"You must cook for Madonna as if she is the real Queen."
That is what one of Madonna's people supposedly told the kitchen staff at St. David's Spa and Hotel in Cardiff where Madge was staying during the first night of her Sticky and Sweet Concert Tour.
Despite the hotel's over-the-top efforts to please her with a total remodel of her top-floor suite including new furniture, curtains, rugs, TV, and on and on, she still managed to throw a fit about some chips.
According to the Wales Online site, the oil they were cooked in was "too old." The St. David's chef says the oil was only two days old, but it was--of course--changed to please the queen.
[Ed. Note: Madonna eats chips/fries? And oil? What happened to her macrobiotic diet?]
Forget London - the latest British capital city to visit is Cardiff. After decades of drudgery brought on be incessant rain and regular invasions of sheep, the Welsh capital is now hotting up faster than the US election race.
A spectacular opera house, a shiny new Parliament building, and the super Millennium rugby stadium are the city's most showy accessories. Depending on your attitude towards cruel sports, Cardiff is either a superb or a revolting place to visit on rugby match weekends, as we did.
The hotel scene is hotting up as well, in expectation of the Ryder Cup 2010, to be held at the Celtic Manor Resort near Newport and Cardiff. In the capital, there's a rather frightening trend for ripping the guts out of office blocks and turning them into hotels, with varying levels of success.
The only area currently worth staying is near the imaginatively named 'Mermaid Quay', or Cardiff Bay. In the last few years, it's been redeveloped from a stinking muddy dock area into a fantastic leisure area, packed with bars and restaurants and heaving with Welsh rugby fans, students and increasing numbers of tourists. Thankfully, Cardiff's two best and most long-standing hotels - the St David's Hotel & Spa and the Jolyon's Boutique Hotel - are right in the centre of this area.
St. David's Hotel & Spa in Cardiff, Wales has apparently realized that someone has invented this thing called an iPod and that you can store all your music on it and play it whenever you want.
Now, with hotel guests able to hear their personal playlists wherever they go, they aren't going to put up with crap music in hotel lobbies or dining rooms.
St David's has responded to customer taste by installing technology which will give guests in each of its eight conference and private dining rooms access to a 20,000-strong music library.
Conversations never need be pursued against a background of anaemic renditions of Greensleeves. Instead, customers can choose music as upbeat or languorous as their own moods dictate.
Actually, the hotel's response seems to be more in line with the Pipedown campaign--a campaign to free humans from piped music in public spaces.
Either way, you should try to go over there and eat dinner in the fancy dining room while listening to "Like a Virgin."
Cardiff, Wales may not be one of the world's top destinations, but it is home to one of the world's top hotels. St. David's Hotel and Spa is on a roll, last year it won Conde Nast's top 20 Destinations in the world and their 7th best business hotel award. This seems however, only to be the start. The IC Wales Network just reported that St. David's broke their income record and pulled in more than 8.1 million pounds.
But they are not stopping there, after all, who likes being 7th best, Jason Harding, the general manager elaborates:
Mr Harding said, `While we are one of the leading venues for medium-sized conferences in Wales, I still believe Cardiff would benefit enormously from the development of a dedicated high-quality conference venue. The city currently suffers as a result.'
Now these are some standards. This guy runs a five-star hotel that is touted as one of the world's best, yet he still finds it fitting to use the word "suffer" when describing the city's lack of decent hotel conference space. That's right Mr. Harding, 7th place is crap, keep working.
It seems clear that this hotel is full of perfectionists and you know what that means, we'll book it.
