The Duane Street Hotel is open, and its restaurant 'beca is now doing breakfast and lunch. A call to the hotel confirms that dinner service at the 40-seat lobby restaurant is still in the works.
In the meantime, the lunch menu is now up on the hotel website, and it looks decent. Some highlights:
Rocket with Fennel & Pomergrantes $10 Kobe Burger with Caramelized Onions, Goat Cheese & Rosemary Fries $16 Skirt Steak with Rocket & Rosemary Fries $17 Chocolate Terrine with Crème Anglaise & Pistachios $10 Smoothies: Mango, Lime & Ginger $6
But here's the thing: It's written for British tourists. No seriously. No one calls arugula "rocket" in the States. And smoothies? Who drinks smoothies for lunch?
The Hyatt Andaz isn't the only hotel coming to New York's Financial District. Last month there were about 2,500 rooms in lower Manhattan; more than 3,700 are planned or already under construction. And one of the flashiest projects is the newly announced Four Seasons at 99 Church St.
The new construction is scheduled to start in June, and with an opening date sometime in 2011, we won't be spending the night anytime soon. Plans call for 175 hotel rooms and 143 condos, with a restaurant, lounge, spa and pool tacked on.
The hotel will need as many amenities as it can get. By the time it opens, the downtown W Hotel, a Wyndham Garden and that Andaz should all be well-established in the 'hood.
As we inch toward 2008, it's time for another look at the Duane Street Hotel, the downtown Manhattan property we heard might be opening today. So? Not so much.
We called up to check, and sounds like Duane Street's just waiting on the city at this point:
We are taking reservations for January. We could open as soon as next week, but we haven't gotten the OK just yet.
If you want to be the first kid on the block to try it out, reservations are open for 2008. The hotel restaurant should be up and running soon after the hotel proper swings the doors open.
People tend to ask us a lot of hotel rate related questions--go figure.
Seeing that we love to help, or at least feign helpfulness, we figured we would take you through our case study of booking a hotel in downtown New York.
No single source will always net you the lowest hotel rate, as always, caveat emptor.
In our case we knew where we were staying: Soho Grand. Futhermore, our date was not flexible, October 24th was a must.
With this in mind we used three online methods and one analog method to book our room. Results post click.
There is nothing better than a good old fashioned hotel rep mixing it up with us. And while we would much rather be hearing from a hotels General Manager, or at least someone in-house, hearing from some sort of hotel mouthpiece makes us smile, and is easily post-worthy.
After the jump, Maria Vu from Syndicate responds to our One Night At Tribeca Grand stay. In our humble opinion, PR folks can learn a lot from how Maria enters the conversation. As always, we welcome guests, hotel employees, and tipsters to enter the hotel conversation any way they wish--just remember to tell us who you are, cause we will find out anyway.
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by pbb
