Something to eat? From room service, Friday night dinner was a tender piece of lamb with a potato and garlic mash; and a chocolate mousse. Both were first class. Breakfast was in the Business Lounge, which serves cured meats, cold salmon, Bircher muesli, and little carafes of watermelon juice in a mini fridge. Lunch was taken away from the Business Lounge, where I made up cheese and ham sandwiches spread with mustard taken from little jars; and fresh strawberries. Saturday night dinner was at the hotel's Bentley restaurant, a dark, groovy space with a bar. I went all-out and got the most expensive whiskey — $36 for a Kentucky bourbon, so hot and so sharp that it plunged a knife, satisfyingly so, into my spine — and the $180 degustation, which frankly bored me to sobs. It took two hours to serve 15 dishes. There was a kingfish hauled shivering from waters near the Antarctic, there was a crab beaten into a tasteless pulp, there was an ingeniously prepared wafer-thin slice of beetroot, there was a honeydew melon sorbet as smooth as glass. Most of it tasted real good, some of it didn't, and all of it was served with a pretentious flourish, which suggested each dish was an artistic statement that had taken years of struggle, torment and epiphany to produce. Really I wish I'd just ordered a chop or something.
Bathroom: Spa bath, guest toothbrush and razor, cute little bottles of shampoo and the absence of something that one never, ever sees in the best rooms — a toilet brush.
Price: $388 per night.
Contact: 27 O'Connell St, downtown Sydney, ph 0061 2 8214000.
Online: radissonblu.com/en/plazahotel-sydney/rooms
Would I return? Yes.
