damon88

HKTraveler

Didn’t do Maido but was at both Central and Astrid y Gaston. Central was great and very cerebral type of food. To make it more enjoyable, I would suggest watching their episode on Netflix’s Chef Table first. AyG was only so so. Their a la Carter dishes were decent but the tasting menu is completely forgettable

Pausanias

A bit too cool for me. I can't remember disliking a hotel so much for long time, though I know I'm in a minority. Macmayday seemed to like it a lot.

Sadly, they got things wrong right from the start. Two weeks before we had emailed them to make a dinner reservation, and to tell them we were members of the Relais & Chateaux 5C Club. We received an immediate confirmation from them.

Following a frazzling 4-hour drive, we checked in at 5pm and were given a nice welcome and a glass of champagne. They didn’t have our dinner reservation. Or anything else we had contacted them about. Never mind. They gave us room 130 which was spacious and light. We liked it a lot. We unpacked a few things and got the room organised which took maybe 15 minutes. Then we went downstairs and left our key at the reception. The woman who checked us in now told us there was a big party with music right next to our room so she wanted us to change rooms. We were to be upgraded. Now, why on Earth didn’t we get upgraded on check-in and save all this nonsense? There were serious mis-management issues here. This farce took half an hour to resolve.

Our upgraded room, 230 I think, was dark, gloomy, and lacked a desk or a bath. It wasn’t nearly as good as our first room. The man who was assisting us said it had a balcony and that was what made it better. OK if you want to choke on the traffic fumes, I suppose. We declined this lousy room. So we got upgraded again, this time to 410 which was acceptable but still not as good as our first room. They said it was the best room in the house. Oh really?

Air conditioning in all three rooms we ‘inspected’ was seriously noisy so we ended up switching it off to get some sleep. Everything about our room seemed get in our way. There was a desk but no power sockets which were miles away on a wall and only European sockets. The claw bath had a sharp metal foot that was guaranteed to break a toe if you wanted the lavatory at night. To figure out the lighting system you needed to have a Nobel Prize for science. We needed assistance to operate the blackout blinds which went up but not down. Etc etc etc. Everywhere totally bonkers design ruled over practicality. The room was seriously annoying.

Dinner was lousy in a tiny stuffy room with six diners and deafening music. I think this is a place for 30-something hip-hoppers which we are emphatically not. Even so, R&C make a thing about quiet and calm and this place isn't. Until breakfast and that was quite serene.

The hotel is really like an art gallery (sub-category MOMA) and I think it's best for people who regard themselves as works of art!