The pastry chef at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego does a pretty phenomenal job. In my four days at Etech I witnessed over a dozen varieties of coffee cake, cheesecake, cookies, petit fours, frangipani, croissants, napoleon, upscale Krispie treats, on and on and on, a heart-stopping convoy of white flour and sugar and eggs and an occasional taste of nuts or berries as if just to break up the monotony.
I like desserts, but not the first thing in the morning, which is when they served half these pastries, with three kinds of coffee and no juice. I don’t like eggs so much, but I’d have strangled a chicken if it meant not eating a half-pound of banana bread for breakfast again.
You could argue that the conference organizers really know their audience. What refreshments would 1200 alpha geeks desire more than sugar and caffeine? In retrospect it was surprising they didn’t serve Bawls for breakfast.
I commented to one of the O’Reilly staffers that the food at the Web 2.0 conference was far and away better than what we’d been served at Etech, and he pointed out that Web 2.0 costs twice as much. It’s O’Reilly’s flagship tech conference, I guess, so it comes with a high profile, a full bag of schwag, and a plate of eggs.