Special Dispatch: Nhow Hotel, Berlin

Nhow Hotel
Stralauer Allee 3
10245 Berlin, Germany
030 2902990
www.nhow-hotels.com/berlin/en

by Sebastian Forks

"People project meaning onto objects. If an object allows you to interact with it, then it becomes part of your being." Karim Rashid

Check in to the world of music. Nhow elevate your stay. Since our arrival late yesterday afternoon, I have taken the strap line for Nhow Berlin - Germany’s brand new design hotel, Europe’s first music concept hotel - at face value. I check in. I listen. I elevate my stay.

Last night I cheated. I got high with my group - partly on the hotel lobby’s techno music, and mostly on Daiquiri, which is a shorter, more chastening version of Mojito. There’s no excuse. It’s made of limes, ice, sugar and mainly white rum, and the rum is easy to taste. Taken before, during or after dinner, it seems to go with everything, is best consumed on pink stools, and gently draws its victim into a place made entirely of words, most of them regrettable.

Now it’s the morning. It is 8 o’clock. I have just woken up. The effects of the Daiquiri are still with me. I can’t wait for breakfast. I am on the hotel’s 1st floor, overlooking a river filled with chunks of ice. My room is enormous. It is designed by Karim Rashid, who works out of New York. I stand in the middle of the room. The floor is made of a special acrylic material, the furniture a mix of futuristic moulds. I especially like the sofa, which looks like the bottom of someone’s mouth. I like to lie on it. A giant flat television sits encased in the room’s dividing wall. Undulating lines of pink cross the floor, and go up the curtains. The bathroom is encased in glass. I feel like I am being dressed by someone who knows a lot about certain types of clothes. It is nice to be made to feel this way.

I sit down on my bed to read up on Karim’s design. It is, says the hotel’s brochure, ‘music for the eyes...a sojourn into a new dimension...’ I’m not sure what this means. Then it says, ‘words...cannot do justice to something that needs to be experienced first-hand – because great design begins at the point where language has reached its limit.’ I put down the brochure. I have reached the limits of hunger. And time is speeding up. I mustn’t be late - I am due to tour the hotel at 9 sharp. I reconnect with my brain’s residual pools of Daiquiri and take a quick shower. I hum and whistle as I dress.

In the lift, I am still humming. I am imagining breakfast. I wonder what music will be played as I eat. I would like some more of the techno. Then I look up and see a colour saturated photograph of Karim. He is in a giant light box. He is on the whole of the ceiling. He stares down at me. He is wearing a white t-shirt, a pair of glasses, and he hasn’t shaved for a couple of days. A woman – a beautiful woman – with half-closed eyes looks up at him. Her mouth is open. She looks like she is going to take a bite out of his cheek. Karim’s mouth is also slightly open. He is looking directly at me. Why is Karim looking at me like that? He is making me feel light headed. I am losing the ability to think. Stop it, Karim.

I enter the breakfast room by way of the lobby, scene of last night’s scene. One final kick from the Daiquiri and I find myself at the foot of a pink plastic lectern. I think I hear music playing. A waiter greets me with a smile. ‘Room number, sir?’ Room number? What is he talking about? I look behind him, into the room. Two huge pink plastic semi-circular breakfast units split the room. Super-white plates lie in piles beneath shelves full of neat little packages of food. Cutlery glints in the winter sun. On either side, white tables – as white as Karim’s t-shirt – line up in perfect inorganic rows. Light pours in from the river.

This morning breakfast is a range of cereals, international right through to locally sourced oats; it is all kinds of bread, and muffins; it is all kinds of eggs - old school, new school, your way; it is smoked salmon in lemon and dill, sausage, cold meats, paper-thin side-plates of prosciutto crudo; it is coffee, tea, juice. I go for the coffee, and a bowl of muesli. I sit down with my group. I see that they’ve had the lot, and toast and butter and small pots of jam compote. I eat my muesli. It is chewy and sweet, and filled with nuts and seeds. I think there’s some coconut in it too. I drink the coffee. It is bitter, and tastes very good indeed. I wonder what it is.

My group leaves. I stare out at the river, which is beginning to look pink. I feel like Karim is right here, next to me, enjoying a quick mint tea, eggs Benedict, French toast and maple syrup. I can’t speak. I am beyond humming. I am completely elevating.

Gail's, Clerkenwell

Gail's
33-35 Exmouth Market
Clerkenwell
EC1R 4QL
0207 713 6550
www.gailsbread.co.uk

by Blake Pudding

After more than a year without full time work, I finally have a new job. This is not cause for delight. The under employed life suited me and I had never been happier. Sadly Mrs. Pudding’s costly renovation plans for our London home have forced me back into the rat race. There are consolations, however, in my new employment: I have my own office with a sliding door, minions on call, and best of all, a company credit card.

I decided to celebrate with a slap-up breakfast. I invited along the literary editor of the Observer, Will Skidelsky, who is a keen gourmand (I’m not using this as euphemism for a fat). We met at the latest branch of swanky bakery Gail’s, on Exmouth Market.

First a little gripe about Americanisms on the menu. No one likes Americans and America more than me but we are in England so there is not need to call a muffin an English muffin. In a similar vein why can’t they use our delightful descriptive term eggy bread rather than French toast? Gripe over; for breakfast the proof is in the pudding and no breakfast could be more pudding-like than Mr Skidelsky’s: eggy bread with zabaglione and roasted quince. The bread was crisp and lightly caramelised and the zabaglione functioned, according to William, like a sweet Hollandaise. Delicious but much too sweet for my morning palate.

I ordered baked eggs on a muffin, bacon, and roast tomatoes with cottage cheese. Cottage cheese! Normally I would have asked them to leave it off but I reasoned that taking into account Gail’s reputation and the high price of my breakfast, £8.50, this would be the best cottage cheese in the world. Maybe it was but it tasted just like cottage cheese i.e. horrible but with chives. Sadly it wasn’t the worst component of my meal. That honour went to the muffin which was stale, stodgy and had not been toasted. My baked eggs looked a lot like fried eggs and were overcooked despite specifying them runny. The bacon was tasty but brittle and ungenerously proportioned.

Did I mention that it cost £8.50? What a cynical take on the English breakfast this was. If my new employers hadn’t been picking up the tab, I would have been furious.

Special Dispatch: Kahana Sands, Kahana, Maui

Kahana Sands Restaurant
Sands of Kahana
4299 Lower Honoapiilani Hwy
Kahana, HI, 96761

by Malcolm Eggs

"Speed limit enforced by laser." (Traffic sign, near Kahana)

Sands of Kahana: a four-star hotel full of fake plants, glittering sea views and people reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm sat in the poolside diner, waiting to order breakfast.

Our waiter is in long baggy shorts. He makes a decent attempt at toothy American cheer but there's something else, a fragility behind the eyes. It's like he's one dark thought away from smashing the shit out of a fish tank with the putting wedge he keeps behind the counter in case of visitors from the past.

I'm here to sample loco moco, a Hawaiian traditional breakfast of rice topped with a burger, two fried eggs and onion gravy. It sounds plain terrifying and the name means 'crazy snot', but it's traditional so there absolutely has to be something good about it. Our waiter is delighted.

When he delivers my plate, he says, "don't be intimidated by the way it looks". Which is a fair comment: this gleaming white and brown heap is not Miss Hawaii material. I dig in. The burger is dry, thin and chewy. The gravy is the clingy kind we used to fear more than even nuclear winter back in the school dinner halls of 80s Birmingham. Competent rice and eggs are slaughtered in the crossfire.

I'm ashamed to say I make myself eat enough to avoid awkwardness, and then sit scowling at a distant palm tree. Our waiter picks it up without a word and walks off. Such a beautiful place; such an unbeautiful breakfast. London seems so far away.