October 1985: At the Biltmore, TDG: Trickle-down Greed.

Let me tell you why the Reds dropped three straight to the Dodgers in L.A., mid-August.

They stayed at The Biltmore (above).

 

The 700-room hotel, tired and weary and experiencing growing pains, is up to its grout in a multi-million dollar facelift. But, rather than shut down sections of the hotel during renovation, management has opted, I am sorry to report, to keep the whole place open, raking in bucks while exasperating and alienating customers.

It is the week of the West Coast Restaurant Show and I am there for the Show staying at the sold-out Biltmore.

You cannot appreciate the real joys of lodging until you’ve been awakened from a deep sleep as I was at 5:30 a.m. by construction workers jack-hammering a stairwell but a few yards from your bed. Factor in a hangover and the ruckus swells.

The construction grinds from sunup to sundown. The place is a den of din. At $94 a night, the hotel is indulging in blatant bamboozle or what I’ve decided to call, “TDG: Trickle-down greed.”

A major foodservice equipment company has booked 200 rooms. When it booked the 200 rooms, did management tell the company that the hotel would be booming with bedlam? Are the company’s employees upset? What about the company? What do you think? Here’s a test for you: where do you think the company will book its people the next time the show’s in L.A., even if the renovation’s complete and the hotel’s rated one of the city’s best?  Pick one of these: The Biltmore or Anyplace But.

In the morning there is a cart in the lobby. On the cart is a coffee service: air-pots of regular and decaf coffee, hot water, cream, real and fake sugar, teabags, paper napkins, stirring sticks. Also on the cart is a note: brief and to the point. Here’s what it says: “This service is for the convenience of our guests until [get this] our coffee shop opens.” Minutes before the coffee shop opens, employees scurry to break down the service, because God help us if someone tries to cop a free cup after the coffee shop opens.

So, what’s wrong with making a buck; what’s wrong with that? Why should the hotel pour free coffee when it can sell lots of it in its coffee shop? Because a lot of classy hotels offer free coffee service in their lobbies; most from sun up to noon, some, all day, that’s why. Further, given the circumstances, given the Biltmore’s ingenious wake-up system, it should pour free coffee and a lot more morning until night not only to guests, but to anyone else who inadvertently wanders into the lobby (aka, construction zone). That’s known as assuaging discomfort, allaying anxiety, recognizing that the place is not a very nice place and “Welcome! We are going to do whatever it takes to restore sanity, a sense of dignity, peace and quiet in an asylum of unpleasantness, substandard service and bad judgment.”  No dice: the cart is rolled away. Want coffee? The coffee shop is now open; get some there.

TDG.

Sunday night at the hotel, tired from cocktail parties and press functions where I’ve been over-wined and over-hors-d’oeuvred, I am unwinding in my room thinking pleasant thoughts. One of them is about roomservice. How nice it would be, I think, to kick off my shoes, turn on the TV, watch something mindless while eating something from roomservice.

I order roomservice food. I do not order anything that might challenge the kitchen, even though I note there are items on the menu that might. I order a cheeseburger and a side of fries. A glass of milk, too. The meal will be a refreshing break from fancy finger foods and expensive wines. The burger and fries, I tell myself, should be the simplest things on the menu for the kitchen to prepare even though I know fries wilt in transit.


Edible? Credible? Debatable.

After what is an interminable wait, roomservice delivers. It is awful (right), except for the milk, although even it is suspect. The cheeseburger is lousy. Ditto, the fries. Both are lukewarm. The meal comes to $20 plus a roomservice charge of a couple of bucks and an 18-percent service charge. Of course, a service charge. Roomservice food is—and always must be—distinct from roomservice service: they are separate functions: one has nothing to do with the other, unlike the hotel’s restaurant where, presumably (although I have my doubts, this being TDG Biltmore), they are inseparable. The hotel has decided, rightfully so, not to penalize the roomservice waiter —to kill the messenger, as it were—for an outrage committed in the kitchen. 

TDG. First, the room. Now, the food. TDG Number Two. Three, if you count the disappearing coffee cart in the lobby.

The next morning I engage the front desk in friendly banter. “I know such matters are out of your hands, but I think you should know that roomservice last night wasn't very good.” In a manner, I am forced to admit, impressively condescending, here’s what front desk says: “Terribly sorry, sir, but yesterday, as I’m sure you must remember, was a Sunday.”

Of course. How silly of me not to know that roomservice at The Biltmore, unlike every other hotel in Los Angeles, is never available on a Sunday, or, when available, constitutes an imposition on the staff. How silly of me not to realize that. Add one more TDG exasperation to my list.

Understand when I tell you that awful roomservice is not a Biltmore exclusive, peculiar to its kitchen or to its renovation. Most if not all hotel food and beverage directors admit roomservice is a pain in the ass. Pain in the ass though it may be, they make every effort to exclude from the menu entrees that if prepared à la minute must be consumed à la minute; to delete courses that do not travel well; and to include only those that when delivered are edible. 

However, here’s a core truth that The Biltmore refuses to appreciate—bad Sunday roomservice or not. Although in my inventory of misdemeanors noted here I identify it as “one more TDG exasperation,” it is, truth be known, not a TDG. However, because it emerges as one more unwarranted indiscretion in the midst of my having to cope with TDG, I’ve decided to make note of it here. Like so:  

The Biltmore’s defense of awful roomservice as a casualty of Sunday service doesn’t wash. Here’s what does: awful roomservice (Sunday or any day of the week) is like an awful house wine. Both tell you something about the standards of the joint. If the hotel takes little or no pride in rudimentary services, how classy can the rest of its act be? After failing miserably with its preparation of a relatively simple meal, do I dare trust the kitchen to prepare something more complex in its so-called gourmet restaurant that just happens to be off the lobby where, if you’re lucky, you can grab a cup of coffee from the morning coffee cart? Having dropped more than twenty bucks on a snack—bungled beyond belief—do I dare drop four to five times that amount in its restaurant? Further, do I dare entertain customers there, risking loss of business and/or friendships? Perhaps the Biltmore doesn’t care. Why should it? Come on: the hotel is being renovated. How can it possibly keep an eye on everything? Bad Sunday roomservice: TDG, guilt by association.

There is—give the hotel some credit—an effort to excuse its misery en place. Call it, if you will, a temporary but nonetheless shabby act of contrition: the hotel offers guests and only its guests (of course) one free breakfast for one day and one day only (of course). But one free breakfast does not begin to compensate for discomforts suffered. A free breakfast, given the state of affairs, is like an airline informing survivors of a crash that they will not lose the frequent flyer miles that would have accrued if the plane had succeeded in completing its flight from point of impact to actual destination.

Every day as I pass the front desk I listen to what guests are saying. Most are complaining. I watch, in amazement, as the front desk shrugs off complaints. They are not arrogant shrugs. They are passive shrugs; out-of-my-control shrugs. Shrugs of helplessness.

It is a different story when I check out. Behind the desk is not a clerk, but somebody higher up. You can tell she is somebody higher up because unlike clerks and other lesser employees, the badge on her blouse is not cardboard, it is brass.



I haven’t the foggiest notion what to do

A guest ahead of me is complaining bitterly to the higher up. Her bitterness drips with displeasure, anger simmering on the verge of bubbling over. As the guest progresses through her litany of accusations, she pauses along the way to give the higher up an opportunity to respond, to no avail. Her pauses are met with incredulous stares and looks glazed as glass as though she were hearing all of this for the first time; added to the indignity is a shrug of the shoulders with arms extended, hands palms up. There is no response; at least one that makes sense. It is the ultimate insult.

 

Has the hotel, has the front desk, any idea of what’s happening, of what happened? Are staff people deaf; dumb, too, reduced to stares, looks and shrugs? What’s going on here?

TDG. Why is management so appallingly and unspeakably (literally) indifferent? How account for its mindboggling unresponsiveness? Let me guess. Just before the renovation began mindboggled and indifferent management met with all employees and gave them each a supplement to its training manual specifying the finer points of TDG with explicit instructions on how to identify and contend with each as they occur.

In gambling with the guest, the hotel shoots craps. Clearly, regardless of renovation or recovery from its swamp of incivility, the hotel has lost me and, I would venture to guess, several hundred more guests as repeat customers.

The Biltmore: Chuck Aghoian/Shutterstock.com; jackhammer: Muratart; burger: Denis Vroblevski; woman: PathDoc