BED AND BORED
Hotels need to put dining back into their restaurants.
Restaurants in city hotels were once the last word in fine dining. As a poor young student I was invited by some distant relatives visiting from overseas to eat at the Top of the Town, the luxury restaurant on top of the Intercontinental Hotel by the university. I spent most of the meal agape at the copper cookware, the silver service, the chefs in real chefs’ hats, the waiters in tuxedos and the criss-cross-charred steak as thick as a phone book.
These days, hotels don’t do dining, really, although you can get your dinner. At the Langham, formerly the Sheraton, they do a buffet thing of quite exquisite hideousness unless “all you can eat” is a phrase that sets you salivating. At the Hilton, they cheat by having the reliably wonderful Fish at the prow of the building; perhaps guests think it’s the hotel dining room. At Sky City they just invited extraordinary restaurateurs to set up shop in the area and stood back.
So when I decided to go in search of a hotel meal in the CBD, I was left with the Pullman and the Grand Millennium. The latter’s Katsura, a Japanese place, was excluded because the object of the exercise was to see what life was like for a visitor who checked in at the end of the world and thought, “I think I’ll go downstairs for dinner.” What impression would they get of New Zealand? Chain hotels are famously so bland and cookie-cutter that you wouldn’t know if you were in Nebraska, Nice or New Plymouth. But could a hotel’s food at least say, “Welcome to New Zealand. You’ve never tasted anything like it”? The answer, I have to conclude, is no.
The Grand Millennium has a fabulously dramatic atrium and a view of the police station and the Aotea Centre, surely two of the ugliest buildings in the city. They are even uglier than the menu in the Grand Millennium Brasserie, a cheerless enclosure off the main lobby with all the atmosphere of a railway waiting room.
I have no idea what the food is like, because I couldn’t bring myself to eat there: just reading the menu made me tired. Apart from the mention of Westmere Butchery sausages, Akaroa salmon and New Zealand snapper (what other kind of snapper would you serve?) it was a cookie-cutter collection, with some Asian standards in a section headed Taste of the Orient, a phrase that was a cliche 20 years ago and is faintly offensive now.
Up the hill, the Intercontinental became the Hyatt and is now the Pullman. The only restaurant is on the ground floor and is called Tapestry Dining. In late June, the May menu was on the website and on the tables (just saying). Again, only the words Taupo and Northland gave any hint of where we were, apart from the reassurance that the seafood was local.
The chef, a Frenchman with Dubai luxury hotels on his CV, goes through the motions and some of the food is actually quite good — a silky goat’s cheese souffle; paua fricasseed with mushroom. But his account of the classic French cassoulet was poor, dry and stingy with the meat; a $39 piece of fish with clams and chorizo was dismally unoriginal; and a thin and agreeably crispy apple tart was barely tepid.
I am not in the constituency of wellheeled travellers who stay at these places, but I cannot imagine that any of them would object to a little pizzazz in the inhouse dining room. This country’s food is one of its great selling points, and the hotels are surely its shop window. It seems a shame it’s all so drab.