Forbes Travel Guide Stories

Hotels

Three Hotels That Make Holiday Shopping Easy

If you’re planning on braving the shops this holiday season, you might need a little backup. That’s why we’ve uncovered three luxe hotel packages that will not only give you a leg-up over your fellow shoppers, but will also pamper you in the process. Here’s where to get the VIP treatment this season:

The Beverly Hills Shopping Experience at Montage Beverly Hills. This package arms you with two VIP shopping tools: a Rolls Royce Ghost and fashion stylist Joe Katz. Both will chauffeur you around the legendary Rodeo Drive. For his part, Katz will advise you on which stores best suit your style—he may even have part of a store closed for you so you can shop crowd-free. You’ll visit luxury retailers like Roberto Cavalli, where Katz will help you navigate the goods. Spend a whole or half day with Katz (the choice is up to you) and then return to the Montage for a complimentary makeup session at the spa. If you’re still itching for more, head to Lobby Shop & Boutique, where you’ll receive a 20 percent discount on any items in the store.

Retail Therapy package at Trump SoHo New York. Shop like a local with Trump SoHo’s most chic package. You’ll start your day with breakfast in the hotel’s café before hitting the streets of SoHo. With the hotel’s exclusive Shopping Card in hand, you’ll have access and privileges at the area’s top boutiques and specialty shops. Find unique gifts at MoMa Design Store or at the vintage shop What Goes Around Comes Around. You’ll also spot some familiar names, such as Theory, Hugo Boss and Diane von Furstenburg. After a full day in the trend-setting neighborhood, you can return to the hotel and march straight to The Spa at Trump. There, you can unwind from your shopping spree with an hour-long Crystal Divine Foot Treatment or a 30-minute Reflexology massage.

900 North Michigan Shops & Bloomingdales Package at The Talbott Hotel Chicago. This boutique hotel will present you with a $50 gift certificate for the nearby 900 North Michigan Shops. It’s easy to get all your shopping done here—the six-story luxury mall is home to stores like Coach, L’Occitane, J.Crew and Bloomingdales—but if you’re still on the hunt for more, just step outside and you’ll find yourself on the Magnificent Mile. This famed stretch of shops and restaurants has something for even the pickiest person on your list. Stop into the Disney Store for your kids, Best Buy for your gadget lovers or the brand new Top Shop for your favorite fashionista. Once you’ve checked everyone off your list, head to Mario Tricoci for a makeup consultation and King’s Café for a Tangerine Lavender Honey Hot Cocoa (both are included in the shopping package).

Photo courtesy of iStock

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Hotels

Where To Score A Cyber Monday Hotel Deal

Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago

Forget the discounted TVs or half-off sweaters — we’re logging on for hotel deals on Cyber Monday. Several chains are running promotions to help you save on upcoming trips. Have your credit card handy and dates in mind to take advantage of these not-to-miss sales:

Trump Hotel Collection. Get 30 percent off when you book a suite at the Trump hotels in Chicago, Central Park, SoHo, Toronto, Waikiki, Las Vegas or Panama. The discount is good for stays from January 1 to March 31. Book online on Monday only.

Viceroy Hotel Group. “Like” one of Viceroy’s hotels on Facebook and you’ll get a booking code a day early — on Sunday, November 27 — to take advantage of deals up to 50 percent off at Viceroy hotels, including those in Abu Dhabi, Snowmass, Beverly Hills and Anguilla.

Starwood Hotels. You have until December 2nd to book The Phoenician in Scottsdale, Arizona, The St. Regis Deer Valley, The St. Regis Aspen Resort and Westin and W Hotels from Kauai to Fort Lauderdale. Book stays from December 1 to April 30 of this year.

Omni Hotels. Log on Monday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. to nab a room for $99 at Omni hotels in cities such as San Francisco, Austin, Chicago and Boston. Don’t wait though — the offer is only good for 999 rooms across the brand for stays before January 31.

Affinia Hotels. You’ll receive 10 percent off your room rate and a $50 activity credit — good for on-demand movies or even in-room spa treatments — if you book a room at Affina’s Chicago, Washington, D.C., or five New York City hotels on Monday. Use the code CYBER1.

Photo courtesy Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago

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Restaurants

Top Chef Restaurants: The Best "Cheftestant" Openings

After making names — and plenty of pork belly, risotto and scallops — for themselves on Top Chef, several alums of the popular cooking show are opening new restaurants around the country. Here’s our roundup of some of the most anticipated openings from the as-seen-on-TV chefs:

Herringbone; Gingham; Gabardine; Brian Malarkey. The Season Three Top Chefalum plans to open Herringbone, a seafood-focused restaurant in La Jolla, California, in the spring of 2012. And he’s not stopping there. Malarkey has plans to open two more restaurants in San Diego: Gingham, which will focus on barbecue and braised meats; and the more polished Gabardine, which will feature a French-influenced menu. After that, he plans to open 15 more restaurants across the country in the next five years.

Little Goat, Stephanie Izard. Season Four winner Izard is opening a diner near her popular Chicago restaurant Girl & the Goat. In addition to house-made breads and roasted meats, Chicago Eater say there will be cooking classes and a bake shop when the diner opens in March or April of 2012.

Frog n snail, Dale Levitski. After leading Chicago’s Sprout for two years, Season Three runner-up Levitski is working on another Windy City eatery — this time serving French dishes with a Midwestern flair, according to the Chicago Tribune. The restaurant is slated to open this spring.

Bandolero, Mike Isabella. The runner-up on Top Chef All-Stars is following up his Italian restaurant Graffiato with Bandolero, a Mexican small-plates eatery in Washington, D.C. The Georgetown restaurant will serve up tacos, ceviches and fajitas, as well as an extensive cocktail list, when it opens in early 2012.

Talde, Dale Talde. A seasoned chef at New York’s Buddakan, Talde is opening an eponymous restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, this December. Expect an Asian-American menu with dishes like Korean fried chicken from the fiery chef, who appeared on Season Four of Top Chef and on Top Chef All-Stars.

The Spence, Richard Blais. Following his burger and “haute dog” outposts, perennial favorite and All-Star winner Blais has plans to open a new restaurant in midtown Atlanta, serving simple American food (though, considering the chef’s love of liquid nitrogen, we wonder how simple it will be). According to the restaurant’s Twitter page, The Spence will open by Valentine’s Day 2012.

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Restaurants

Do This Or That: Las Vegas Luxury Burgers

FleurBurger 5000 at Hubert Keller's Fleur in Las Vegas

FleurBurger 5000 at Hubert Keller’s Fleur in Las Vegas

 

We’ve got to hand it to Hubert Keller: The classically trained French chef doesn’t mind slumming with the likes of American fast food — he’s a die-hard burger fanatic with three budget-friendly Burger Bar chains in the United States. But most telling is his Las Vegas restaurant Fleur inside Mandalay Bay (named after his San Francisco juggernaut Fleur de Lys), which offers a gourmet burger for a cool $5,000. Yes, the FleurBurger 5000 is an exercise in extravagance, but it’s also just damn good. It’s made with Kobe beef, topped with foie gras and black truffles and served on a brioche truffle bun — you might as well start salivating now. It also comes with a bottle of Chateau Petrus 1995 (a wine with a hint of black truffles), and is served in Ichendorf Brunello stemware, shipped to your home after the meal. Fleur sells about four of these palate pleasers a year. Don’t want to fork over that kind of cash for a patty? There are plenty of other luxury burger experiences to be had in Sin City:

    • Burger Bar at Mandalay Bay offers a chance to taste Keller’s burger without a super steep price tag. While some options go for as little as $10, we like the $60 Rossini Kobe burger, which is comparable to Fleur’s with sautéed foie gras and shaved truffles.
  • Le Burger Brasserie inside Paris Casino touts a $777 Kobe beef and Maine lobster burger, topped with carmelized onions, Brie, prosciutto and 100-year aged balsamic vinegar — nothing but the finest for this ground beef. A very good bottle of Rose Dom Perignon accompanies the order.
    • L’Atelier du Joel Robuchon at MGM Grand features Le Burger, two Wagyu beef sliders and some killer fries for $32. And since you’re eating at a traditional fine dinining establishment, you’ll also get the de rigueur amuse bouche.

Photo courtesy of MGM Resorts International

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Hotels

Global Soap Project And Hilton Team Up For Sustainable Hotel Culture

Global Soap Project founder Derreck Kayongo, pictured right, delivers soap in Africa.

Luxury soaps—just one of the amenities you’ll encounter at Four- and Five-Star hotels. But what happens when you leave a half-used bar behind? More often than not, the remainder ends up in a landfill. There must be a better way. Enter Global Soap Project.

On Nov. 8, Hilton Worldwide announced its partnership with Global Soap Project, a nonprofit organization that collects discarded soaps from hotels, reprocesses them and sends them to vulnerable communities. Hilton also committed to investing $1.3 million over the next three years in Global Soap Project. Together, the nonprofit and the hotel chain are helping the travel and hospitality industry clean up in more ways than one.

“There’s a symbiotic relationship between the health industry and the hotel industry,” said Global Soap Project founder Derreck Kayongo. “Soap recycling means good health and hygiene and social responsibility.”

For the people Global Soap aids, soap is an afterthought when the choice lies between soap and food or medicine. Children die every day from diseases like dysentery and pneumonia that could easily be prevented by soap and water, and Kayongo estimates 800 million bars of soap are discarded every year. He says the Global Soap Project’s goal is to put a bar of soap in every child’s hand—a measure that could help eradicate disease. For hotels partnering on the project, the benefit is twofold: Not only do they help prevent diseases, but they also reduce their carbon footprints.

As a corporation, Hilton has made strides to improve sustainability. The company’s LightStay initiative, for example, looks to reduce the energy and water use and waste and carbon output in all its hotels. The Global Soap Project is an extension of those measures. Among its successes, Global Soap Project has shipped 2.5 tons of soap to South Sudan, a country with an infant mortality rate of 102 per 1,000.

Kayongo counts his personal delivery of 5,000 bars of soap to Kisumu, Kenya, as one of his greatest achievements thus far. He and his parents fled their native Uganda for Kenya as refugees when Kayongo was a child, giving the trip an even greater sentiment. For his efforts, Kayongo has been honored as one of CNN’s Top 10 Heroes for 2011. But while luxury hotels and sustainability may seem like a paradoxical relationship, Kayongo believes the two can coexist. In fact, he said he has even delivered bars of BVLGARI soap that easily retail for more than $10 to impoverished people.

“We’re not just giving them the worst product, but the best product,” Kayongo said. “Beggars can be choosers.”

Photo courtesy of Global Soap Project.

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Restaurants, Tastemakers

Tastemaker: Chef Alex Stratta To Open First New York Restaurant

Chef Alex Stratta

Forbes Travel Guide Tastemaker and chef Alex Stratta is making a fresh start with a new restaurant: Bigoli. Stratta, a Top Chef Masters alum and executive chef of the now-closed Five-Star Alex restaurant in Las Vegas, is teaming up with partners Brad Nagy and Angelo Viscoso and chef de cuisine Joe Swan to open the eatery in New York’s Greenwich Village. We chatted with chef Stratta about his latest venture:

Q: We haven’t heard much of this restaurant until the other day. Were you trying to keep this under wraps until it opened?

A: Not particularly. It was something we were working on and it happened very, very quickly. I was trying to give the restaurant business a bit of a break, but I got the opportunity to do consulting and just to help out. Next thing you know, I’m more involved with it and The New York Times finds out about it…and then it’s been kind of a rollercoaster for a couple of days in the sense that expectations are pretty substantial. We all agreed to come in nice and quiet and slow — but it got people’s interest, so here I am.

Q: What is the overall concept of Bigoli?

A: [Brad Nagy and Angelo Viscoso] are from Westchester County, New York, and have a pizza restaurant called Frankie & Fanucci’s. They took over the space and were going to make it into a pizza place, so they built a beautiful big pizza oven. I saw the place and said it was way too nice to be a pizza joint. So I said, why don’t we do something that isn’t done often: cook old-style and traditional, and cook everything in the wood-burning oven — the roast, the fish, the vegetables. Then we just proceeded to develop a menu that was very pasta-heavy, because Bigoli is a type of regional pasta that’s made with buckwheat flour. It’s going to be Italian — strong Italian — but regional and simple and straightforward. I don’t want to do fancy stuff anymore.

Q: What will the menu be like?

A: What we’ve designed on the menu is a bit of a hybrid of the a la carte. It seems like more and more people are picking and choosing what they want to eat, so I decided to do pasta straightforward. And then the main courses, you get to choose. Instead of having composed dishes, we’ll have the base main course, like a pork chop or veal chop, and then you get to choose your components. But it’s not like a la carte in the sense that it doesn’t cost any more; it’s just, here’s the dish and choose two sides and you can create it yourself.

Q: What is the interior design like?

A: It’s urban, simple. [There will be] wood chairs, and we took a bunch of different types of broken marble and made a nice marble and stone floor. [You’ll also see] dark woods, dark leather, nice pastels, very subtle pastel upholstery and striped carpet in the back. The place looks like it could be at any level of dining. It’s beautiful. It’s got a nice entrance and open kitchen. It’s got this beautiful wood oven that’s decked out with broken pieces of tile. I’m very, very curious as to how it’s going to feel when there are people in it.

Q: Are you relocating to New York?

A: No. I’m going to be staying in Las Vegas. I have my children there and I’m planning on doing some more stuff in Vegas, so this is kind of a small thing I was going to do that snowballed into something larger and I’m super excited about it. I love New York and I’m certainly coming into New York with a level of humility. It’s a tough town.

Chef Stratta says he plans on doing two stints a month at the restaurant, so you might just see him if you visit. Bigoli, located at 140 West 13th St., is set to open by November 29th.

Photo Courtesy of Bravo

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