el crispito

This W opened in 2003, and was immediately a success. It's located in Polanco, which is a very upscale neighborhood, in a row of hotels that include Mexico's Hotel Nikko, a Marriott and the Hotel Presidente Inter-Continental. Walk out the front door, walk north, and in less than 10 minutes you'll be on Avenida Presidente Masaryk, which is very similar to Rodeo Drive. The biggest difference being that here, seemingly everyone tells you to not even think about actually doing such an excursion after dark, because surely you'll be mugged or killed.

I'm not at all sure that this is true; Shawn and I walked back after dark from dinner at Aura, the restaurant in the Hotel Habita without any incident. However, it should perhaps be noted that the concern even extends to the use of taxi cabs. There are certainly areas in the city where one would not want to go out at night, but I must say that walking around in Polanco, I have not felt threatened. Who knows? Perhaps that is when one is in the most danger, but if you can never leave your hotel, why bother going anywhere?

The hotel has a lot of nice amenities, as do all W hotels, but some of the particular perks of this one are the indigenous spa treatments, such as Mayan massage and facials, Azteca manicures and pedicures, and a Temezcal purifying ritual. Shawn enjoyed a more traditional, 90-minute shiatzu massage at the spa, followed by a bit in the steam room. There are hammocks located in the shower area, although why that's where they're located, I'm not quite sure. You can't really shower in the hammock, but I did hang out in it while Shawn took a bath in the funky round bathtub that looks like an oversized teacup.

Bathtub/Shower with Hammock, at W Mexico City

I really like the bars and restaurant (Solea) here as well. I was able to get a Manhattan made with Angostura bitters, an ingredient that is necessary to make them properly, yet I have been unable to find anywhere in Mexico. The chef at the restaurant, Chef Osuna, is creative and skilled; Shawn and I both have been delighted with everything we've eaten there. Among my favorites are the salads and this dessert they have: a banana tart served with chocolate-port ice cream. The brunch that they have on Sundays until 5 pm is also amazing, because they have a huge buffet of simple, but high-quality ingredients that you can put together to make a salad, or eat by themselves. They have all kinds of nuts, fresh herbs, greens, oils, vinagars, steamed vegetables, cheeses, croutons, meats and dressings, all isolated in their own dishes (the array of these ingredients stretches along an enormous table) so you can pick and choose as you wish. It's like the biggest, most luxurious salad bar I've ever seen.

We have been disappointed in a few things though, and despite the fact that we've had an outstanding experience here, I feel I should mention them.

While the concierge staff is very friendly and they try very hard to come through for you, it seems they're just not quite up to the level of your average W concierge staff. We asked for suggestions for a restaurant, not strictly vegetarian, but a place where we could get some decent food that was vegetarian. I had read online of Tandoor, an Indian restaurant with considerable vegetarian offerings, that has been around for about 20 years. The concierge had not heard of it. Granted, it's Mexico City, and one wouldn't expect anyone to know of all the restaurants in town, but given that it's one of perhaps four or five Indian restaurants in the city, you'd think he'd have heard of it. He offered to call them, but I had not brought their phone number down to the lobby with me, so we decided we'd go with his suggestion, a Thai restaurant, Thai Gardens (Calderón de la Barca 72), to which they'd sent many a vegetarian that returned with wide smiles. He said he'd try to find out about Tandoor while we were away so that we could eat there at a subsequent meal.

To limit this entry to detail about the W only, let me just say here that the Thai Gardens experience SUCKED. You can read about it in a separate entry.

We returned and told the concierge about it, and he apologized profusely. Supposedly, a lot of other vegetarians had been there and loved the experience. Maybe we're just picky, but when you pay that much for a meal, I think you're justified in being a bit picky. I was so unsatisfied with the Thai Gardens experience that I wanted to erase it from my mind with a delightful experience at Tandoor, the Indian restaurant that I'd looked up earlier. We asked him if he'd had any luck in getting information about it, and he had not. I suspect that he didn't have the time to look into it, but even so, that kind of sucked. I went upstairs to our room and used my Internet connection to look up their phone number, which I found in under three minutes.

Shawn at Handy Workdesk, at W Mexico City

When I brought it down to him, he called and made us a reservation. That place turned out to be great, and I'll probably talk more about it in a later entry.

I asked about a very popular restaurant that I'd read about too, which is only about 15 minutes walk from the hotel. He knew of this one right away, but feared that they may not have vegetarian food. I'd read a couple of reviews that talked about an assorted tamale appetizer, and it had about 3 out of four vegetarian tamales. I asked if the concierge desk kept menus on file for local restaurants and he said they did, but of course, their copy for that restaurant was missing. They called the restaurant, and someone at the restaurant said they'd email one over. Fine. We were not going that night, so the concierge's suggestion that he give it to us the next morning sounded fine.

It would have been fine, except for the fact that it wasn't slipped under our door in the morning, nor was it waiting for us when we returned from brunch after noon. We stopped by the concierge desk and the woman that had phoned to the restaurant the night before was dismayed that we'd not received it, but explained that she had only come on duty in the afternoon. Apparently the person working the concierge desk before her had not received it. Yeah, apparently not.

At other W hotels, there would have been follow-up on the issue until it was resolved. Instead of getting excuses as to why it hadn't happened, the concierge would have been on the horn getting a copy sent over within five minutes, and at five minutes and one second, they'd have been back on the phone finding out why it hadn't arrived. Heck, the concierge at the W Montréal would have probably arranged to have samples of the food delivered for free so we could sample it since we'd had to suffer the inconvenience of waiting. The W Mexico City concierge staff seems neither that motivated nor that in-command of the situation. That's too bad because in a city as big as Mexico City, it would really help to have someone you could turn to that was both knowledgeable and capable at cutting through all the extra stuff that isn't what you're looking for.

It doesn't help that they're stretched thin. The friendly (and cute!) young man that recommended Thai Gardens (and then apologized profusely when we hated it), had to keep running back and forth between the front desk and the concierge desk when people arrived to check in and reception didn't have enough people to deal with them in a timely manner. I want to say that I felt that he tried really hard (although I didn't feel that as much effort was put forward by the other concierge desk staff), but he just didn't have the resources to come through for us. And you see, that's what staying at a W is all about. You shouldn't be in want for anything at all, ever.

Another thing that was a little disappointing was the fact that the hotel is already starting to show some wear. The leather lounges in the lobby could stand a good polishing, and some of the furniture has bent legs and scuffed surfaces. Many of the chairs in the dining room are a little loose in the joints. It should be noted that these issues are all in the public areas; our room was in very good condition.

Last but not least, when I asked the bellhop that brought up our bags if the water from the faucets was filtered, he told me, "We recommend that you do not drink the water from the faucets." Okay, that's fine. Many hotels in Mexico have that same policy. But if they do, they provide you with free bottled water. The bottles of Voss water in the room to which they direct you for drinking water have MXN $70 pricetags on them (for 800 ml). I am not entirely sure that we'll be charged for those, but I'll find out tomorrow upon check-out.

Our next stop will be the Condesa DF, and to be honest, I don't expect an experience that is up to the same level as that of the W, but we'll see!