Larry Olmsted, writes about every thing, from the food to the luxury showers.If you want to know more about this new addition to the" Vegas Experience"look no further.
![]() |
Nobu Hotel Las Vegas Review. |
"Hotel Test Drive: First Look At Nobu Hotel Las Vegas
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2013/02/13/hotel-test-drive-first-look-at-nobu-hotel-las-vegas/Earlier this year I wrote about the much-anticipated upcoming opening of the world’s first Nobu Hotel (several others are in the works, from Miami to Dubai), inside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. With the possible exception of the under-construction Linq Resort, compete with an London Eye-style giant observation wheel, scheduled to open on the Strip in December, the Nobu Hotel Las Vegas is easily the biggest lodging event of the year in one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, which instantly makes it big travel news.
n my last piece I promised an early review of the property and the time has come. On February 2, Chef Nobu Matsuhisa cut the ribbon with a samurai sword while his business partner in Nobu Hospitality Group, Oscar-winning actor Robert DeNiro, looked on. The hotel opened eight days ago, on Sunday February 3, and I was one of the first guests, having just spent four nights there. The official grand opening will not be until April 28, and the top of the line suites are not finished yet, but the vast majority of the guest rooms are (it was over 70% occupancy last weekend), along with the restaurant and dedicated staff. In fact, considering that most hotels, even the best run, go through a lot of problems right after opening, I’d say Nobu Hotel did surprisingly well and is definitely ready for prime time.
Miso black cod is one of the beloved signature dishes at Nobu Matsuhisa's restaurants.
The building looks unchanged from the Strip, just another squat, white, nondescript square tower rising from behind the Roman façade. But the interior was gutted and the rooms are radically different from any in Caesars – or any in Vegas. They are larger than normal standard rooms, with a sitting area with L-shaped couch and coffee table beyond the main sleeping area. The design style is very much Asian, with the bed and furniture low to the ground, all sleek surfaces of black lacquered furniture, wood and leather, and the carpeting is textured to resemble the rake lines in a sandy zen garden. The art is also Asian, a mix of traditional Japanese woodblock prints and much more contemporary works. But the best thing about the rooms are the lavish bathrooms. Each has a vastly oversized shower, roughly twice the size of the walk-in shower that has become de rigueur at luxury hotels like Four Seasons. The huge shower has a great rain showerhead, separate handheld shower, and is built of imported Japanese black tile, with a traditional teak stool like you would find in a Japanese bathhouse in case you want to take a load off and rest up while washing. The toiletries are strictly first class, NaturaBisse from Barcelona, and like top luxury hotels in Tokyo the range of items is far greater than in typical U.S. hotels, complete with razors, shaving cream, dental kit and the like.
The showers, of black Japanese tile, are huge, roughly double most luxury hotel walk in showers.
Other special amenities include 24-hour room service from the Nobu restaurant downstairs, with custom menu items you can’t get anyplace else – and it’s the only Nobu that serves breakfast, for in-room guests only. Guests share Caesar’s extravagant and award winning QUA Baths & Spa, but they have developed special treatments just for the Nobu Hotel. One creative touch: immediately after check in, a complimentary tea service is delivered to your room with green tea and a special rice cracker that has been imported from Nobu’s hometown in Japan, a nice welcome that helps set the mood.
Security minded guests will love the unique elevator system, one I have never seen in any hotel. Optical scanners read your key before letting you call an elevator (unlike those that require the key once you get in) and you select your floor before entering. Once inside, the elevators have no buttons except open, close and help and there is no way to get to the various floors without a key.
Nobu's creative take on "bagels and lox" is
one of the special 24-hour room service items created exclusively for
guests of the new hotel.
One of my least favorite things about almost all Vegas hotels, including Caesars, is their daily inability to deal with the massive number of people checking in or out at any given time. It is common, even at so called 4-Diamond hotels here, to wait on an airport-like line for half an hour or more to check-in, and then routine for your luggage to take 30-60 minutes to reach your room, something I find just as unacceptable as Vegas hotels find it normal. But Nobu has its own dedicated bell staff and even though I arrived by cab and left my bags in the maelstrom of the Caesars main entrance, when I checked in there was no wait at the desk in the hotel’s private lobby, zero, and they dispatched one of their bellman to go seize my luggage, which arrived in the room less than five minutes after me. When I checked out it was even faster – the bellman came within a two minutes of my call. This might not sound surprising at, say, the Peninsula Hong Kong, but in Vegas this kind of bell service is more miraculous than David Copperfield making an elephant disappear. One other decidedly un-Vegas touch I loved was the fact that there are relatively few rooms on each floor, which means no 15-minute walks down endless corridors to reach your room, another frustrating but business as usual fact of life here.
Caesars Palace has one of the top spas in Vegas, QUA, and special treatments were created for guests of the Nobu Hotel.
Pet peeves? Sure, I have some, as I’m extremely particular about luxury hotels. My biggest complaint is the ridiculous $15 per day charge for WiFi (at least it’s fast). This is probably the number one complaint of hotel guests worldwide, but the number of places actually charging is dropping fast, and while some high-end luxury hotels have held out – exactly the wrong places to be charging for WiFi to begin with – it has become virtually unheard of in new hotel openings at any price, and I suggest they drop it ASAP. I was not shocked when they put a shoeshine bag on my bed at turndown, since many top hotels such as Four Seasons routinely do that and offer overnight complimentary shoeshines, a nice touch. But I was shocked when I looked closely at the small print on the bag and found that the shoeshines were another $15. I’ve never seen that before. Finally, and it’s a very small point, I found it off putting that the faucets in the bathrooms are all reversed. At the sink, hot is to the right and cold left, the opposite of standard, and in the shower the rotating handle starts at scalding and gets colder from there, again the opposite. Once you get this figured out it is no big deal, but it seems weird and to make it worse, there are no markings or temperature indications at all.
Still, despite these small complaints, I have to say that after having stayed at just about every major hotel in town, Nobu Hotel is absolutely one of my favorites and I would gladly stay there again. The pros, especially by Las Vegas standards, far outweigh these few cons, and to recap, the major pros are: bigger and better rooms, much better check-in, check-out, and bell service, great location coupled with peaceful escapism, and one of the city’s best and hottest restaurants.
Safe travels!"
As you can see, informative and unbiased.Pointing out the good and the bad makes this review of the Nobu Hotel in Las Vegas believeable.
No comments:
Post a Comment