Hotel Stay at Bitter and Sweet

Wow! For almost four years, N and I have managed to stay together. Who would have thought that? To reward ourselves for having been able to deal with that fact, we went to a hotel in the lovely village of Veenhuizen. So lovely, in fact, that it has three prisons. Three. And a prison museum as well. Apparently, the prisons house 1000 inmates, on a population of 250. The whole village seems to have been set up just to facilitate this penitentiary apparatus.
Each house in the village had some virtue printed on it. The general idea was, that as prisoners passed by on their way to prison duty work, they would repeatedly read those words and keep them imprinted in their memories. Thus, they might learn about the good values in life. Yeah, inmate re-education has come a long way since.


Anyhow, on the houses formerly used as a prison hospital, amongst others the words 'Bitter and Sweet' were printed (in this case, the pharmacist's office). A hotel was created from these separate houses, by linking them together, creating halls suitable for reception, dining room and lounge. In doing so, a nice combination of old (original hospital houses) and new (halls) was made. Hotel/B&B-facilities that were created by combining old and new architectural structures, are called Heritage Lodges ('Erfgoed Logies'). Their setup usually is more luxurious.


No exception to the Bitter and Sweet hotel. Spacious rooms, high-quality beds, use of luxurious materials in the dining hall. Included in our arrangement was a dinner, of which I did not take any pictures, due to the presence of lots of other guests and the all-too-well-known unwillingness to draw unwanted attention by using flash. The dinner wasn't a la carte unfortunately. It included gravad lax, peppercorn steak and coconut bavarois/chocolate parfait for dessert. All was well.


So, what remains to be reviewed, food-wise, are the coffee and apple-pie in the afternoon and the breakfast. Even though the hotel makes its own bread (a whole range of regular breads, sugar-bread, and breakfast rolls), each day served fresh at breakfast, it was hard to tell whether the pie was made by themselves too. It was obviously served cold, and so, if homemade, at least stored for some time in the refrigerator, so I couldn't tell whether it was made fresh (probably was). Tasted like any other regular apple pie, but still good.


Breakfast ranged from the aforementioned range of breads, croissants, pains au chocolats to cuts of cold meat, boiled eggs, yoghurt and cereals. Served with that were freshly squeezed orange juice, coffee and tea. All types of bread tasted like they were made fresh. Whole breads instead of being pre-sliced, could be sliced by the guests themselves, using a special kind of knife that moved in between guides fixed to the slicing board, to achieve perfectly straight cuts. Also worth mentioning was one of the two types of cheese, also self-sliceable. It was of a young kind, but included herbs and garlic! Very nice and soft.

Before going home, we took some freshly baked bread from the inhouse bread counter.


If N hadn't woken up in the middle of the night, with cough, wheezing, dyspnea, chills and sweating, leading me to believe she might have caught a pneumonia, causing us to contact the doctor's office, going back home to get medication and waiting until we could visit the office at 8 am, we would have had a very relaxing night (fortunately, no pneumonia - possibly some asthmatic reaction to whatever may have been in that hotel room). Now, at least we had had some nice food.

And isn't that all that matters on a food blog?