Originally Posted by
Thunderroad
My wife and I returned from the St. Regis Mauritius about a week ago. Having spent a week there ourselves, I guess we overlapped with Lore. Sorry we didn't meet you and your wife there!
Ah, what a shame! I'm sure we saw each other once or twice at the Boathouse if you also had the platinum breakfast!
Originally Posted by
Thunderroad
The Bad:
- Back to that one exception to the rule regarding great service: Two of the hosts (whom I assume were also managers) we had at the Boathouse during breakfasts were the most officious hosts I've ever had. One small difficulty was that they refused to open up the tables in half of the smallish restaurant, so that a few times it was not possible to sit right by the beach - though setting those tables would have been very easy. But that's a minor matter. The far bigger problem was the attitude - generally unsmiling, standing around doing nothing while the wait staff was running around busy, acting like the smallest courtesy of pouring OJ (for instance) was a great favor. Having worked at restaurants in the past and visited many nice dining establishments and hotels over the years, I'm pretty confident at saying the these two fellows could write a book on how not to do the hosting job.
You know, now that you pointed it out, this also stuck out in my mind. The hosts/managers were typically the ones with the white dress shirts, right? I noticed the same thing - they generally ran around to welcome and seat people but we didn't notice them do anything useful. There was one lunch towards the end of our stay that was absolutely a catastrophe. Everyone came at the same time and they had a real problem getting the orders right. The next morning, I noticed right away that there were new hosts/managers in place, although I wasn't really sure what they'd be able to do.
Originally Posted by
Thunderroad
- I fully respect the hotel's right to require certain standards of attire for dinner, such as long pants for men (and I believe even additional standards for the Boathouse in the evening). But on a tropical vacation when it's quite warm in the evenings, we prefer to be relatively informal and to dress as comfortably as possible. That's one reason (second to the food, though), that our best meals were off-property. Again, though, this is really just an observation regarding our preferences, and not a complaint about the hotel's policies.
Although it was kind of a pain to change into pants, I was able to wear polo shirts (and observed many people with t-..... even) without an issue. Was it more that you wanted to wear shorts?