As the expansion of railways transformed European tourism, luxury grand hotels across Western Europe standardized the 'continental breakfast'—a light morning meal consisting of coffee or tea, fresh croissants or brioche, and sweet fruit preserves. Designed specifically to appeal to the refined sensibilities of the emerging international tourist class, this meal stood in sharp contrast to the heavy, hot meat-based traditional English breakfast. It reflected the rising speed and administrative focus of modern urban travel and hotel culture.

This light, highly urbanized morning meal became an ubiquitous literary motif in early twentieth-century Modernist poetry, appearing regularly as a symbol of rootless cosmopolitan life, emotional alienation, and fragmented modern conversations. T.S. Eliot and his contemporaries frequently utilized the setting of coffee cups and stale croissants in hotel dining rooms to map the spiritual emptiness of post-war European intellectuals.