sweet biscuits. And, naturalmente, no Italian breakfast table is ever complete without an outsized jar of Nutella. On a recent stay in a hotel in Calabria, it was a literal bucket with a pump-action nozzle.

In India, the focus was more savoury - dinner-as-breakfast with curries and rice, dhals and dosa and waitstaff, obviously well-practised buffet binge enablers, not only offering to fetch more for me when I took a breather in the "eat, collect, repeat" cycle, but insisting on packing me a to-go box.

It's in bigger hotels, which have to provide breakfast standards for a broad international clientele, however, I feel like I've really won the breakfast lottery. There's no way I'm filling my plate with the familiar (pancakes, bacon and eggs, yoghurt with muesli) when there's a culinary world tour to be taken, with paratha or pide, congee or coconut sticky rice, dumplings dipped in black vinegar or spicy sauce, pho with handfuls of fresh herbs and crunchy bean sprouts, a perfect flaky pain au chocolat or sweet pastel de nata.

The only downside to the breakfast buffet, regardless of its location, is the universally awful coffee. It's like offering cask wine at a fancy degustation dinner.