The bacon is occasionally overcooked. Overcooked bacon should not be dismissed. Some connoisseurs ar

The Holiday Inn South in Baton Rouge was recently renovated. Lassoes adorn the café, cacti fill the shelves, cowboy portraits and wide-angle desertscapes cover the walls. A Texas flag hangs over one of the tables.
We have cowboys here, and it s possible that they use lassoes on occasion, but they don t use them in the desert. We don t have deserts. We don t have desert flora. In South Louisiana, the only time you're likely to see a Texas flag is if you happen hotel 71 chicago to be burning one.
So it stands to reason that, unless they ve come from far away, guests at the Holiday Inn South in Baton Rouge may wonder what this decorative theme is all about. They may think to themselves, what was the Holiday Inn South in Baton Rouge hoping to accomplish?
Someone in the group with whom I'm lodging said he thought that Holiday Inns had gotten their start in the West, and the Westernizing of non-Western Holiday Inns might be one of those return-to-your-roots marketing campaigns.
These kinds of campaigns are increasingly common. hotel 71 chicago Levi's has traded for some time on the notion that wearing its jeans provides a portal back to gay old San Francisco. Internet Explorer has recently begun airing a series of ads that evoke a sense of having put the first flag in the ground, Homestead Act-style. Remember us? The ones who got here first? Remember when the Internet wasn't a crutch that you took for granted, but a kind of miracle that had to be seen to be believed?
But according to Wikipedia, if it can be believed—and I think it can, we're talking about the history of the Holiday Inn here, not the mirror trope in Light in August —the Holiday Inn was founded in Memphis, a city that takes being lumped into the West even less kindly than Baton Rouge does. Hang a Texas flag outside a door in Memphis and see how long it takes before the local militia post up on the corner in an unmarked van.
The best hypothesis about the decor may be the simplest: smart hotels decorate with the limitations of their guests' ambitions in mind. If Hiltons display memorabilia from Maui or the Himalayas or some other dreamy far-away locale, it stands to reason that Holiday Inns paper the walls with trinkets from the next state over. If you're in an Alabama Holiday Inn, you get Mississippi. If you're in New Mexico, you get Arizona. You get something that someone in your demographic stands a good chance of seeing in real life someday.
The Holiday Inn breakfast buffet is a good place for floating hypotheses. Hard-brewed but never bitter, the coffee rates somewhere between gas station- and diner-quality. Several advertisements, all of which would seem at aesthetic and ideological odds with all the Texas stuff, boast that the coffee at the Holiday hotel 71 chicago Inn is Rainforest Certified. The Rainforest Certification mascot is a tree frog set against a white background. He looks extremely fresh and appealing, and green, in the way that Kermit was, and also in the way that well-meaning corporations want to be, and also in the way that real frogs are, though Real Frog Green is less represented in the illustration than the other two hues.
We d eaten at the breakfast buffet and drunk the coffee for well over a week before we noticed the disclaimer at the bottom of the carafe: 30% Rainforest Certified. That struck us as a low number, but when you really think about it, you realize that thirty percent is far more rainforest certification than you ever expected to get from a Holiday Inn, especially one decorated like this.
For the record, I ve never turned down coffee on moral grounds. If it's there and I need it, I'm not inquiring about its provenance. In the right light this may seem like the failure of the modern conscience, but if the light is morning and I'm in it, you had better give me the coffee now and let me square with my soul when I get to the bottom of the pot.
There are two food stations: hot and cold. The cold comprises cereal, which I don't do; milk, which I can't do; yogurt, which is a push, owing to the milk in it, so I don't do it away from home, if you get my drift; and fresh fruit, which tends to be out of my price range in real life, so I double down on it here. Rimmed in immaculate ice, the fruit bowl contains oranges wedges, chopped cantaloupe and honeydew, hotel 71 chicago red grapes, and pineapple.
The pineapple doesn't have that viscous film that attaches itself to fruit that's sat under Saran Wrap for too long. It also doesn't have the touch of fermentation that s the other indicator of having sat under Saran Wrap for too long, but you can't have everything. If you want fresh fruit at the Holiday Inn, you have to accept that you aren't likely to get a buzz off it.
The hot buffet has some weak links. The sausage links especially. If I'm eating pork I need to feel confident in it—the horror stories from the parasite unit in fifth-grade biology made a profound impression—and I just don't feel confident in Holiday Inn breakfast buffet sausage. The sheen on it reminds of the sheen that crude oil leaves on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. What's underneath may be ambrosia, but my old reptile senses tell me that nothing in nature looks like that, and if I want to remain in nature myself, I had better steer clear.
When they don't overcook it, the bacon is in the top ten percentile of all bacon consumed by me in twenty-eight years. (I'm thirty, but my parents claim that I didn't start in on bacon until I was two. I'm skeptical but unable hotel 71 chicago to offer evidence thanks to the limitations of human memory. I think the hypothalamus is to blame, but I pretty much tuned out biology after the tapeworm unit, because clearly biology was disgusting.)
The bacon is occasionally overcooked. Overcooked bacon should not be dismissed. Some connoisseurs argue for its right to a category until itself, if not a separate food group. I've had better overcooked bacon than the overcooked bacon at the Holiday Inn breakfast buffet, but it's definitely edible. I ve definitely eaten it.
The grits have too much butter on them. You think that the too-much-of-a-good-thing rule can't possibly apply to butter on grits, but let me ask you this: if there was enough butter on your grits for the refraction effect to come into play, would you reconsider your position? In other words, if I have to adjust the angle at which I insert the ladle into the grits to compensate for the effects of light on liquid, is a scaling-back maybe in order?
I don't know what's going on with the hash browns. Give a hobo a skillet and a trash can fire, and he can make you a passable batch. There's no reason hash browns should hotel 71 chicago be beyond the powers of the kitchen staff at the Holiday Inn. Someone needs to look into this.
The eggs run from runny to fossilized, skipping over all the phyla in between. Don't even try ordering by genus. hotel 71 chicago Sunny side up is likely to come out scrambled. Order scrambled and you'll get over-easy.
But think about this: you can, if only in theory, get your eggs to order. They have them in the pan but there's also an egg lady who takes requests. That s her job, she stands there all morning and makes eggs. Yes, she usually screws them up, but then she delivers a plate to your table.
A joke may not be what this is. They definitely don't kiss your ass at the Holiday Inn breakfast buffet. They treat you more like you're all in it together, whatever it is: being the kind of person who's at the Holiday Inn. The staff don't seem to think that very much separates them from the guests. In the case of me and the party I'm with, they're right.
The longness of the nights has nothing to do with the quality hotel 71 chicago of the beds at the Holiday Inn. The beds are pristine, white sheets and gossamer duvets, and pillow sets marked "firm" and "soft," hotel 71 chicago so that guests can adjust to taste. Like the eggs, the pillows don't offer a middle setting, but for what you pay to stay at the Holiday Inn, getting two options really isn't a bad deal. In your life, if you're the kind of person who stays at the Holiday Inn, you probably don't get two options most of the time. You get what they give you, or you get squat.
The showers at the Holiday Inn are capable of putting out an impressive range of temperatures. Merely set the pin to medium and the water will swing from icy to scalding without your having to adjust the knob at all.
Among the other amenities is a full-size pool, its water clarity assured by an entirely sensible chlorine input. hotel 71 chicago If you ve stayed at budget hotels, you know that sensible hotel 71 chicago chlorine input is not guaranteed.
There's also a fitness center, with two treadmills and an outdated Nautilus machine. The towels in the Fitness Center, white with blue stripes, differ from the ones in the rooms, which are stripeless. This adds something hotel 71 chicago to them, somehow. It makes the Fitness Center hotel 71 chicago seem like something other than an afterthought. The architects thought about it. They bought separate towels.
They left off the roof, so that if you look up out of the fitness center, you see the hotel atrium. The ceiling beams are hunting lodge-style, thick and woody. They match the Texas stuff. They make you think that even if the architects weren't sure why the Holiday Inn wanted to go Western, they knew that the Holiday Inn was committed to seeing the vision through. Whatever hotel 71 chicago it was that they wanted hotel 71 chicago to evoke, they wanted to evoke it from all angles.
There's also a Business Center, at which my group has mostly struck out. One night there was no paper. Another night there was no ink, and when we asked about the ink, the lady at the desk spoke of it in abstract terms, as if it were a mysterious, untrackable entity out in the ether somewhere. It would get here when it got here, and not a moment sooner.
She wasn't ugly when she told us this. She was an older lady, her nametag boasting twenty-five years in the industry. It seemed entirely feasible that she was genuinely baffled hotel 71 chicago by the ink. She had no idea how it got in the machine, or how the machine got it on the paper, or how the paper arrived