1. Chateau Marmont: best scene, best people-watching, pretty courtyard ambiance. Much more fun if you're staying at the hotel.
2. Cadier Bar, Grand Hotel, Stockholm: a truly stunning, serene, elegant hotel bar in the very best European tradition. Sunset kills.
3. Park Hyatt Tokyo: Hard to find, boring, full of loud Americans, vertigo-inducing view, yet strangely memorable.
4. & 5. King Cole Bar, St. Regis & Bemelmans at the Caryle: Home to some of my favorite New York memories, and more memorable meetings. Very dark, classic, expensive, Manhattan at its best.
6. International House, New Orleans: I am sure its been made over, but when I was last there years ago, the hotel bar had no electricity, only candles, and was captivating.
I can't think of any more; I don't spend much time in bars when I travel, or at all really, and not much time at very nice hotels, to be frank, although I revel in the clubby ambiance in the good ones, the old ones, especially, and the transient glamour, as if I am dreaming that I am watching other people live out the other side of their waking lives, asleep as I am. If I am very tired when I land in a new city at dawn, I take a taxi to the nicest hotel in town and eat breakfast. In Edinburgh, it was endless tea at the Balmoral. In Rome, the waiter smooth-talked me into an ice cream sandwich with breakfast. Why resist? Reminds me, why indeed...'Night.
Any to add while I toddle off to my suite in Dreamland?
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