Word: hotels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stuck an 8-in. (20 cm) chef's knife right through his hand, pulled it out and went back to chopping - but so far there has been relatively little actual post-Bourdainian fiction. Possibly the first novel of consequence is Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, set in a hotel restaurant in London. The restaurant's executive chef, Gabriel, has clawed his way up effortfully from the working classes, but having done so, he is now, at 42, having a midlife crisis. He's not having much luck starting a restaurant of his own or marrying his girlfriend Charlie...
...high school English class - a microcosm of Britain, a country that is also, not coincidentally, having a midlife crisis. The kitchen is a strange crossroads zone where high culture and manual labor collide. It's radically globalized and borderless, with workers from Liberia and India and Moldova. (The hotel is called, inevitably, the Imperial.) Ali's kitchen is, like Britain, something of a muddle: "If the Imperial were a person, thought Gabe, you would say here is someone who does not know...
...plugging a gap in the market for decadent Western desserts, heart-shaped cookies, cayenne-pepper-espresso brownies and the like. But perhaps the most telling opening - in terms of the area's newfound cachet - is that of the Intercontinental West Lake, tel: (84-4) 6270 8888. The hotel has three smart restaurants - a French bistro, an Italian restaurant and one that serves Vietnamese-Chinese cuisine - as well as a bar set on its own island in the lake. Only the prices are hard to swallow...
...onetime Yangtze Hotel on Hankou Road - now called the Langham Yangtze Boutique - was built 75 years ago to cater for the city's Chinese élite. Designed by Li Pan, a popular architect of the day, it was an ostentatious project, costing 1.2 million silver dollars (or about $325 million in today's money) and featured a host of mod cons - like air-conditioning - that were then becoming standard in luxury international hotels but represented heady advances for locally financed properties. Tycoons, heirs, heiresses and film stars flocked to the Yangtze's opening. The hotel's nightclub, the Yangtze Dance...
...ensuing decades, much of that glamor faded, and the Yangtze ended up as a characterless, if perfectly respectable, midrange hotel, its interiors retaining a hint of history but sacrificing most of their charm during unsympathetic - the uncharitable might say "tacky" - renovations conducted down the decades. Not surprisingly, the hotel's new management decided to put a reassertion of 1930s style at the forefront of a lavish renovation project completed earlier this year. The Langham Yangtze Boutique now boasts the kind of rooms and public spaces that a tuxedo-clad Noel Coward would have enjoyed lolling about in, gimlet in hand...