Quick post here. Had a very satisfying experience with lastminute.com’s Top Secret Hotels service on Thursday, and just wanted to mention it.

With tickets to see oh-so-middle-of-the-road Razorlight in the temple to corporate entertainment that is the O2 and a very early start the next morning, my gorgeous date and I were hoping to break the massive journey back south with a hotel in town.

Having previously crashed at the swish Hilton London Tower Bridge Hotel when unable to crawl home after a particulalry liquid birthday celebration, we were keen the repeat the experience with enhanced soberiety. Unfortunately, explicit last minute offers for this hotel were thin on the ground and the Hilton site still had rooms are around £170 – too rich for our budget.

Instead, we opted to use lastminute.com’s Top Secret Hotel service, where late deal rooms are super cheap on the basis that you are not told exactly which hotel you are committing to prior to pulling the trigger on the booking. Not as terrifying as it sounds, you get to see the important details beforehand (star-rating, room details, hotel facilities) and refine the search to a certain location. In fact, if you know the area in which you are booking well, you might get enough info to work out which hotel you are being offered in advance.

We thought we’d managed this trick when picking our ’secret hotel’ to be a nice four-star place that we thought was on Southwark Road. For £69 we were pretty happy. Turns out we had it totally wrong and the £69 hotel we were booked into was actually the Hilton London Tower Bridge Hotel we’d wanted in the first place! A quick check on the Hilton website post our booking showed they were still offering the same rooms at top price, so effectively we’d made a saving of about £100 – result!

Easter means eggs, and people rising from the grave; both of which were reason enough for me and my gorgeous date to head west to NYC for the long weekend…

Our base for the duration of the stay was 6 Columbus, part of the Thompson Hotels group. Good hotel, shame a couple of problems with their service clouded the stay.

A bit of a porky for the website to say the hotel is located on Columbus Circle, as it is actually on W58th, but we’ll let that one pass, as it’s pretty close. One minute from the park, within easy walking distance of 5th Av’s main shopping and just a short subway ride from Soho, it is pretty much perfect for a long Manhattan weekend visit.

(A bonus to the location was finding ourselves right behind the Time Warner building, which contains a bunch of useful shops (including the awesome Wholefoods), a gym (to which the hotel can organise access) and several restaurants (including Per Se, more of which later…).)

The rich coloured decor inside the hotel rocks a deep crushed velvet vibe, similar to some of the W Hotels around the city. There’s also a cool-looking sushi restaurant which we didn’t try but which was recommended to us independently by a friend.

Our room for the first three nights was a Queen Superior which, while pretty small, was more than adequate if you intend to be out in the city the majority of the time. With wooden floors, big artwork, Kiehls products, a wide-screen TV and iPod docking, the room had a warm but modern feel with the luxury elements deployed in the right areas. The bed was super-comfy and residing on the ninth floor we were really impressed with how quiet it was at night.

Given 6 Columbus is pitched price-wise right between its Midtown competitors, The Hudson and The Chambers, it’s hard to work out how they are seeking to distinguish themselves. All similar in style, The Hudson is cheaper, but has smaller rooms, whilst the opposite (on both price and room size) is true of The Chambers. Perhaps it’s in the quality of service? Perhaps not.

Minor gripe: it seemed like the hotel took its eye off the ball slightly and completely messed up our booking (putting us in a queen room when we’d booked a king, charging us for wifi when it was complementary etc). A minor annoyance, but handled quite well by the manager on duty at the time. With no rooms to switch to the hotel compensated us by offering the penthouse suite for our last night, which we gratefully accepted. The good recovery work was then completely undone during a poorly handled the change-over in rooms, which completely wasted much of our last full day in town.

However, when you’re staying in a penthouse that is 10 times the size of your previous room, with views over Central Park and some friends around to show off to, it’s hard to stay miffed for long…

I’m pretty sure parenting manuals probably lecture on about the evils of bribing your offspring with treats to ensure they behave; sweets to keep them quiet, dvd’s to keep them still, that sort of thing – totally not to be encouraged.

I, however, am not a child, nor am I a parent. So, when my gorgeous date suggested that we run the Sussex Beacon Half Marathon together she knew it would be necessary to engage in some serious food and hotel related bribery to get me on-side. Having previously stayed a couple of times at the very good Drakes and also enjoyed their restaurant immensely, the bar had been set pretty high.

(The restaurant at Drakes used to be part of the very good Gingerman Restaurants group but doesn’t appear to be anymore – anyone know what happened there?)

The Hotel du Vin, in Ship Street, was our base for the weekend (review here) and the food-based bribery started with a dinner in their eponymous bistro on Friday evening. Friday is normally my Borough Market lunch-binge day, but knowing I was eating out that evening I’d forgone my usual in favour of restraint and my stomach was complaining accordingly on the 50 minute train ride to the south coast.

(I must comment here about my skills as a food reviewer; currently, I’m fairly sure I have none. I hope, one day, to be knowledgeable enough about food and patient enough in my writing to produce reviews as inspiring and interesting as Food Snob or FXCuisine. However, at it stands I would feel slightly like a fraud if I tried to write too much about the preparation of, and ingredients within, the meals I eat. I hope that will change with time. In fact, this is one of my primary reasons for writing this blog; to gain an education in food through advice and interaction with others who know the subject matter in a much greater depth than me. Hopefully as my palate improves so will my depth of knowledge to a point where I’ll have the resources to assess whether a dish is well prepared and executed, or not. However, for the time being, when I write about meals had, descriptions will probably be brief and a little bereft of details, with little ‘critical’ content: I’ll say what I like and disliked, and I’ll probably post more questions than is strictly necessary (feel free to answer). This is not to be taken as a lack of interest, but more as a reflection of my decision to hold back from commenting when I feel I don’t know what I’m on about!)

(so, onward in baby steps…) I’m not sure when the hotel was built/converted, but it’s a vast improvement on the building’s previous incarnations (remember the Berlin Bar anyone?). Modern and comfortable, without being sparse, all rich colours, bare brick walls, subtle lighting and big art made for a relaxed pre-dinner drink from the (to be expected) large wine list. The Bistro itself sits just off the vaulted main bar area and was welcoming nicely ‘faux’ French in decoration (with some naked ladies, in paintings). Tables were quite close together but I liked this on a Friday night when it lent to a bustly bistro feel, somehow adding to the French-ness of the affair.

The menu was fairly standard bistro favourites, split into ‘Simple Classics’ and a regular menu which appeared well adjusted for seasonality (or at least it felt that way given it was cold out and a lot of the dishes looked like warming comfort food). Our meal was unremarkable; my gorgeous date chose a simple dish of moules marinières from the ‘classic’ starters, but had it as a main course. The few mussels I sampled were a little rubbery, but perfectly edible (how dominant should a marinière sauce be in this dish? Do you want the sauce to be rich enough to be a feature in itself – to be sucked up in some nice bread? Or would this over-ride the point of having the mussels in the dish?); either way, I thought the sauce was a little watery.

I had the smoked haddock fishcake as a main course, which I didn’t like too much as it was a little long on potato and salt, but the highlight for me was my starter of Devilled kidneys on brioche. I think I’ve only ever had kidney as part of a pie before, and I’ve certainly never had them ‘Devilled’ (what is ‘devilling’? how is it done? what makes it different to frying or grilling etc?). Slightly pink in the centre and given with a lovely smooth texture not dissimilar to a firm foie gras, these puppies were delicious. The brioche was the perfect accompaniment, bulking out the mouthfuls just enough without taking away from the flavour or texture of the kidneys. I would have happily had this course over again for my main, which kind of extenuated the disappointment that came when the fishcake arrived. With a couple of glasses of wine and, friendly, if busy service, the meal hit the post-work-spot just about; as far as food bribery goes, the kidneys were enough to ensure I stayed for the weekend.

Chance of me returning (independent of a marathon): 55%*
Chance of me recommending: 60%*