Hilton Garden Hotel, Lecce, Puglia, Italy: uninspiring food for Tourists

2nd September.
The period 2-9th September is detailing food eaten on a Riviera Coach trip to Puglia, Italy. Dinner was included in the holiday, and 4/7 nights was based on the three hotels we were staying in.
Hilton Garden Inn, in Lecce is a comfortable out of centre hotel. The staff manage to make a global brand have an Italian flavour (e.g. none of the room doors working on one floor), but given the opportunity to impress a relatively adventurous coach party ( you have to be a bit adventurous to be visiting this off the grid part of Italy) of Britons, they failed with an uninspiring meal and chaotic hotel organisation.
So for our communal dinner, this was the menu (no choice):

Expectations were modestly high at the start, but the first course, which may have been soup defeated many. We were told that it was a fairly traditional dish in this part of the world, and various variations were to be found in surrounding countries:

It looked like soup, but its consistency was fairly thick and as you can see, the bread could not sink in it. It was hot (CHOF 9) but somewhat bland and beany. My wife thought it would have benefited from some chili flavoured olive oil. Some seconds were offered, but most people politely declined. A triumph of menu English, but the only one.

The main course was somewhat sparse and looked boring.

I made the picture small, because the portion size was small. It was more or less hot, scoring a 7.5 as I remember it, and most of the heat resided in the potatoes which were clearly not mashed.The piccatina looks like other piccatina dishes on the web, so that is clearly what was intended. Uninspiring.

The desert was exactly as described on the menu, so apple pie it was.

Breakfast was a bit of a surprise as typically in Italy one may get nothing more than bread cake and coffee. This hotel has a breakfast buffet, which sounds fine in theory, but give the influx of 50 travelers on the same timetable, the simultaneous delivery of breakfast defeated them. The coffee machines ran out of hot water and milk, other things ran out, and the somewhat promising buffet was not as it seemed.

On the first morning, the buffet was luke warm, as might have been expected (I mistakenly thought that if we had come earlier, it might have been hot), but on the second morning, where we all had to eat at 0630, the hotel excelled itself. The contents of the buffet were actually cold. I complained and from the one person who spoke hotel English was informed that the range was new and therefore was not to be expected to work. Raw sausages and cold potatoe. Nul Pointes.

The one highlight on both mornings was the signature waffles. If you had not come across the self cooked waffle before (more of an American phenomenon) this may not have been on your radar. Most of our party had never heard of this, and after a while I worked out how to do this with premixed waffle mix and sauces and a machine that timed itself. Success, and a waffle that scored 10 on the scale for hotness as it was freshly cooked to my specifications (slightly less than the instructions). 

Pity I could not have had more control over the temperature and creation of the other food. Lecce is not used to significant numbers of tourists, and they may get better in a few years time.

Conclusion: uninspiring food for Italy.