Guide to Your Financial Future

Return to Article

What's New in San Francisco Area Hotels

David Armstrong

San Francisco hotels have been popular with travelers since frontier days, but the rough and ready hostelries of 150 years ago didn't offer crushed Zinfandel body polish, restaurant dishes of baby calamari, poached egg and pancetta dusted with parmesan cheese, bedside iPod docking stations or kiosks for printing airline boarding passes.

But today, high-end San Francisco area hotels are rolling out such luxurious -- and sometimes quirky -- amenities, even in a dodgy economy.

The baby calamari and poached egg are featured on the dinner menu at Luce, a showcase Californian-Italian restaurant in the newly opened InterContinental San Francisco, the first major, built-from-scratch hotel in the city in five years.

InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG Quote) opened the distinctive hotel in May in the trendy South of Market area, which has stolen some thunder from Nob Hill and Union Square, San Francisco's traditional destinations for retail therapy and elegant living.

Luce at InterContinental San Francisco offers seasonal fare.

Towering 32 stories and clad in a distinctive blue-glass skin, the 550-room InterContinental caters to business travelers and convention-goers at the next-door Moscone Center. But it is no no-frills business hotel; rather, it flaunts the luxuries of a high-end leisure hotel, among them the locally sourced, seasonally attuned cuisine of Luce's chef, Dominique Crenn.

The InterContinental, sister of Nob Hill favorite the Mark Hopkins Hotel, also pampers guests with its I-Spa. Nicely aromatic, softly lit, serenaded with New Agey space music and with a warren of treatment rooms, the I-spa offers treatments such as an 80-minute Swedish massage ($170) that my spa-loving wife pronounced excellent and a 20-minute hand and foot paraffin treatment ($65).

The I-Spa's terrace.

Guest rooms are wired to the max, with wall-mounted cell-hone chargers and other gadgetry. Our room afforded a sweeping city view, as do many aeries in this highrise, though the closet was surprisingly snug considering the welcome spaciousness of the bedroom and bath.

San Francisco's hotels are not immune to the economic downturn. The boutique hotel operator Joie de Vivre Hospitality is offering market-based discounts for groups holding meetings in its Hotel Adagio that book 10 guest rooms or more. The promotion, which runs through Jan. 31, effects a 10% discount if a meeting contract is signed on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes between 9000 and 9999; 15% if the index closes between 8000 and 8999; and 20% if it's signed on days the Dow closes between 7000 and 7999.

Other hoteliers are using the traditionally slow fall season to renovate their properties. Prominent among them is the 1,010-room Parc 55 Hotel, which has freshened all of its guest rooms and just launched an upgrade of its lobby and public spaces. The total tab: $30 million. The Parc 55 will premiere a new fine-dining restaurant, called Crave 55, next March. The hotel, which is staying open during the work, expects to finish the overall upgrade by May.

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco, near the shoreline of San Francisco Bay and quartet of landmark Embarcadero Center highrises, completed a multimillion-dollar makeover this past spring. The 1970s structure, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the world's largest hotel lobby (an eye-popping, 17-story atrium), had begun to grow tired and borderline kitschy.

Hyatt Hotels and Resorts got rid of the kitsch by replacing the hotel's old-school revolving restaurant, Equinox, with two premier-level floors at the top of the building. The Regency Club rooms ($159 to $429) and expansive club lounge give the place an exclusive feel, and the lounge features a kiosk for printing airline boarding passes. Downstairs, Hyatt has put-in a sleek new bar, 13 Views. The bar looks out on the bustling Embarcadero waterfront, which has thrived since the removal of a spectacularly ugly elevated freeway, blossoming with new restaurants and markets at the renovated Ferry Building.

In wine country, an hour's drive north, the big travel news is the opening in late September of the Westin Verasa in a once-forlorn section of downtown Napa city. Although it sports a rustic wood-and-stone exterior that resembles a hunting lodge or a ski chalet and looks oddly out of context in its urban locale the 180-room Starwood Hotels and Resorts (HOT Quote) hotel is sleek and contemporary inside.

The city of Napa was long drive-through territory for visitors pushing on to posh restaurants and verdant Napa Valley wineries. The opening in late 2001 of Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, changed that, triggering a makeover of downtown Napa. Copia closed its doors at least temporarily before Thanksgiving, and the future of the financially strapped nonprofit venture is uncertain, but the changes the museum catalyzed continue.

The Westin is the first major, newly built hotel in downtown Napa in years, but it will be joined in 2011 by Marriott Hotels and Resorts' (MAR Quote) Ritz-Carlton. The four-star Westin is actually a condo hotel; unit owners hand their keys to the hotel when they're not there, and share in the proceeds from room rents.

The Westin has views of downtown Napa and the Napa River, a flood-prone waterway that has been diked, cleaned-up and bordered with a relaxing riverside promenade. Oxbow Public Market, which opened this year with artisan breads, cheeses, locally grown, organic produce and, of course, wine -- is a short walk away. So are a cluster of wine bars and shops. One of the most interesting is Backroom Wines, which its knowledgeable owner Daniel Dawson recently moved to a new location at First and Main streets, where he sells elegant, small-production vintages.

The Westin's prime food offering is La Toque, a French restaurant helmed by Michelin star-winning chef Ken Frank, who relocated the well-regarded eatery from Rutherford. The new La Toque is intimate (65 seats), smartly contemporary in design and expensive; prix fixe dinners range from $49 to $88, before pairings of Franks' food with elite French and Californian wines.

Of course, pampering is available everywhere in wine country -- but for that crushed Zinfandel body polish, one must head to Healdsburg, at the northern end of neighboring Sonoma Valley. This and other wine-based spa indulgences are available at the Hotel Healdsburg through Dec. 31.