It goes without saying that we love the hotel lounge. Whether it’s in our home city or far abroad, the hotel lounge is a respite from the mundane and a welcome perk of geographic proximity. Here’s where you’ll find us across the country:
XYZ Lounge – W San Francisco. The lobby lounge of the W SF is as comfortable as they come, with an expansive gas fireplace and yummy menu of small plates (we love the chicken sandwich and tuna tartare). Always temperate despite the SF chill, the lobby also offers complimentary hot chocolate to warm the hands and temperaments of guests.
St. Regis – San Francisco. We love love love this cavernous lobby bar, with a modern and slightly Asiatic sensibility. From the fresh seasonal flowers to the towering Christmas tree and sparkling lights, the lobby provides the perfect setting for the beginning of the night or the end. One of the few bars in town with top-notch bar snacks, we’re addicted to the cheese puffs, a light and delicious crisp of Parmesan and cheddar.
Chateau Marmont – Los Angeles. Quiet, subdued, but buzzing with moments of rogue glamour. This is Hollywood the way Hollywoodland intended, bright enough for an afternoon lunch but dark enough for secrets.
Olives – W Union Square New York. Slide in here the way you would your own living room or the library at your old college. We love the central location perched in Union Square (up, right), close enough to the train to work as a meeting point for friends but far enough from the vendors selling organic honey sticks. Order liberally from the appetizers menu – we assure satisfaction.
Mandarin Oriental – London. The Mandarin Oriental is like having a well-situated friend in Knightsbridge across the street from Harvey Nichols. With comfortable club chair seating and a decadent “see and be seen” central bar, it fulfills the HotelCrush quotas for style and relaxation. Voted Best Hotel Bar by Time Out London, it garners our praise for its perfect Ketel One martinis and its crisp barbeque potato chips, deliciously refilled again and again.
Nothing shouts “summer!” like a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade on a sunny afternoon. And it must be fresh, nothing is worse than a dribble of synthetic preservative-laden lemon syrup stirred into room temperature tap water.
We love the Hemingway known to Gerald and Sara Murphy – brooding, ambitious, and calculatingly absorbed in a sort of post-war carelessness. It’s this Hemingway, untainted, that’s arrived in a storefront lounge on Hollywood Blvd. dimly lit (to discourage reading, no doubt) and crushed wall-to-wall in books. The drink menu is as spare as Hemingway’s prose, and our Death In the Afternoon cocktail featured absinthe, sour mix, blackberry juice, and a float of champagne. As undrinkable as the Old Man and the Sea, we gamely downed the glass in three gulps over fast conversation with a party of Munich natives. Our curiosity sated, we cut out before the weekend crowd, borrowing a move from the pages of Hemingway himself.
New hotel restaurants are high on our radar so with the renovation and re-opening of