BLT Burger has just opened inside of the Mirage in Las Vegas and we're already drooling. The all-burger dining experience comes from Chef Laurent Tourondel, he of the BLT Steak and BLT Market fame and here's a taste of what you can expect:
Specialty burgers include the Tex-Mex, a 7-ounce beef burger with jalapeños, chili, avocado, salsa, jack cheese, onions and sour cream; Lamb Tandoori Burger, a slightly spicy Colorado lamb burger topped with mint-cilantro yogurt sauce, cucumber, olives, red onion and tomato; and a signature Meatball Burger composed of ground veal, pork and ricotta and served with garlic pomodoro sauce.
Don't forget about the burger homage to Las Vegas: The Stripper, a 7-ounce beef burger in true Las Vegas style with lettuce, tomato, onion and bell pepper without the bun. A classic burger here starts at $12 and the Kobe burger is a pricier $17.
So with the opening of BLT Burger inside the Mirage, we thought we'd let you know of a few other noteworthy hotels in the U.S. that feature burger shops.
Ask Men has just done a feature on famous hotel rooms, but if you read through the list you'll soon see it really should have been called infamous hotel rooms. But this top ten does make an interesting list.
For example, the Hotel Adlon Kempinski in Berlin comes in at #8 not because Bill Clinton or Queen Elizabeth II have stayed there, but because that was the place where Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the balcony.
Imagine you are a jet-setting rock star and your label is being really pushy about getting you to lay down some new tracks for your album. But all you really want to do is be big pimpin' all over the world. Is there a way to do both? Actually there is.
A few hotels offer recording studios inside their properties, making it possible for rock stars and pop stars to take a working vacation.
Of course, you don't need to be a big time rock and pop star to book these hotel studios, you just need plenty of cash.
That means any monied up schmo can throw down a hack version of Chocolate Rain, upload it somewhere, dream of going viral, then end up on VH1's The Best Week Ever. Ah, the wonders of the new millenium.
While one hotel in Tribeca frets about finding an executive chef, the rest of Manhattan hotels are looking forward to Restaurant Week.
For New Yorkers and anyone visiting New York between July 21 and August 1--the flood gates are (almost) open as Amex cardholders can begin placing reservations for Restaurant Week now. All you plebes without Amex cards can have a go at it beginning tomorrow.
For the uninitiated, New York Restaurant Week seems a lot like the similar offerings in cities like Boston, Chicago, Washington D.C. and even Indianapolis, but it becomes quickly clear that NY's Restaurant Week (NYRW as it's abbreviated in office emails) is on steroids.
For New Yorkers, a prix fixe $24.07 lunch or $35 dinner at hot tables like Gramercy Tavern and Nobu means rearranging their lives during these two weeks of frantic gustatory indulgence.
For Hotel fiends, NYRW simply means that we get to slip into the city's hottest hotel restaurants without dropping $100+ or strong-arming an out-of-town friend to dine in. Because this is a city with a mass amount of hotels trying to be cool by tacking on top-of-the-line kitchens to their 5-star reputations, the selection for NYRW is quite juicy and ultra tempting...
We have stayed in our fair share of hotels over the past few years and while we have taken a close look at everything inside a hotel room from pillows, to bath toiletries to TVs to views and WiFi connections, we don't seem to take much notice of the hotel's carpeting.
That is, unless it's really ugly.
Now we don't believe an ugly rug can ruin a hotel experience. In fact, we would probably prefer a room with an ugly rug if the hotel had free WiFi, rather than a luxury hotel with the finest softest rugs and pay-for ethernet access.
And while some of you will probably say we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here as far as nitpicking goes, we standby our assertion that these hotel carpets listed after the jump are ugggglly.
Our Annual WiFi Report will help you avoid having to use something like this when staying at a hotel.
It is time once again for one of our most popular features, HotelChatter's annual look at hotel brands with the Best and Worst Hotel WiFi offerings.
In 2007, we boldly stated that the hotel WiFi landscaped had reached an impasse. And this year, we are sad to report that again, there hasn't been much movement.
The same complex formula still applies when hotels consider offering internet. We are sure hoteliers and hotel general managers have some elaborate mathematical equation which they use but we'll just simplify it for you here:
If high room rate and/or luxury status, then no free WiFi.
Yes, luxury hotels continue to nickel and dime you for a service that could easily be rolled into your room rate or resort fee while budget hotels like Best Western and Holiday Inn have free working WiFi throughout. And don't even get us started on some hotels that are beyond fashionably late to the wireless party and only offer ethernet connections in rooms.
But don't despair. There is still some good news to share here and we're going to spend the rest of the week educating you about the Hotel WiFi Landscape of 2008.
As most people who suffer from technophilia know, a lot can change in a year. In the year that we released our first Best Geek Hotels List, the iPhone beat out every other cellphone on the market, the MacAir usurped the MacBook and saved shoulders worldwide, Guitar Hero and Rock Band raged, and Facebook surpassed MySpace, at least in our group of friends.
While most hotels are still rather slow to adopt technology -- hello, working free WiFi please?-- we did find a new crop of geek hotels that were worthy of superlatives. Some of these hotels have been geeking it out for a while and some are still in beta. But much of the source code remains the same:
Being geek is a cultural endeavour, so after searching every henhouse, outhouse, and boathouse around the world we have put together our list of the world's top geek hotels for 2008. From artificial intelligence, to high end gadgetry, to geek service, and geek movie worship, the hotels on this list have a certain je ne sais quoi de geek.
We always enjoy a good room with a killer view when we check-in to a hotel but sometimes we want more. Sometimes we want to stand outside of our room on a hotel balcony and yell, "I'm not wearing any underwear!" Wait. No, that's Paris Hilton but you get what we are saying. We covet hotel rooms with spacious balconies.
Most of the time, you will have to pony up more money for a suite to get a view and the space to enjoy it. But if money were no object, here are a few places we would check out.
3 Comments - Add Yours
by juliana
