This was published 8 years ago
Hotel dining guide: Should you avoid hotel restaurants?
By David Dale
The queue for high tea at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong starts an hour beforehand.
Number four in the list of traveller's rules on how to avoid boring food in a strange town – following never eat in a restaurant that revolves or floats, never eat in a restaurant more than 30 metres above the ground, and never eat in a restaurant which offers an accordionist, is – never eat in your hotel.
However, that definitive list was devised a couple of decades ago, when grand hotel dining rooms around the world were famous for menus designed to pacify nervous Americans – an international melange that was vaguely French, vaguely Italian and wholly dull. But still expensive.
The rule assumed that most people travel in order to learn about other cultures, and the intelligent traveller would learn little about the foodways of Anatolians from eating a club sandwich in the Istanbul Hilton.
Salmon tail cooked on the bone, samphire and rouille at Four Seasons Restaurant Pei Modern.Credit: Steven Siewert
Times have changed, and now I think we are obliged to update rule number four to this: never eat in your hotel dining room – unless that dining room is where the people of the town go when they want an interesting meal. The kind of hotel that would encourage its chef to excite local foodies rather than appease visiting geriatrics is likely to be a great hotel. And fortunately there are now quite a few of those.
Let me give you a little back story. I'm a hotel geek. Back in the days when I was able to go overseas at least once a year, I would budget to stay, just for two nights, in one of the grand old hotels of the world, even if that meant crusts and cockroaches for the rest of my journey.
I loved wandering the halls of these gilded dinosaurs, imagining that behind the doors were the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, D. H. Lawrence, Coco Chanel, or Charles Dickens – all hotel geeks in eras long before mine.
Both grand and great: the Hotel Danieli in Venice.
Too often, the one detail that disappointed me was the dining room. For example, in the 400-year-old palace called the San Domenico in Taormina, eastern Sicily, I enjoyed ocean views and tapestries and oil paintings, but the menu in the opulent dining room was French. I decided I could not stay in a hotel that had contempt for its regional cooking and moved out after one night.
I went down the hill to a small place called the Villa Sant'Andrea, which is half the age and half the price of the San Domenico. Its dining room served the gutsy dishes for which Sicily is famous (sardines, eggplants, pine nuts and chilli) and offered a wine list crammed with local whites and reds I'd never seen before.
At the bottom of the wine list was a short section headed "Vini della penisola". After some initial puzzlement, I realised a penisola is not some kind of pipe organ but just Sicilian for "peninsula". That bit of the wine list covered the stretch of land that connects Sicily with the rest of Europe – you know, the long boot that includes such dumps as Milan, Florence and Rome and makes such irrelevant tipples as chianti, vermentino, pinot grigio and barolo. That strength of regional pride told me Villa Sant'Andrea is a great hotel, while the San Domenico is merely grand.
In addition to the menu the Villa Sant'Andrea had an extensive local wine list.Credit: Tyson Sadlo
A great hotel should be a part of and yet apart from the country in which it resides. It is an embassy from a nation called Ritzonia, whose king is Cesar Ritz, the Swiss waiter who went from managing the Savoy Hotel in London to creating the Ritz Hotel in Paris, then The Grand in Rome, The Grand in Madrid, and The Ritz in London. Cesar Ritz set the standard to which any great hotel must rise, and died in a Swiss mental hospital after his perfectionism turned into mania.
Ritz knew that one of the essentials of a great hotel – along with a revolving door, a grand staircase, and a charismatic concierge – is an exciting dining room. That's why he partnered with chef Auguste Escoffier, the man who literally wrote the book on haute cuisine. Escoffier's habit of dedicating dishes to famous customers – such as tournedos Rossini for an Italian composer, strawberries a la Bernhardt for a French actress and peach Melba and Melba toast for an Australian soprano – spread Ritz's reputation around the world.
The cooking of Escoffier at the Paris Ritz was radical for its time, but still recognizably Parisian. Local foodies went there to see what the fuss was about. And this is where so many modern hotels fall down. They are cowardly about their dining rooms, erring on the side of safety instead of individuality.
Famous wits dined at New York's Algonquin: Today the menu might require a sense of humour.
One hotel that manages to be both grand and great is the Danieli in Venice. One Christmas Eve in its rooftop dining room, looking right to the Doge's Palace and down to the Grand Canal, I had a wonderful pink risotto made with radicchio – the sharp local lettuce that flourishes in the winter. I've tried several times to replicate the dish, but my radicchio turns into brown slime. The secret stays with the Danieli's kitchen. The risotto was followed by stewed eels with polenta, which I didn't enjoy, but which I respected as traditional Venetian Christmas fare.
My requirement that a hotel dining room be true to local traditions does not extend to breakfast. The standout breakfast hotel in my experience is the Condes de Barcelona. It offered slices of various local cheeses, jamon (Spain's convincing answer to prosciutto), and mini pain au chocolat (which Australians call chocolate croissants) which kept emerging crunchy and runny from the kitchen. The espresso was excellent, which was not my usual experience in Barcelona. (The Hotel Condes also has a dining room which has been awarded two Michelin stars, so we're safe in using the word "great").
As for lunch, I never eat that in hotels while I'm travelling (though when I'm in Sydney, I sometimes have lunch in Glass, within the Hilton, and Pei Modern, within the Four Seasons, without thinking of them as hotel dining rooms).
The only exception to my lunch rule was The Algonquin Hotel in New York, where I ate in homage to the wits of The Round Table. They were a bunch of writers and actors (such as Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley) who called themselves The Vicious Circle. They ate there every weekday between 1920 and 1929. I was staying in the hotel, but that didn't protect me from the requirement to wear a tie (they supplied me with an egg-stained one from a rack near the doorway). The food was terrible (tomato soup, lamb chops, apple pie) but apparently that was a fair replication of the experience of the Vicious Circle (who went there because it was cheap).
So we've done dinner, breakfast and lunch. Two other forms of eating are particular to hotels. Firstly, afternoon tea, England's contribution to the cooking culture of Ritzonia. We owe it to the Palm Court of the Ritz Hotel in London, where the 1920s habit of consuming tiny cucumber sandwiches and cream cakes from racks carried to the table by crisply uniformed waiters became a fad that spread to the grand hotels of the world.
In the 1950s, the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong started an afternoon tea ceremony for the round-eyed colonials, and a tradition rapidly developed that married ladies would take their tea and scones on the right side of the lobby while "ladies seeking dalliance" would be found sipping on the left side. Nowadays the Peninsula's 2pm-6pm tea ceremony has become so famous the queue starts forming at 1pm, and you take any seat you can get. Presumably a desire for dalliance is signalled in other ways.
For my money, the best purveyor of afternoon teas in Australia is the Hyatt hotel in Canberra, where you choose your sweet delights from a gigantic buffet, and your digestion is aided by music from a pianist or a string quartet. That will cost half of the $95 per person demanded by the London Ritz nowadays.
As so to room service. The only reason serious travellers would order it in a great hotel is if they're desperately ill, on their honeymoon, or accompanied by small children. Inevitably a room service menu contains easy-to-transport items such as the club sandwich (with a toothpick in it), the hamburger, the steak sandwich and the caesar salad.
But I must offer a bravery award to a place called Hotel de la Ville, near the Spanish Steps in Rome. We were tired from wandering cobbled streets with a three-year-old, and we were leaving early the next morning, so we ordered room service. The hotel offered the usual American choices, but also local specialties such as green pea risotto and fettuccine with mushrooms. We knew both dishes were unlikely to be al dente by the time they'd come up in the lift and trundled along the corridor, but we wanted to encourage the kitchen. For safety's sake, we also ordered a hamburger with chips and a steak sandwich.
Two waiters delivered the trolley with a flurry of white tablecloths. My daughter studied the array, ate two chips, ignored the burger and got stuck into the risotto and the fettuccine. I concluded proudly that she was a born traveller and that the Hotel de la Ville was a great hotel.
David Dale is the coauthor of Anatolia – Adventures in Turkish Cooking (Murdoch Books).
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