11 quotes found
"There is no pain in life, they say in Granada, so cruel as to be blind in Alhambra. When the Arabs of the desert conquered Spain, they said that they had reached heaven. From the ramparts of the Alhambra, sitting on a spur of the Sierra Nevada, look out and you see a paradise created by nature; look in and you see a paradise created by man."
"knew bette than anyone the importance of the kitchen in creating a truly luxurious hotel experience. He had built his success in the hotel business in tandem with the brilliant chef Auguste Escoffier. At the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo and the in , where they had both worked for years, Escoffier had dazzled guest with his cooking, inventing new dishes and finding new ways of presenting classics."
"The Ritz is the highest-priced hotel in Paris. Nine dollars for a single room is the minimum here, all is elegant, chic, gay and sophisticated. The Ritz clientele is cosmopolitan to the nth degree. Diplomats, English nobility, financiers, smart women of society, buyers and actresses of the stage and screen make their reservations months in advance for the spring season. To get good accommodations, at this time of the year, you must be known to the management. If you are known, it doesn't matter about your pedigree or even bank account. Chorus girls with a certain popularity and indigent but well-known journalists are treated with more respect by the staff than wealthy but unknown tourists."
"... for Mr. Field, the 51-year-old head bartender at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz hotel, it’s just another stop on a 27-month global journey — of wandering, reinvention, freelancing, passing the time — while the famed Ritz is renovated. ... The Ritz set the gold standard for hotel living when it first opened in an 18th-century residence on the in 1898. All that is landmarked will stay the same: the sculptures, marble staircases, the building facade, the bas-reliefs and wood paneling in the Imperial suite, and the ceiling and 18th-century marquetry floors of the Chopin suite. Of course, the wood-paneled, leather-armchaired Hemingway Bar (the reincarnation of Le Petit Bar) will not be disturbed. , , , , , , , , and (as well as , of course) all drank there. The royal highball and the seapea cocktail were invented there."
"Like many upscale establishments of the period, the Ritz maintained a separate bar for women who were unaccompanied by men."
"Since it became fashionable to boast a Paris divorce, the Ritz ladies' room has been headquarters for the Alimony Sisterhood, who meet there and compare notes about past and future husbands, lawyers' fees, their dearest friends and the increasing popularity of pearl necklaces. Some of the veteran alimony leaguers seem perpetually in a state of expectancy—of divorces or new husbands. There are ladies making the Ritz bar a nightly ceremony who are at their fourth husband and who won't admit to thirty years of age."
"... The redbrick, white-wood-trim Shelbourne hotel has commanded "the best address in Dublin" from the north side of St. Stephen's Green since 1865. After a major renovation and expansion, it reopened in the fall of 2006; a new restaurant, new lounge bar, and 75 guest rooms constitute a major facelift for most iconic hotel. In 1921 the 's constitution was drafted here, in a first-floor suite. wrote her novel The Hotel about this very place."
"In 1951, ... wrote a history of the Shelbourne Hotel, which she describes as 'overhanging the ornamental landscape of trees, grass, water' of the Green, 'tall as a cliff, but more genial'. Largely dismissed by critics at the time, and ever since, The Shelbourne is much more than a history of the hotel, although it is that; it is really a history of Dublin seen through Bowen's well-polished lens. As Irish history flows around it, the Shelbourne Hotel becomes for Bowen a kind of still point, a splendid bow window through which the flux of time can be observed. While teaspoons clatter politely on fine bone china, outside there is the , the rise of nationalist politics, and the , when more than 200 members of the Irish Citizen Army, among them , took over St. Stephen's Green. The hotel's initial response to the insurrection — transferring tea to the Writing Room at the rear of the building so as to take guests out of the direct line of gunfire — 'was met with disfavour'."
"In his memoirs, recorded what he remembered, some thirty-five years after the event, of ’s actual words spoken during the that after-dinner speech at the ' dinner, held at Dublin’s Sherbourne Hotel to celebrate the inaugural season of the in 1899. Apparently, almost everybody present was drunk, including O’Grady himself when he rose to speak."
"… The hotels of the city offer a valuable insight into the people who lived and worked in Dublin, as well as those who travelled there. The Shelbourne Hotel on Stephen’s Green was perhaps the most prestigious in the city, a place where many moneyed visitors stayed and wined and dined in considerable style. The staff was truly cosmopolitan: the cooks and chambermaids were Irish, while the waiting staff comprised eight Germans, three Austrians, and one each from Bohemia and England. They all lived together in a house near the hotel until, at the outbreak of the , the German contingent was interned. In the area around the Shelbourne Hotel the fashionable elite clubs of London were replicated, most obviously in the prestigious ."
"... The hotel to which I had been directed is a respectable old edifice, much frequented by families from the country, and where the solitary traveller may likewise find society. For he may either use the "Shelburne" as a hotel or a boarding house, in which latter case he is comfortably accommodated at the very moderate daily charge of six-and-eightpence. For this charge a copious breakfast is provided for him in the coffee-room, a perpetual luncheon is likewise there spread, a plentiful dinner is ready at six o'clock; after which there is a drawing-room and a rubber of whist, with tay and coffee and cakes in plenty to satisfy the largest appetite. The hotel is majestically conducted by clerks and other officers; the landlord himself does not appear, after the honest, comfortable English fashion, but lives in a private mansion hard by, where his name may be read inscribed on a brass-plate, like that of any other private gentleman."