"hotel" news and stories

Gone are the days of leisurely room service meals for fast-paced, budget-conscious business travelers. And hotels are moving beyond traditional in-room meal service and offering meals to go, the New York Times reported.

From New York's Grand Hyatt to the The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago to London's Grosvenor House, a J.W. Marriott Hotel, high-end hotels are offering pre-packaged meals. And the options cater to all tastes, from the $2 bagel at the Aloft Hotel in Lexington, Mass., to the $40 Maine lobster pita from the Trump International.

"Business travelers are packing more time into the day, using their travel time to work," Matthew Adams, vice president and managing director for the Grand Hyatt, told the Times.

If any Foodie Flick could blow your mind, it's this one. British comedian George Egg recently posted a YouTube video in which he cooks dinner in his hotel room.

We're not talking about a quick salad and sandwich here. Without bringing any special tools from home, Egg sweeps aside the overpriced room-service menu and makes pasta and biscuits in his room -- from scratch. No hot plate. No microwave. If it wasn't captured in a video, we probably wouldn't believe it.

The entrée? A tortellini pasta with spinach, rocket and crème fraîche that he cooks in the room's tea kettle. This might not leave a desirable taste for the next poor sap who makes tea, but it's a rather ingenious way to boil noodles. (He adds a raw egg yolk in a nod to carbonara; emulate that at your own risk.)

Oh, but there's more: Egg ups the ante by making biscuits (kneaded, risen, the whole 9 yards), using a clothes iron. Color us a new shade of impressed.

Though Robert Irvine might be back on "Dinner Impossible," we reckon he's got some stiff competition.

Forget tramping to wine country to taste wine and pose for pictures sitting on a wine barrel--how about sleeping in one instead? Up in northern Holland, a hotel has made sleeping rooms out of old Beaujolais barrels. Each barrel held 15,000 liters of wine (almost 4,000 gallons). The rooms look quite, erm, cozy inside, with claustrophobically narrow single beds lining the sides, but it would be quite an experience nonetheless.

Read the full story and see interior photos at treehugger.com.

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Rioja producer Marqués de Riscal is to open its City of Wine cultural centre on the 1st September. The 60 ha complex is part of a ten year plan and an investment of some US$77 million in the winery and its facilities. Central to the centre will be the new landmark Hotel Marqués De Riscal. This is designed by renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, his second creation in Spain after driving Bilbao's urban revival with the Guggenheim Museum.

The 43 room luxury hotel has a wonderful roof designed in homage to the flowing skirts of Flamenco dancers. The hotel boasts a glass elevator to the wine cellars where tours and tastings will be held. A Michelin starred chef will also host cooking and wine and food matching courses.

Sarah had a point when she said that conference food is pretty much always fattening. I am currently at the BlogHer conference, along with a few other people from Weblogs, Inc., and even though the company is wonderful, I can say less for the food. When a hotel prepares fried food for a large group, it is inevitably greasy and heavy, so it was unfortunate that the meals centered on that. Lunch on the first day included fried chicken and dinner was a buffet of fried foods, like egg rolls and dumplings, as well as kebabs slathered in various sauces. There was no salad option at dinner, although there was a cheese plate. Any dinner dissatisfaction was quelled by the open bar, though I did hear some slightly dissatisfied murmuring about the fact that Pepsi, and not Coke, was the hotel's soda of choice. Many women opted for calcium-fortified water instead.

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