Author: Paul Southgate
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InterContinental Crete – A Supermodel Hotel
The InterContinental Crete arrives like a supermodel walking into a beach club. Heads turn. Conversations stop. Everyone notices. And for the first couple of days, you completely understand why. This is an exceptionally handsome hotel. It occupies a glorious position above the sea, with views so perfectly framed they look less like scenery and more…
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Maistrali – A Lesson in Human Behaviour (and Overcooked Chicken)
I always feel sorry for restaurants in resort towns. Imagine the predicament. Every evening a river of holidaymakers shuffles past your front door, peering at menus laminated sometime during the Ottoman Empire, trying to decide between five or six almost identical tavernas. The food is probably broadly the same, the prices broadly the same, and…
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Ofou to lo – An Outrageously Perfect Greek Taverna
If the gods of Olympus ever tired of ambrosia and decided to open a taverna, they would build something very like this. The sea beyond the tables is so extravagantly blue it looks as though someone has turned up the saturation on reality itself. The fish arrives with such startling freshness that you half expect…
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Hotel Port 7 – Substance is hard to achieve
I didn’t stay at Hotel Port 7. I can’t tell you whether the pillows are plump, the showers powerful, or whether the housekeeping folds the loo paper into little triangles that make people feel they’ve entered a higher social class. What I can tell you is that I stopped for a drink on the terrace,…
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Amoodi – The Best Thing on the Beach Isn’t the View
We’ve all been there. You trek down a glorious stretch of coastline, lured by turquoise water and the promise of a lazy afternoon, only to find the same tired formula waiting at the end of it. A beach shack at the back. Sunbeds at the front priced somewhere between “luxury experience” and “small family hatchback”.…
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Moxy Barcelona Gets the Modern Hotel Just Right
I’m starting to develop a worrying affection for the Moxy brand. Worrying because, on paper, it ought to annoy me. It’s a hotel concept apparently devised by a committee of people who own trainers costing more than my first car. There’s the inevitable industrial-chic aesthetic, the communal tables, the mood lighting, the sense that someone…
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Pez Vela – The Restaurant That Attracts Exactly the Right Sort of Crowd
You can tell a great restaurant by the people who choose to spend their time there. A beach bar in Barcelona ought, by rights, to be a chaotic affair: sunburnt tourists comparing maps, influencers photographing cocktails from seventeen angles, and stag parties negotiating with the laws of gravity. Yet Pez Vela somehow escapes all that.…
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Not all seats are equal. Especially on Etihad.
The thing about first-world problems is that the moment you complain about anything remotely luxurious, somebody lobs the phrase “first-world problems” at your head as if they’ve delivered the final word in moral philosophy. Bad service at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair? First-world problems. Your Aston Martin has ludicrously expensive parts? First-world problems. The caviar…
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Man Wah – Silk Slippers Above the Harbour
Hong Kong, after Shenzhen, feels like stepping out of a spaceship and into a well cut Savile Row suit. Not because it’s old, though parts of it gloriously are, but because it understands something Shenzhen hasn’t yet learned: that progress without polish is just noise. Shenzhen dazzles you with drone delivered toothbrushes and toilets that…
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The Hopewell Hotel: A Five-Star Stay Hidden Behind a Shopping Centre and a Lift-Based IQ Test
The first thing you want to know, always, is whether it’s any good. So here it is, up front, no foreplay: yes. It’s very good. Properly good. Luxurious, clean, stylish, and, annoyingly for everywhere else, brilliantly located. But, my word, the courtship. Because the Hopewell does not so much present itself as dare you to…
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The Travel Critic 