|
WHEN it comes to luxe
accommodations, Manhattan has few rivals. Uptown, downtown and, especially, in
midtown, the city is awash in hotels offering suites in the four-figure-a-night
range, and even higher.
With all these choices,
and with the holiday season nearly upon us, the time seemed right to put a
simple and extremely appealing plan into operation: book a suite for my wife,
Nancy, and myself at three of New York's top hotels and compare the experiences.
Our allowance was $1,500 a night, more or less.
I picked the Four
Seasons and the St. Regis, two flagships in the heart of the city, and a
downtown boutique, The
Mercer. The decision was based on curiosity and whimsy as
much as anything else, but there was a certain symmetry to it -- cool modern
elegance, romantic Old World opulence, hip stylishness. And each has a
highly-touted restaurant.
Since it opened on the
corner of Mercer and Prince Streets in 1997, The
Mercer has come to symbolize SoHo, the much-changed neighborhood it inhabits. Discriminating film celebrities
are frequent guests, as are younger well-heeled Europeans. True, one of the last
holdouts of the old SoHo, Fanelli's Cafe, sits resolutely across the street, but
the stores, galleries and restaurants that fill the surrounding cast-iron spaces
are as chic as anything on Madison Avenue.
The operative mode
within the six-story, 75-room hotel is tasteful understatement. It's evident in
the plain but comfortable modern furnishings, the indirect lighting and muted
color schemes, and in the soft, spare lines that dominate the rooms and
hallways.
Our $1,100 top-floor
loft suite had a number of pleasing textural touches in its 670 square feet,
among them an exposed-brick wall, a floor-to-ceiling arched window looking out
on Prince Street, and a large leather screen on runners that served as a
moveable wall between the living room and bedroom. There was also a fireplace,
two plasma-screen televisions, a sound system with wall-mounted speakers, and a
bathtub with its very own opaque-glass skylight.
The
Mercer offers a
veritable catalogue of thoughtful amenities, including a lending library of CD's
and movies, minibar snacks from Dean & DeLuca, and the arrival in the
morning of two newspapers (one, The International Herald Tribune, comes in what
looks like a baguette sleeve). Even the inevitable terry-cloth robes have
something extra -- a smooth cotton outer shell that feels like silk. If God is
in the details, someone at The
Mercer is a true believer.
One of the hotel's major
attractions is its restaurant, the Mercer Kitchen, where a menu prepared by
Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a reigning monarch of French-New American cuisine, is
served in an undeniably cool basement space defined by a bright open kitchen at
one end, a dark bar near the other and a series of low brick arches that create
appealing spaces in between.
On the recent busy
Thursday night we were there, however, the din from a roisterous crowd and
pulsating music played at high volume gave this ambience a pounding. To make
matters worse, we were put at a table directly under the stairway and right next
to the coat-check room.
The food was excellent
-- celery root and chestnut soup, pumpkin ravioli and grilled swordfish and
lobster tail -- but we ate it as quickly as we could, skipped dessert and fled.
If our four-figure suite
price didn't get us a prime spot in the Mercer Kitchen, it did provide entree to
the hotel's private club, the subMercer, which we couldn't resist checking out.
Part of the fun is getting there, through an exit door off the restaurant, down
a flight of steps and along a narrow walkway leading to a smaller, casbah-version of the restaurant space, with red lights instead of yellow ones,
and even more intimate nooks.
Adam Sandler was sitting
at the bar, but it was only 10:30 and nothing much was stirring yet. The music
was even louder than upstairs, so we didn't stay, which turned out to be a
serious lapse of judgement. Shortly after 11, I learned much later, a party
across the street with Victoria's Secret models spilled over into the subMercer.
In the morning,
room-service breakfast took exactly 10 minutes to arrive -- I timed it on the
tiny, minimal-looking black clock on the table beside the incredibly comfortable
king-size bed. The fruit on the fruit plate tasted right off the vine and the
croissants were perfect. The skylit bathtub beckoned. Maybe we should never have
left the suite.
At the Four Seasons on
East 57th Street, we were promised a suite with a view of Central Park. And for
$995 -- discounted from $1,325 on something called the Romance and Style Package
-- that's what we got: a two-room, L-shaped 720-square-foot suite looking north
and west from the 41st floor. The afternoon we arrived was clear and the park at
the height of its fall color, so the effect was breathtaking.
The hotel, designed by
I.M. Pei and Frank Williams, is cool and sleek, with large, high-ceilinged
public spaces that make you think of a modern version of an Egyptian temple. Our
suite was beige and honey-colored, with light-wood paneling, ultramodern
furnishings and lots of electronics, including three televisions (one in the
spacious marble bathroom), a Bose clock-CD player (with a small selection of
CD's, one of which was called ''Deep Sleep''), and buttons to push -- for the
floor-to-ceiling curtains, for instance, and for turning on a privacy light that
saves you from the bother of putting out a Do Not Disturb sign.
A folder in the room
spelled out a list of intriguing possibilities, among them a midnight-to-6 a.m.
menu for night owls; a special Japanese breakfast with onsen egg, pickled
vegetables and toasted seaweed; and a spa and fitness center, offering
treatments with names like the Shopper's Revival, the Jet-Lag Remedy and the
Perfect Wedding Gift. The 30-minute New York Neck and Shoulder Massage sounded
good to me, but it turned out that, except for the manicurist, the spa staff was
booked until early the next afternoon, after our checkout time. So while Nancy
went to have her nails done, I consoled myself by calling the valet service for
a shoeshine. The shoes were picked up within 10 minutes and returned within 30.
|
 |
Later, we abandoned our
aerie for a drink downstairs. The Fifty Seven Fifty Seven Bar, just across from
the restaurant of the same name, was packed, so we opted for the main lounge, a
pleasant, slightly elevated space that looks onto the lobby. There, we spent
most of the next hour sitting in oversized chairs, sipping our drinks and
casually observing the passing parade, which included more than a few guests in
town for the New York City Marathon two days later.
The Fifty Seven Fifty
Seven restaurant, also designed by Mr. Pei, is usually described as a
''soaring'' space notable for the power crowd it attracts at breakfast and
lunch. The diners that evening could have been power brokers, but if so they
were disguised as families or youngish couples on a big night out. This was red
meat night, lamb for Nancy, sirloin steak for me, plus a nice bottle of Pommard.
The food was fine and the service friendly and attentive.
The view was still there
when we got back to our suite, and it was all sparkly now, with the Carlyle
Hotel and the George Washington Bridge glowing in the north and the park a vast
dark space interrupted by the lights strung along its winding roadways. We
stared out at this for a while, then checked to see what movies were available
on the hotel's pay-per-view channel. We settled on ''Unfaithful,'' with Diane
Lane and Richard Gere, punched the privacy light, climbed into our king-size bed
and did something truly extraordinary for us -- stayed awake through the whole
movie.
A new morning dawned,
and with it the room-service breakfast ritual. We were told the food would take
at least 40 minutes, which was slightly annoying but gave Nancy plenty of time
to try out the tub. It was big, though not quite as big as The
Mercer's, and the
bellman had told us with pride that it would fill up in only one minute (he was
right); it also had a headrest.
Breakfast arrived and
was laid out in the living room. There we were, perched high above Gotham,
bathed in light and swathed in terry cloth, she consuming French toast, I corned
beef hash. What words to capture this moment?
''You know what?'' Nancy
said, peering off into the distance. ''I can see the Tappan Zee Bridge.''
The distance between the
Four Seasons and the St. Regis, which is on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue, is
only a couple of blocks, but in terms of ambience it's a couple of centuries.
(You'd need to check planetary charts to figure how far apart The
Mercer and St.
Regis are.)
The lobby of this
Beaux-Arts hotel, built by John Jacob Astor in 1904, is a compact marble space
that bustles with top-hatted doormen escorting guests to and from their cabs,
porters loading luggage on handcarts, the concierge staff working the phones. It
struck me that for people of a certain age, and I am one, it is an exquisite
representation of grand hotels imagined as a child.
Best of all was being
told by the receptionist that our $1,160-a-night suite was being upgraded (we
were staying anonymously) not just one level, but four. I wasn't sure what that
meant exactly, but I didn't argue, especially when the same receptionist took us
up to the ninth floor and opened the big French doors to our home for the night,
1,500 square feet of gilt-edged extravagance that would make Louis XVI beam, if
only he were around to see it.
There was a large
bedroom and a much larger living room, both dotted with what look to be genuine
antiques and large, wonderfully florid pieces of furniture, separated by a
hallway long enough that you'd have to shout to be heard from one room to
another. Not that you would, of course.
It shouldn't have
surprised us then that immediately after our bags were dropped off, a butler --
our butler -- arrived at the door to show us the ropes: where the light switches
for the wall sconces were; where the light switches for the chandeliers were;
how to operate the ingenious phone machine with a lighted touch-screen that
automatically dials any of the hotel's services.
His name was Anthony,
and he said we were to call him if we needed anything. As it turned out, we
didn't call him, but he kept showing up anyway, first to bring fresh fruit, then
champagne and strawberries, then a vase of long-stemmed roses, then to wheel
away the cart after we finished afternoon tea. Having a butler, we were
discovering, is not a bad thing.
That evening, we dined
on foie gras and lobster bisque, monkfish with lentils, banana tart and a
chocolate concoction that resembled a Calder mobile at Lespinasse, the elegant
and pricey restaurant where Christian Delouvrier is the genius-in-residence.
Afterward, we somehow negotiated the few feet to the hotel's atmospheric King
Cole Bar, where several lively groups of revelers created a pleasant buzz, and
had a nightcap.
That night I slept the
sleep of the overindulged, and woke very late the next morning. We padded around
in our terry-cloth robes and matching terry-cloth slippers, alternately reading
the Sunday paper and commenting on our good fortune. I made two calls. The
first, naturally, was to room service for breakfast. The second was to the
receptionist to see if we could extend our checkout time. The answer was yes.
The food a Belgian
waffle and fresh fruit, coffee with warm milk and fresh orange juice, took a
full hour to arrive, placing the St. Regis dead last in the breakfast derby. So
maybe it was Anthony's day off. Who cared? We were in no hurry to go anywhere.
How swell it is
|
