The Year Hotels Changed
Also, an edible ode to chiles. And more than you ever wanted to know about charcoal.
“I’m looking for a hotel room in San Francisco next month,” my friend Bill just texted me, “and I can’t find anything even remotely reasonable. Only hotel I could find downtown without a 2- or 3-day minimum was the Palace at $1,850 a night.”
Really?
Bill’s note - and the excruciatingly high prices hotels across the world are now charging - made me think about this article I wrote in 1984, when the American hotel scene was being upended by innovators with new ideas. Foremost among them were two San Francisco geniuses with wildly different goals.
Bill Wilkinson wanted to offer you the opportunity to be endlessly pampered. Bill Kimpton, on the other hand, said he was “selling sleep not luxury.” But there was one thing both men felt certain about: great restaurants had to be part of the package.
Both men lured world-class chefs away from other venues. For Wilkinson that wasn’t such a stretch: Bradley Ogden’s restaurant was simply part of the luxury package he offered at Campton Place. But Kimpton came at it from another angle. Knowing that people might be wary of low prices, cramped quarters and uninspiring locations he set out to reassure guests by anchoring each hotel with a fabulous restaurant. When he opened Vintage Court, he lured the great chef Masa Kobayashi from The Auberge du Soleil in the Napa Valley.
Later on I’ll post the piece I wrote when Masa moved from New York to Napa. (He was such an essential part of Le Plaisir that the restaurant chose to close rather than go on without him.) But now I’ll tell you that his story had a tragic ending. A few months after opening his eponymous restaurant in Kimpton’s hotel (to wildly enthusiastic reviews), the chef was murdered in his own apartment. The murder has never been solved.
Bill Kimpton - a visionary and, it seemed to me the few times I interviewed him - an extremely likable guy - passed away in 2001. Today only two Kimpton hotels remain in the city where he started. Interesting footnote: Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan is Kimpton’s step-daughter.
Here is a fascinating menu from around the same time.
I’m assuming this is from the early eighties, when Mark Miller was running The Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley (and before he grew so enamored of the food of the Southwest that he moved to Santa Fe to open Coyote Cafe).
What particularly intrigues me is the way this menu roams the globe, swooping into Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Ethiopia, Spain to sample the many ways each employs chiles. There’s even a final stop in India to put out the fire.
It’s a fine reminder of that time when we were all discovering the foods of places, thrilled by new spices, new textures, new flavors. These dishes don’t belong together - and yet if you offered me this menu today I’d order every single dish.
Susan Spungen’s new Veg Forward might be the perfect cookbook for this moment in time. And isn’t this a great cover?
And if you’re spending a lot of time around the grill, here’s a little gift for you. Or perhaps it’s not a gift after all. Because it is easy to spend an insane amount of time on the wildly obsessive website called The Naked Whiz. Everything you’ll ever need to know about charcoal.
Did your friend Bill find a place? I'm going to SF in October and booked a room at The Beacon (formerly the Francis Drake). The Proper also looks very reasonable!
May 1984, I read your article and Wine spectator reviewed Masa's. We booked Vintage Court on our honeymoon, couldn't get reservation at Masa's but got on the wait list. After an afternoon of dim sum in SF and Alice Medrich's chocolate we got a call Masa's had an opening at 6pm. Stuffed as we were jumped at the chance. After a starter of seafood sausage threw my husband over the edge, he went up to our room as I finished the meal alone. I was entertained by a large group of people in town for the National Restaurant Association show. On the table were remarkable bottles and stacks of unfinished glasses of wine, notably a very old vintage Chateaux d'Yquem. My husband returned for dessert and needless to say missed a memorable meal. Actually after 39 years it is still one of our most memorable dining experiences!