The Credentials:
A distinguished hotel with polished, self-assured service and a French country house feel, within javelin throwing distance of Central Park. It’s a hotel with history: a wealthy Swiss businessman opened the establishment in 1926 to capture some of the passing carriage trade. Tennessee Williams died here in 1983. He also used to evoke the ire of guests by typing loudly until the early hours.
Guests should not miss the hotel’s ritzy Monkey Bar, which first opened in the 1940s and became an important jazz watering hole. It is cheekily named after the mural of monkeys fixing up banana Daiquiris on the wall.
Dine:
The Monkey Bar is an institution, and has featured in Sex and the City and Mad Men. It’s American, but thankfully there is more to the menu than hamburgers and steak. Try the East and West Coast oysters or the Jonah crab claws.
Breakfast was a continental buffet, as in many of New York’s higher end hotels. It was nice to see the waitresses bringing out fresh boiled eggs as well as the standard assortment of cereal, pastries, toast and fruit. There was also an encouraging range of tea—something which a surprising number of upscale hotels in New York are weak on; this is, after all, a nation firmly entrenched within the coffee camp.
Sleep:
If your budget stretches far enough, it has to be the Tennessee Williams suite. It’s a wonderful room crammed with memorabilia, from rare black and white photos of the man himself to an original playbill of one of his most famous plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Failing that, the other rooms are handsomely decorated: white walls, mint and gold Regency-style furniture, and glistening dark wood antique cupboards. The marbled bathrooms have opulent, old-world charm, from the cotton-silk-mix shower curtains hung with antique shower rings to the old-fashioned gold levered taps.
Who Goes There?
A mixture of wealthy foreigners and well-heeled Americans in New York on business; more than once, I encountered ladies in power suits and Hillary Clinton hair stalking the corridors and jabbering away to colleagues on their mobile phones.
Out & About:
Central Park is less than a 10-minute walk. The Rockefeller Centre is even closer. The Museum of Modern Art is three minutes away.
The Worst Thing:
Some of the furniture is rather tired in the public areas.
The Best Thing:
Fabulously spacious rooms for New York.
