There are myriad attractive reasons to choose to stay in your parents’ home when you’re visiting for the holidays–that is, if you have parents, and if they have a home. But if you do, and if you hail from New York, and if you come from a close-knit family, and if you are me (and many others at the tail end of Generation X, who now live elsewhere), your lodging reservations are almost etched in stone–unless you stay with your in-laws and feel guilty you’re not staying with your parents, or unless you stay with your parents and feel guilty about not staying with your brother, et cetera.

Most people from New York, this author included, have never stayed in a New York hotel. It’s not just a variation on: “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen and never got to the Empire State Building.” New York hotels were not just considered extraordinarily expensive in our world. They were considered wasteful and off-limits–for tourists and outsiders–as well as grossly inauthentic. How could you visit your “home” if you choose not to stay there? Isn’t going home–as if anyone can anymore–supposed to feel comfortable? Add to these sentiments two important reasons to seek out a Manhattan hotel for a couple of days–one, a legitimate work requirement; another, that New York hunger to know how the other half (in this case, Manhattan hotel guests) live. Such are the reasons behind my decision last December to stay in two hotels when I had four family residences in the New York area from which to choose, where I could have slept–and argued, and worried, and overeaten reduced calorie snacks–for free.

I’ll admit: The idea appealed to me from the moment I booked my plane. Sandwiched between a horrible six-hour Jet Blue flight without a functional TV and having to go “home” to the scene of my childhood night terrors, I could use a mini-detox on the ground to mentally prepare for a family visit — the hope being that I’d come off as just a little bit less of the stunned ‘tween I usually appear to be when I meet my parents after a number of months away. I could avoid the instant regression and enjoy an immediate chance to be with my NYC peers and feel like an adult. Then, when I did approach my family, I might not act–and/or be treated–like a child again.

The plan: Land in JFK. Commit a serious crime, choosing not to be thrown into a Nissan backseat for an emotionally jarring 53-minute drive east. Then stay somewhere required for my professional assignment, near others I work with and would have to meet, for a few days–before heading out, on my terms, to the Long Island structure in which I was raised. Employing this strategy, I could avoid, if not simply delay, “Home for the Holidays” syndrome–and maintain some hand in the Home Visit Power Balance that eventually sways in the direction of the Hosts within two hours of adult children landing on weathered emotional tarmacs.

So, I tried it: After landing in New York, sweaty with creaky joints, I emerged from JFK for the first time and found a spot in the epic Cab Line. It was blissful, jockeying for space with the other very giving visitors, especially the conversational ponytailed man with the 90210-fan carryon who had felt that our in-flight legroom was “communal footsie space.” Spiritually nourishing is the only way to explain how it felt to then see the NYC skyline from the comfort of LIE traffic while listening to a taxi driver who actually spoke English whine on the phone about his prostate. Next, however, I received a true gift, as the cabbie explained, with bulletproof rhetoric, that it would be more environmentally friendly to choose not to drive up to the door of my hotel. Yes, he would save gas, time, and the planet if I could walk the extra four blocks, with three bags, so he “also” wouldn’t have to turn in a direction he didn’t want to drive. I appreciated the socially responsible approach, but, selfish yuppie scum that I am, kindly asked if he wouldn’t mind completing the trip for which he was going to receive a flat fee and generous tip. Note: Situations like these are great fun when your cabbie speaks English well.

Things improved significantly upon my arrival at the Andaz Fifth Avenue, however. Standing on the street, cars blazing past me, bags at my feet, I felt almost like Arnold Drummond at the introduction to Diff’rent Strokes. Wealthy urbanites zipped to and fro, perhaps to expensive restaurants where they would likely check their iPhones for an hour in front of someone drinking overpriced wine. Across the street from me was the majestic staircase and lion-roaring façade of the New York Public Library; at least this trip would make me feel as good about my writing career as family members who expect detailed assessments of my monthly magazine invoices. And there was literally a Nip in the air. A flying wrapper from one of those scrumptious chocolate-parfait candies (or do you call one of these “a Nips?”) wafted right past my nose, reminding me of New York’s incorrigible whimsy. How I longed to return from Los Angeles to a homeland that didn’t take itself too seriously.

The Andaz, however, wasn’t the Plaza (note, a good thing). I like a hotel in New York with something of a hidden door, like the tall slab right off 5th and 41st that leads you into the Andaz. Also, I didn’t feel outclassed by ridiculously dressed bell-people, gilded mirrors, and crazy old furniture, as I often did visiting friends in the lobbies of more so-called regal establishments. The Andaz is stylish but not in an aggressively hipster way; it’s adult and assured, if more pricey than the Holiday Inn. The employees who welcomed me were actually nice, even witty, and as I checked-in via iPad at the sleek white bar in the chic high-ceilinged lobby, gulping free water in a flask-like bottle, I decompressed, which is more than I can say for how I feel at many of the front desks in Palm Springs’s hyper-relaxed! spa resorts.

But the hotel didn’t feel like a real NYC home; it felt like something better: the pied-a-terre I’d want if I could afford one. Outside the elevator on my level I found a wall with a handwritten quote from Gustav Mahler (my personal godfather of whimsy) explaining a concept that, as a musician, I try to explain to people all the time. “If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.” Pretentious? I don’t think so. The maxim could have just as easily been written by Bob Dylan, or Cee-Lo Green, save for the addition of one or two more “contemporary” words.

Staying in my minimalist loft-room, with a design-y desk next to a tall window looking out on the NYCPL, I started to ooze into my writing work. I wasn’t physically in the library, surrounded by books, feeling the history of literature and the ghosts from that 90’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, engulf me. I was in a spare, zen-like retreat that looked down on the place quite literally, putting that important and imposing structure in its rightful place. Hell, I could walk right in there now, borrow a book and never return it. I would rest easy this evening, but not before indulging in the footbath I found in the giant shower. (Note: I don’t know another New York hotel that offers a bowl in which to cool your dogs, nor have I ever tried one, but after a day of standing around in Red Wing boots, trying to pretend to New Yorkers that I don’t spend most of my LA life slumming it in cushy New Balance sneakers, it was relief of the highest order.)

I was worried about dinner-time, though. Usually, in New York, the first night brings me some gastritis-soothing, mom-roasted fowl. This night, however, I would meet my brother and his fiancé, not in their apartment, but in the hotel’s dark and speakeasy-ish basement bar, treating the young lovers to a nice array of very stiff cocktails, red wine, and tapas, where, among other tasty bites, we’d excitedly devour the exact opposite of a Jewish roast chicken: Spanish-spiced pork shoulder. It felt wrong and right at once, which these days, without sounding like an ad for a stupid new Vegas hotel, actually seems to feel more right than anything. Of course I chased it with chorizo and slept guilt-free.

The next day, leaving the Andaz for work–I’ll take that free boutique lip-balm, thank you very much, cool chick in the lobby–I won a new assignment that I had been hoping for. The question: Did hotel-living make it happen? Give me the confidence I needed to be my best? I couldn’t be sure, but just in case, I swiftly repaired to the next NYC antithesis of my childhood home: The James Hotel, in Soho, roughly positioned where 6th Avenue meets Canal, in a sort of Nexus of the West Lower Manhattan Universe, above the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and in front of a lot of open space, thanks to more than a few blocks of low buildings. All of which I relished from a sleek high-floor room with glass corners. Which is, if you were wondering, how to do downtown.

If the Andaz is modern midtown comfort through accessible style, the James is on par with a somewhat different mojo, centered also on style but on design that feels more Tribeca-inspired. The James is a smaller, even more hidden spot, but this view was Wall Street 2 (if you were the film’s handsomely paid creative producer, as opposed to its bad actors), the room more about looking out in every direction than tucking in with one master view.

Both NYC-viewing styles have their merits, of course, and I appreciated the free pastries and high-end joe available in the eclectic public space off the hotel’s check-in desk as much as I appreciated the Sony iPhone charger next to my firm platform bed. It was also novel to be within walking distance of Balthazar for the first time in my life. Now that the famed brasserie has escaped Sex and the City site-placement, we can finally return to loving it, genuinely, and eating superior french fries that do not appear to exist in a family home where everything is sautéed, if it is fried at all, in heart-healthy omega-3s. Why not indulge, especially when the hotel’s SUV will escort you, DeNiro-like, to the train station for free?

You have to learn something in every essay, even a casual one for an online publication (take notes, micro-blog students), and what I learned from these lodging experiences was that by choosing specific, new boutique hotels that break the standard NYC mold, I could actually break through that Inauthenticity Forcefield that renders Manhattan hotel guests outsiders. At least that’s how it worked for me, armed with just a little insider knowledge and a personal history of the city. I’m not going to argue that I completely avoided “Home for the Holidays” friction: it set in about three days into arriving at my family’s place. But hell, it took three whole days, and I avoided the anticipatory anxiety, which is sometimes the worst part. Moreover, those first 72 hours with the parents were far more comfortable and pleasant, the way they should be.

Do I suffer from delusions of grandeur? Sadly, I always have, outside of short travel essays, too. But now, in my fantastic head, at least for one work-related trip that I happened to tack onto the beginning of a family visit, I had two pied-a-terres in Manhattan. When I return next time and cannot revisit them (because, who will want me to anonymously review them twice?), I will simply employ pharmaceuticals to help me forget what it was like to live in New York, albeit for a couple of days, like a New Yorker again, and I’ll just take to my trundle bed with a plate of roast chicken and gnaw away the night, rolling across the floor of my childhood bedroom, believing that when I finally grow up in my head, it will all be better.

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This coastline in Thailand’s south-west, at the edge of its Muslim regions, suffers, you could say, from being too beautiful for its own good. It was used as a background, just as famously or infamously, for the Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun. Thus, as you first enter the marine parks by boat from the town of Krabi, there is an instant feel of déj

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There’s an unforgettable scene in Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse.” Monica Vitti, playing Vittoria, is standing at night by a long row of flagpoles that rattle sinisterly in the high wind. Vaguely spooked, and on edge, she turns as if to verify the source of her unease and bewilderment only to see these wobbling, sibilant poles. I always think of this scene whenever I am within architectural settings determined by the International Style. The film used the fascist and mid-century architecture of Rome as its emotional language, perfectly and subtly conveying the continuity between spatial brutality and human malaise. But one wonders if it is loved as much by architects as by those of us who entertain a distrust of mid-century architecture.

If you recall this peerless film, it’s a depiction of the doomed love affair between a self-absorbed stockbroker played by Alain Delon and a pathless Vitti character who has wandered out of one love affair into another without knowing what she is doing or why. The couple meet regularly at a crossroads shadowed by terrifying buildings; a horse and buggy pass by inexplicably at the same moment. And then, with the gathering inertia of most love affairs, the couple cannot be bothered to meet there anymore. Still, the architecture remains. It is space that has created human personality, not the other way around.

What does all of this have to do with New York’s Standard hotel? Well, that depends on your mood. When Andre Balazs‘s boutique hotel opened to acclaim in January of this year, there was a great deal of press loquacity on the topic of its design and architectural meanings. It was readily compared to in-town Internationalist icons like Lever House and the U.N., to the works of Eero Saarinan and Mies van der Rohe. Fair enough: Todd Schliemann of Polshek Partnership Architects, the architect who boldly raised this cement-and-glass, book-shaped tower above Manhattan’s new High Line park, was making exactly that statement. It’s a beautiful statement, too, precisely because we have been spared more meat-and-potatoes developer schlock engineered to maximize space (that is, other people’s money) and instead given something — rare in contemporary New York — to think about and enjoy speculatively. It is a question of which is to be enjoyed: inside or out?

There is a difference. From the outside, an impression of grim muscularity and determined assertion. From the inside, a feeling of lightness and spacious Barbarella whimsy. The mood is a little strange — nostalgic and slightly uneasy, bold and solitary at once. We are being thrown artfully back to the Sixties in the grand manner. But which Sixties?

Staying here in a ninth-floor suite with views over the Hudson and the towers of New Jersey (more beautifully sinister than we realize when seen from a pronounced elevation right by the water), I couldn’t help thinking not of the New York of Lever House but of the Rome of Moravia and Antonioni.

The impression is reinforced by the hotel’s interiors, designed by Hollywood set designer Shaun Hausman, and I dare say that it’s quite deliberate. Accordingly, I took the Italian girl, who coincidentally bears more than a passing resemblance to Monica Vitti, and the first thing she said was, “I love it, it’s all Rome 1960.” Which may not be quite true, of course, but there it is.

Balazs’s hotel is marvelously integrated with the High Line, which rolls underneath its muscular concrete vaults (Rome, again). Whether it works or not is secondary to the fact that they have tried to make something unusual work. Stay at the hotel, take your passeggiata on the High Line — there is some Italian ice cream on offer — and lounge on the wooden sun beds with your amore. Is this not an improvement in the city’s landscape?

Secondly, I like it when hoteliers go design-crazy for the hell of it. It is usually a bit tacky and adolescent, but so what? Despite parochial expressions of surprise and amazement from the New York press about the Standard’s high-concept minimalism and “attention to detail,” such concept hotels are pretty common in Asia. Think of the Dream Hotel or the S15 in Bangkok, or any number of places in Tokyo. The trick is to offset the slight cheapness of the materials with dazzling gobs of design. It’s hotels as DWR.

The only trouble with this concept in America is that many Americans don’t really understand luxury or service in the way that Asians do — it’s all four notches down, so it teeters on a finer knife-edge. New York design hotels love to staff their lobbies with leggy models and air-brushed pretty boys who seem pained by the idea of, well, working in a hotel. I am always dying to touch them with an electric cattle prod to see what will happen. But at least staying at the Standard you are not trapped inside the ghastly no-service Gansevoort nearby. Here, they at least raise their dreamy eyes.

Now to the rooms. We took a $625 a night suite with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. Gorgeous atmosphere of light and water and air. My first thought was: Why have Hong Kong hoteliers grasped this synergy all along while their New York counterparts are only getting it now? This city is surrounded by water, by sea, by vast skies. The Standard, finally, uses them.

I have to confess that I actually felt moved by New York’s skyline all over again. Romantic energies took over. The interiors are like ship cabins, elegantly utilitarian and ergonomic, with white plastics and metals, wooden slats, beige materials, enameled tiles, and rather austere looking in-house bath materials. It’s the hotel equivalent not just of DWR but of arte (or is it cucina?) povera.

Personally, I like this sort of thing, in a certain mood at least. Here, it matches the overpowering sense of luminous space. The beds are capacious and deep. You can watch the sunset without feeling that you are in a city at all. It’s like pretending to be poor, and perhaps that is what design hotels are all about. They awaken an atavistic purist within us.

This even extends to their breakfast policy, i.e. there isn’t any outside of room service. I was told that I could, at a pinch, have a cup of coffee — as long as it was black. Oh, dear. This is one area of minimalism that might be usefully revised. When in New York I really don’t want to be dreaming wistfully of breakfasts in Shanghai. Or walking around the Meat Packing district like a lost soul looking for somewhere to eat. I noticed some Japanese girls doing the same, a kind of polite fury in their eyes.

But now let’s consider some nicer things about this home away from home on Washington Street. Take the question of voyeurism, for example.

Notoriously, the Standard’s rooms are so open-plan, so full of glass, that you are automatically exposed not just to the elements but to thousands of other less fortunate New Yorkers milling below you. Not least those people who are strolling innocently along the High Line. Or are they so innocent as they appear? The architect is quoted in a New York Observer article from several months ago as having seen a Standard maid from the High Line dressed in a tight little dress and stockings pressing her adorable bum against one of the windows. “Fabulous!” he cries. “This is it!” So at least we know that it was all planned. I wonder if he would feel the same, seeing one of the guests taking a crap in the open plan bathroom? But chacun

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When I heard that, in 2003, the Chinese government had actually changed the name of a town in Yunnan province from Zhongdian to Shangri-la, however, I felt impelled to get a map of China and have a closer look. And there it was, nestled on the Tibet border and equipped with a small airport and Banyan Tree resort: Xiangilala. An idea had been turned into a place, which is even more intriguing than the other way around.

On my way through Shanghai, I took the time to read Lost Horizon. It’s a potboiler, written by an obviously intelligent man, and like many such works, it exerts a curious, trashy spell on the unconscious. Let me summarize. At the head of the western contingent that lands in Shangri-la is Conway, a strapping but disillusioned Oxford intellectual who speaks fluent Chinese: I imagine him as a young Aldous Huxley contemplating his own future utopian work, Island. With him are a Bible-punching maid, a disreputable American Wall Street operator fleeing justice, and a young English prig, who desperately wants to get out of Shangri-La and back to, well, Welwyn Garden City. Dialogue is peppy. “Dammit, man, what are we chaps going to do?” Conway, though, is quietly impressed. Shangri-la’s plumbing, he discovers with a joyful frisson, has been imported from America and the only inconvenience as far as he can see is that once you’ve entered the golden valley, you can’t leave. It’s an interesting dilemma. Good plumbing, no freedom.

And there are other peculiarities. Shangri-la, it turns out, is not really Tibetan at all. It was founded by a wandering Frenchman called Perrault in the 18th century who lived to an amazing age and founded the monastery’s collection of classical music and world classics. Then we discover that the High Lama himself is a Bronte scholar, a fan of Wuthering Heights, no less. And it soon transpires that he isn’t Tibetan either — he is Perrault!

Despite these preposterous twists and turns, Lost Horizon enjoyed so much success in the 1930′s that it was able to simultaneously inspire a movie, the naming of a presidential compound, and seven Nazis expeditions to Tibet, the most famous being the 1938 Schafer expedition. Quite a feat for a thinking man’s potboiler. But did Shangri-la ever exist? Why has the word remained so persistent a part of the vocabulary of English?

In Wikipedia, we find the following entry: “Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. The story of Shangri-La is based on the concept of Shambhala, a mystical city in Tibetan Buddhist tradition.” In Sanskrit, Shambhala means “place of tranquility.”

The Banyan Tree chain, based in Hong Kong, has rushed into this orgy of marketing with a grisly alacrity. The people behind it hope, obviously, to latch onto the great reservoir of affluent Westerners who are, no doubt, going to be charmed by the very idea of a Himalayan paradise. The cruder side of the real Tibet will be kept at bay, mainly by siting the hotel miles from the main road on a lonely hillside overlooking an equally lonely river. No one can get to you: Well, the Tibetans can’t get to you; the yaks can’t get at you either. But your unconscious can.

That’s the whole point. It’s an austere place, and its appeal is to the mystical grain of self-denial buried so fondly within the average Wall Street hedge-fund man — or, now that the round-eyed Americans are broke, their Chinese counterparts.

It feels like a remote imperial outpost in Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians,” behind whose impressive walls one might wait for the arrival of greasy little thugs on ponies. Instead, one enjoys the Jacuzzi units in the farmhouses and eats panna cotta on the terrace at sunset with silver spoons while chit-chatting with the international leisure class. The rooms are actually converted farmhouses, painted dark red inside and protected by their own walls and traditional gates. From the upper rooms, you can see the yaks staring at you. No one knows why yaks stare so, but they make one deliciously nervous, walking around in a $400 bathrobe: Perhaps it’s because they look at you as if you owe them money.

One morning I went into Xiangilala. It was a disappointment, of course. A frontier town filled with traffic cops should never enjoy such a name. I waded along the usual Chinese avenues of five-headed lamps looking like a pompous promenade in an English seaside town bordered by a mess of frenzied construction. New hotels were rising everywhere. Nightmarish billboards loomed out of the rain, with the word “Shangri-la,” blazing in both Chinese and Tibetan. The sides of the houses were covered with mysterious rows of graffiti numbers — telephone numbers, it would seem, but for what?

That night I wandered through the old town. There was a Zhang tribal dance going on in one of the squares with dozens of Zhang women in bright headdresses doing a kind of circular Morris dance accompanied by some great, galloping, white hippy girls in outlandish frocks. The news has gotten out. Shangri-la exists, and you can be a terpsichoric hippy there. No one minds.

Back in 1995, before the mania to become Shangri-la set in, Zhongdian drew a mere 4,336 visitors. One understands immediately that, in only five years, a beady-eyed government in Beijing allied with investors in Hong Kong has turned this place into a cash-crunching fantasy machine. It’s a perfect example of why tourism has such a bad reputation among people who profess not to be tourists, which is to say virtually everybody. It has no real reason for happening other than a crude grasping for dollars; it assumes that branding is omnipotent; it takes us all for idiots. Moreover, it succeeds in all three assumptions.

But back to the Banyan Tree. The design is meticulously Tibetan and Buddhist-feeling. Spare, flowing water, pebbles: the international language of designer Buddhism. In the resort’s common areas, though, you sometimes see well-off couples from around the world padding about with wind-spiked hair, gasping in the high altitude, and complaining about the food. This is not so Buddhist.

There were a few furious scenes at dinner. One night, a South African guy stood up from his table and screamed in exasperation, “This isn’t it a bloody panna cotta, man, it’s a bad bloody chocolate pudding!”

“It is panna cotta,” the waiter said with seething aggression.

“It is not panna cotta.”

They almost came to blows.

“It’s chocolate bloody pudding.”

“Panna cotta!” the waiter cried, emotionally.

Now, I couldn’t imagine Hilton writing that dialogue in his Shangri-la, but then we are not told if the 200-year monks ever sampled panna cotta. Yet the resort did remind me of the novel all the same. It does feel a little like a utopian project. Those yaks: they’re just so perfect.

But is utopia ever content? The staffers are drawn from every part of Asia, and as I was sipping a beer on the terrace, looking out over patches of snow and yet more grazing yaks, a staffer from Malaysia confessed to me that everyone hated working there, that the bosses were ruthless penny-pinchers, and that the Thais and the Indonesians couldn’t stand this so-called Shangri-la. I asked the spa staff, in Thai (for secrecy’s sake) what they thought of the Chinese. “Chinese big barbarian pigs,” they said sadly, shaking their heads. “We not happy.”

Syncretism is always a hard thing to pull off, but here it has almost become something you have to decode for your own sanity. The prices are exorbitant and you are surrounded by one of the poorest regions on earth. Normally, this is not a deathly factor, per se, and it can sometimes be cannily explained away. But not here, somehow. You are paying, essentially, for a beautiful setting and a beautiful farmhouse, and the mish-mosh restaurant food designed to please the mythical “western palate” makes one yearn for some rancid butter tea and bershom made with Tibetan wild mushrooms.

But there are some mystical oddities all the same. They say that, at harvest time, the place swarms with rats and gerbils. They are apparently uncontrollable, just a fact of life in a rural environment. It was my driver, La, who explained this as we sat one night in his house, three miles from the Banyan Tree, drinking his “Zhang wine,” brewed with ancient herbs in rooms colored with home-made frescoes reminiscent of LSD trips. We were so drunk that we had laid out on your backs in the middle of the room, surrounded by smoking, yak-butter candles. “The gerbils,” La cried. “The giant rats. Everywhere! The Banyan Tree is doomed!”

After leaving the resort, as it happened, we drove many days to Litang in Sichuan. On a lonely stretch of road, not far from the desolate town of Daocheng, La suddenly slammed on the brakes. Without saying a word, he slipped out of the Jeep and unsheathed his SOG Survival knife. A few feet away, what looked like a giant rodent stood gnawing a piece of brightly colored fabric — a torn prayer flag. La sprang after it, and it shot away across the snow-spotted tundra. I could only watch helplessly as some mysterious drama played itself out between man and rodent. La ran at a furious pace right out to the horizon, then disappeared.

I read later that parts of China have been overrun by an outsize rodent species, Rhombomys opimus. Better known as Great Gerbils, these creatures can grow to be 16 inches long and have nibbled away more than 11 million acres of Chinese grassland. Perhaps that’s why La was so motivated to subdue the offending animal. Or perhaps it was the insult to the prayer flag. Or perhaps a Great Gerbil is a ready meal. Finally, La came back empty-handed, sighed, turned on the ignition, and then touched his lips with his fingers. He shook his head and then pointed, mysteriously, to one of the runic tattoos needled into his neck. “Banyan Tree,” he said darkly, and I had no idea what he meant.

There are worse places to stay in Shangri-la, of course; the Red Army Shining Star motel, for example, or the Pacific Rim. You could even end, God help you, in the Gyalthang Dzong, described as lying “in a vast grassland of alpine flora dotted with cattle of yak.”

True, these places won’t run your credit rating. But the Banyan at least makes us feel like life is not entirely cheap and disposable. It lets us breathe the rarified air of our own myths. The rooms are pretty good, too.

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The genius of the hotel is that it performs several functions simultaneously. It shelters, nourishes, becalms, entertains, and replenishes, all at once. Historically, restaurant culture and tourism grew out of the hotel, not the other way around. The modern hotel, girdling the planet in ever-larger chains, is a microcosm of all the things that human beings want when they are liberated from the chains of sedentary domesticity — including the comforts of sedentary domesticity.

While I am in Asia, I am often based in Bangkok. The city has the best hotels in the world, but there is one thing they lack. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, and so to find a hotel that includes baccarat or poker in its list of amenities, you are well-advised to head to Macau. While writing my book Bangkok Days, I discovered the Hotel Lisboa, the most profitable hotel casino in the world and the personal creation of octogenerian Hong Kong billionaire Stanley Ho, ballroom dancer extraordinaire and Asia’s richest wine collector. To judge by the décor of the Lisboa, Ho is mad. It looks like an orange meringue pie, scrambled with a vast tit. No matter. The rooms are wonderfully vulgar, dejected punters on losing streaks can get “hot-cold” blow jobs in the sauna, and there are antique jade galleons for sale in the lobby. By now, I have a standard routine when staying there.

I sleep all day, of course. The hotel is perfectly designed to elide night and day. At eight p.m., exactly, I put on my darkest suit and take the elevator down from the seventh floor of the hotel. It is the hour of the “second shift,” and the revolving doors turn like turbines as crowds from the Chinese mainland pour through them and hurl themselves towards the labyrinth of casinos scattered throughout the hotel. Seven million dollars a day in revenues. I always feel that I am making a grand exit every time I leave my suite and descend to the casinos. I am ready to play Asia’s favorite game, baccarat, at smoky tables of fourteen players in conditions of superstition-fueled hysteria, regulated only by electronic boards (one for each table), which indicate the way the winds of Fortune are blowing. This is an I Ching hotel, dominated by superstition, mystery, irrational calculation.

In the elevator, we meet the mainlanders. Brutal factory managers with rubella faces and cheap suits who smoke continuously, their eyes little lusty slits that suck everything in and spit it out again. The women in white cowboy boots and sequined jeans. Trashy, but weirdly sexy. They don’t exactly look like they are having fun, not in our robust occidental sense. They look like they are out to scalp the world. This is life and death fun, after all — Chinese fun — and it is not fun unless you are winning more money than you make every week working at the Shenzen paper clip factory that enslaves you. On the ground floor, they stand by the Throne of Pharoah, a reproduction chair from Tutankhamen’s tomb, and a large vertical oil painting with its title provided: La Mere Abandonee. A woman with a lyre sighing over a baby sleeping in a wheeled carriage. What do they make of such things?

The Chinese know all about suffering. But this scene of rural misery from nineteenth century France does not arouse their curiosity at all. They turn their backs to it as they wait for the elevators. Is it “bourgoise?” They carry bags of gaming chips and cans of winter melon tea. Their breath smells of oyster sauce. I buy a cigar in the underground mall filled with Piaget watch stores and shark fin vendors and go back up to the biggest of the casinos to start my night dancing with the goddess of luck, Guan Yin. This in-house casino is called the Mona Lisa. I’ve noticed that Guan Yin and Mona Lisa have the same, faint, slightly sinister smile.

As it happens I am very interested in the goddess Guan Yin. In India, she used to be a he, and his name was Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva of Compassion. The Chinese, like the Thais, turned her into a goddess and associated her with luck, even gambling luck. Her image is everywhere at the Lisboa, serene and all-knowing. Her name is translated as “she who listens to the sounds of the world.” But will she make me lucky as I gamble my nights away inside this psychotic hotel which acts as her shrine?

The Lisboa is a remarkable hotel in the way that it synthesizes many human cravings. Nothing is judged, nothing is unavailable. It purrs like a great machine of human pleasure. It’s certainly novel to be able to go straight from your room to your in-house casino with a cigar and brandy in hand without committing a crime.

I play Fish-Prawn-Crab dice for an hour, then baccarat, forgetting myself completely. In Asia, it’s the baccarat punto banco variety, not chemin de fer, so it’s a game of absolutely zero skill and pure chance with only small odds in the House’s favor. It’s a fast, high-wire game that grates on the emotions. The game of kings and princes remodeled for the Chinese mass market.

After the predictable disasters, I move off down the elevators to the Crystal Palace, another casino. It is like descending into an ice grotto. Waves of glass shards fall from the ceilings in shades of green and orange. I lose and lose. At $100 HK a hand it’s easy to lose hundreds in a few minutes. From there I navigate in total solitude to the Club Triumph and the Lisboa Hou Kat, a place that has a secretive feel to it, like a buried palace in Crete from the time of Linear B, with a circular room of leather sofas and tangerine trees with good luck envelopes. The Chinese seem to have a mastery of intricate secrecy; the Lisboa is a vertical honeycomb which confuses one’s innate sense of privacy.

At the top of the Lisboa lie what are called the VIP rooms. These are a labyrinth of small high-stakes “pits” arranged around atriums, corridors, and gardens of their own. It is a world apart. Inside the rooms of the Neptune or the Fortuna, or dozens of others, you see startling apparitions. Old men with scarred faces smoking cigarillos behind rope cordons as they play alone, young gangsters in sharkskin suits and Tiffany rings, lounging on Louis XV sofas, portraits of English aristocrats on the walls rendered by Chinese artists, their eyes and noses weirdly misrepresented. Some of the rooms could have been lifted out of Casanova’s Venice, with baccarat replacing faro. There are grated fires and sashed curtains. The fires are real.

Elsewhere reproduction Renoirs loom on the walls. Bright red armchairs seem to have dropped out of the surrounding Alma-Tadema paintings of ancient Rome. Laughing maidens gamboling down flowery slopes. Here, in the four innermost rooms, the bets are a minimum of 10,000 up to a maximum of two million. Three plays at a time, usually, and there is a separate entrance leading into the hotel so that the high-rollers are encouraged to roll right out of bed and into the VIP rooms with sleep in their eyes.

You go here when you want to lose a lot of money, and you don’t mind losing a lot of money. I will go here at midnight or later, when I know I won’t mind the biting losses, and I will sit with a bad brandy or a tumbler of Royal Stag Indian whiskey and play 1,000 HK hands with the thugs.

As I am the only gwai lo there, I am treated as an oddity, but I can count in Cantonese, and I can therefore play in that unspeakable language. I can therefore lose quickly, to cries of “Zaau gei!” Because the hotel admits virtually no natural light, I quickly lose all sense of time and place. I am inside Stanley Ho’s ego, not to mention my own, and this makes it an expensive place in which to idle.

How expensive is a night at the Lisboa? Well, that depends on what you consider indispensable and how bad your luck is. Either way, the hotel caters to you. If you lose everything, you can go down to the Noite e Dia café in the circular basement mall and drink a cup of Ovaltine, served by girls in grey leather capes. You can gaze at the relojherias and the Mongolian tarts who won’t have you and wait for the dog races to come on at 7 a.m. It isn’t as bad as losing in Las Vegas. If you win a lot, on the other hand, you can go to the lobby and buy a Chinese seismograph or a gilded peacock from Garraud’s of London. Or for that matter, a jade figure of Guan Yin herself. If you win so badly that you are suicidal, you can do what I do: go for a late dinner at the Robuchon outlet on the sixth floor.

There, a mushroom soup appears, combining almonds, berries, purple gorse flowers and pieces of blossoming thyme. On the ceiling, “stars” come on, flickering on and off like a night sky, and I order a bottle of Kweichow Mountain 1927, the most expensive Chinese wine ever made. True, this makes the whole experience entirely unaffordable and therefore worthwhile. But then again, the Lisboa is horribly vulgar, and so am I. Sometimes, one needs a hotel that matches one’s worst, not one’s better side. The Lisboa is my perfect match. The rooms are pretty good, too.

The post Macau Pow: The Punch of the Hotel Lisboa appeared first on The Faster Times.

Taillevent is a unique place in the galaxy of Paris’s three-star Michelin restaurants. Lodged in the former town house of the Duc de Mornay at 15 Rue Lammenais — a quiet side street near the Champs-Elysees — it has remained in the same abode for sixty years, and has enjoyed its three stars for thirty, though it lost its third star in 2007 — an absurdity. “Exquisite cuisine and a sumptuous cellar,” says the Michelin nevertheless, and this has been the accomplishment not of a chef but of a restauranteur family: the Vrinats. In the first place, Ande Vrinat who opened the restaurant in 1946. And then, after 1972, his son Jean-Claude.

A former chef there, Philippe Legrande, once said (in Andrew Todhunter’s “A Meal Observed”) that Vrinat overwhelmed the kitchen a bit and that the food “went out into a vacuum.” In a tender and admiring obituary for Jean-Claude Vrinat in Slate, Michael Steinberger wrote: “In the era of globe-spanning celebrity chefs, this allocation of labor and limelight was nothing short of antediluvian.”

But that was the price, perhaps, for the rigorous adherence to tradition, which is, let’s face it, sometimes what you want in a restaurant. Describing a recent dinner there, British wine critic Jancis Robinson observed that during sixty years “Taillevent has put on 30,000 performances — more than ‘The Mousetrap.’” The chefs who have been at the helm here over the years, Lucien Leheu, Claude Deligne, Philippe Legendre, Alain Solivérès, are somehow less than the sum total of Taillevent itself. And in our nauseating culture of celebrity is that a bad thing? Besides, Salvador Dali ate here with his ocelot.

But such restaurants are not just temples of food. They are also sometimes neurotic laboratories for our most personal relationships. In disorientating decors of crippling luxury and oddity, over the weirdest food the human race has ever concocted, in a river of wasted cash, those relationships can be displayed, tested, antagonized, and celebrated. And, in a peculiar sense, confirmed as well as damaged.

Though it’s not part of a hotel, Taillevent’s ethos clearly descends from the lineage of the hotel-restaurant. You feel part of a private house, enveloped by a larger entity. The hotel restaurant — Le Meurice, for example — extends the hotel’s atmosphere of suspended time and disrupted social reality to an opulent interior restaurant run by the same establishment. You are cocooned, with eating and sleeping bonded together as in your own home.

At Taillevent you walk in through a hallway which was once indeed that of a private house, as it was when it was built in 1852 by the Duc de Mornay (though not the Mornay, alas, who gave his name to the famous sauce). It was later the embassy of Paraguay, but as an eatery it was named after the legendary fourteenth century chef Guillaume Tirel, alias “Taillevent,” who as chef to Charles V was also the author of the cookbook “Le Viande,” the founding text of French cooking. Establishing itself quickly as one of the city’s great gastro-palaces, Taillevent had earned its first two Michelin stars by 1956 and has held onto them ever since. The interior décor has been changed in recent years, it’s true: paintings by Naggar on the walls, hip spotlights (alas), and the wainscoting looks a little paler. But the knives are still Christofle, the crystal is till Schott, and the half million bottles downstairs, some of them aging away in three different locations in Paris, form perhaps the best list in the city.

But here’s the thing with Michelin palaces. They are so-called “Veblen goods,” which are so named after the Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen ( 1857-1927 ), a shrewd and entertaining critic of late nineteenth century American capitalism. This to say that their desirability increases the more expensive they are, not according to the normal laws of supply and demand. Veblen, by the way, also coined the pretty term “conspicuous consumption,” and this entitles me to call Michelin places “Veblen restaurants.”

My theory about them is that the more you pay to use them, the more you are inclined to stage your primal dramas which would otherwise remain hemmed in by prosaic conventionalities.

I was there that night with my then girlfriend, we had arrived from New York the night before, exhausted and moody, and the Veblen effect at first soothed us, then made us fractious. It was a strange mood, partially created by the restaurant itself.

I scanned the wines, since I was there as a wine critic at the invitation of Vogue. Among the Bordeaux reds I spotted a 1920 Haunt-Brion for 1,400 Euros, a 1955 Pichon Langueville for 900, a 1953 Chateau Gilette Sauternes for 590. But in the end I ordered the oldest Burgundy they had, a 1961 Domaine Duchet. It’s an estate that no longer exists. (The tiny vineyards were sold to Forbes for $5 million and then turned into Domaine de Croix.)

The first course was something called petits pois virtuels to which the tag a la francaise had been mysteriously added. Three strips of gelatin infused with essences of peas, bacon and mint. It’s not my sort of thing, and in fact I think gelatin and foam should be made illegal by Interpol. I hesitated. But these strips of gelatin didn’t make us argue. Quite the contrary. They were, bizarrely, conciliatory.

But then the second course, a royale d’artichauts poivrade with girolles de printemps got the mood a little tenser – a hearty, pungent artichoke puree with the mushroom sitting in the middle of it like a shriveled animal organ. A piglet heart, perhaps. We ate it. We began arguing.

At fist the arguing was low and desultory, a few irritations aired as the Domaine Duchet went through our veins and opened up the jet-lag. It was like sinking into some viscous marsh. What about? The usual things that couples argue about, and in a sense, it doesn’t matter. I wondered, however, if the quantity of cash we were burning through was in tandem with the rising heat of our disagreement, or had actually liberated it in some way. The tone became accusatory, though the substance of what she was saying was not unreasonable. It was the Michelin context that made it seem so, and it was perhaps those Naggars and that strange artichoke that lowered the usual restraints. Who knows?

We ate a curried lobster and risotto, and I saw with pleasure that the Duchet was a hobo of a bottle, stained and moldy and decrepit like something that has been dragged out of an ancient aunt’s attic. It was laid on its side — poor old thing — and I read the simple red Gothic letters that revealed very little. But then, that was its appeal: it was way off my admittedly small mental map. The wine was pale, delicate, with that usual faded brick edge, and a scent of summer strawberries. I wrote in my obnoxious notebook: “I think that’s all we’ll say in winespeak.”

We were now arguing at full throttle, trying to keep our voices down while a snooty international clientele glanced over at us with incredulous disgust. Americans. So boorish they can’t even keep their stupid arguments in the hotel room. The staff noticed with their eagle eyes that we were the only people there not enjoying ourselves. They seemed sorry about it. So on, delightfully, to a plate of sea bass and vegetables infused with saffron and interpersonal fury.

After that it was a rare dark red canard de la Dombes with verbena and an Amaretto sauce. This dish seemed to go on and on as I labored with the rangy meat — perfectly done — the wine began to blossom and we begin to trade sotto voce insults. Tears flowed.

There was a long pause between this and the onset of dessert: an briny souffle made with aged Comte cheese — a Chateau Chalon — and a fantaisie des frais des bois. As with most old wines, the Domaine Duchet put me in a solitary, melancholy, reflective mood and I was happy to drink it in an emptying room, alone with a weird circular sculpture of carved ducks and the wine guys who interested to chat about the ’61. But soon we were completely alone in that fantastical dining room, watched with even greater incredulity by the staff, who finally had to intervene to throw us out after we had handed over about $2,000 for the Veblen experience. “Come again,” they said insincerely.

As soon as we were out on the street, however, the argument blew over. Was it cathartic? An hour later my girlfriend was asleep in the Hotel Castligione and as I stroked her sleeping hair I wondered if it is a fundamental principle of human relations that your girlfriend can throw a fit anywhere she damn well pleases. Of course it is. I actually admired her for it. Either way, we never talked about it ever again, and I wonder what Thorstein would have said. Did we get our money’s worth?

The post En Garde: A Gourmet Row at Paris’s Quintessential Hotel-style Restaurant appeared first on The Faster Times.

Whenever I stay in a Marriot I find it useful to remember that J. Willard Marriott, the American who founded the world’s biggest hotel group in 1959, was once a Mormon missionary. He was known for dropping in on his properties and terrorizing his employees by running a finger along every shelf in the hotel kitchen: a mote of dust on Willard’s finger and you were in trouble. Willard invented a kind of scrupulosity today associated with the very concept of luxury. Luxury as not only freedom from dust but from cultural specificity. A Marriott hotel was like a capsule from a blissful future where space and time collapsed, and where technology produced a utopian mirage that yielded tangible benefits.

Today, Marriot operates 3,000 hotels in the U.S. and thousands more around the world. In Asia, Marriots are fine hotels; the J.W. in Bangkok, named for Williard himself, is one of the most suavely licentious hotels imaginable. In the ground floor restaurant, Thais in toques dispense a five-cuisine buffet, tending to piles of fresh lobster, ma-muang (mango), toro sushi, and Chao Praya oysters. Girls in silk sarongs saunter through the basement to a soundtrack of ranat ek music, as guests swallow Japanese teppanyaki. One could go on. The ash trays by the elevators are small pillars with six-inch-wide squares of Zen sand raked into ripples. The bamboo thickets swaying above the pools are real.

In Scotland, it’s a different story. Marriot also runs a hotel in downtown Glasgow which costs about a hundred dollars a night more than the J.W. in Bangkok. Are they comparable? That depends on whether you continue to believe in the separation of our world into “first” and “third.” Emotionally, these terms are complicated. But we can tabulate them simply. First world: efficient, capitalized, attentive to consumer detail, service-orientated, unstinting with luxury, convenience-obsessed. (I leave discussions of democracy and human rights for another occasion.) Third world: disorderly, scruffy, dangerously sordid, low standards of convenience, service, insect-control, etc. The third world, as you will see, is the direct inverse of the first, and vice versa.

Recently I was flying to Islay and arrived at the Glasgow Marriott at the end of the afternoon in a rain storm. Here’s a very British scene: exhausted tourist struggling with two large bags in a ferocious downpour while two “bellhops” stare at him from the safety of the hotel’s closed doors, smiling with faint disdain. Time and again, I find myself defending Thais against the ridiculous charge of being “obsequious” simply because they don’t behave like this. Ah, the Scots reply: this is a four star, not a five star. It’s only at a five star that ye get the right to not get drenched. At a four star you’re on your own.

The hotel was invented in the nineteenth century as a home away from home. Marriott took that principle and extrapolated it into a formula for offsetting cultural alienation. In Glasgow, however, they have honed it into an actual mode of cultural alienation. That first Glasgow Marriot night, feeling jetlagged but unable to sleep, I decided to put on my downy bathrobe and venture down into the hotel’s so-called “spa and health club.” It certainly looked like a Marriott spa and health club on the website. I thought of the Jacuzzis and marble bathrooms of the J.W. on Soi 2. In the dark basement of the Glasgow branch, however, the girls told me there were no towels available.

“But this is a health club and spa,” I objected.

“Aye, but there’s nae towels.”

“None at all? Not even one?”

They shook their heads as if this was a natural disaster that could be only rectified with time. “They’ve nae been delivered,” they explained.

I wondered who it was who delivered the towels. I went into the pool area. It was like a pool in a New York City high school, half cordoned-off, empty, with life buoys shaped like British Polo mints and a strong scent of disinfectant. Even the chairs were plastic. As I floated there in the tepid water, two Polish girls arrived in swimsuits, took one look and said “Cholera” in Polish. That word in Polish is derived directly from the name of the disease and translates roughly as “Holy shit.” So even by the standards of Polish tourists in Europe, the Glasgow Marriott struck a dismal note.

It is strange how the idea of luxury itself is both easily transplantable across cultural frontiers but also fragilely dependent upon local custom. Thais understand luxury instinctively, while Scots do not. This is not to say that luxury does not exist in Scotland; there is plenty of it there, from the Gleneagles golf resort to countless majestic castle hotels like Inverlochy and Stobo. But just below that exalted level there is so often a worm in the apple, somehow — an underlying attitude of class resent. In Britain, service is often seen as servitude; luxury seems like something alien and imposed. In Asia it is anything but.

If we are social utilitarians, the distrust of luxury is justified. After all, it’s an illusion deliberately intended to make us forget our political and social bearings, which is to say our real life. But the luxury hotel, by definition, is a kind of therapeutic exit from such contexts, and implicit in the idea and practice of luxury is a kind of transformation through unreasonable delight. Humans have always loved luxury because it expresses an impersonal love of some kind. Wander through the Met museum and gaze at the gold hair pins of ancient Greece. Isn’t there a love of beauty, order, craftsmanship and — if you like — female hair, all contained in those tiny, useless objects? A hotel should feel the same, even if it’s ultimately about your credit card.

The next morning in Glasgow, I went down to the buffet breakfast. If all else was dismal, I thought, at least the Marriott would put on a jolly attempt at this beloved expression of gluttony. I got there before everyone else and noticed at once the trays of bubbling porridge. A surly and sleepy Russian guy stood behind the griddles in a toque. There was a plate of tiny pancakes in front of him, already stone cold, and so I asked him if he could perhaps make another tiny pancake from scratch. He shrugged. As in Soviet days, “from scratch” was impossible. He made a mournful face. He would only do fried eggs and chips. Around us were troughs of baked beans and pre-fried eggs, congealed bacon and small packets of Rice Krispies, lacking only Basil Fawlty’s immortal garnish of “a couple of dead dogs.” Fruit juice from Sainsbury’s cartons, and you were lucky to have it.

It was like flying on an American airline: You were actually punished for being foolish enough to choose the brand. The staff seemed to say: you thought you could get something out of us? You thought you would get a hot meal and a smile?

The long association of modernity, and therefore luxury (in its most visible incarnation), with the West has now been broken. Soon, I predict, Asian hotel chains will send their employees to the West to witness the instructive horrors of “third world” infrastructure, service, and product levels. Marriott clearly would never run a Glasgow-style outfit in an Asian country. They would fear the loss of image. In Glasgow, of course, they are doing well. Occupancy is high and customer satisfaction is not at all catastrophic, as a glance at their Tripadvisor page shows. The clients of the Glasgow Marriot are still passive citizens, not enraged consumers. “Very nice place,” people from Texas and Doncaster write with sublime objectivity. “Very nice buffet breakfast.”

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