I’ve read that hotel restaurants have experienced something of a resurgence, but apparently I haven’t been to any of them. My experience has been that they are invariably are over priced and mediocre. And living in Boston, I know over-priced and mediocre. The Westin at the San Francisco airport managed to exceed my expectations in a spectacular manner, but unfortunately in the wrong direction.
The staff at the front desk insisted that there was nowhere we could eat locally, but that the hotel restaurant was very good. So fine, I’m going to end up paying a bit more, but at least we’ll get something quickly (especially for the 5 year old). So how badly can you screw up a BLT and a pizza with arugula salad? There was a rather creative interpretation of BLT as ‘bacon, lettuce, tomato and 2 inches of sliced turkey on dry supermarket bread’ and the ‘pizza with arugula salad’ turned out to be soggy pizza under a fully-dressed arugula salad. I thought maybe the pizza was a California thing, but no, Westin menus are all set by corporate headquarters. On the plus side, our daughter’s chicken fingers were good, and I know that if I ever decide that slopping a salad on top of a pizza is a good idea I should go easy on the dressing. The their credit, when I wrote to the Westin and Starwood corporate, the manager of the Westin contacted me and dealt with my complaints appropriately.
However, lesson learned: next time I’m spending a single night at an airport hotel, I’m going to research the local fast-food outlets before I leave...
If you are looking for a good BLT and you’re in the Boston area, All Star Sandwich Bar in Inman Square, Cambridge is an excellent choice, and you can get really good pizza, sans arugula salad at Emma’s in Kendall Square. Not that there’s any shortage of good pizza around Boston, but there is also no shortage of bad. Which reminds me, maybe I should start a regular series of “strange things I’ve found on pizzas” (meaning of course things that were put there intentionally, which immediately disqualifies any cockroach that met an untimely end in the pizza oven).
