MY WAIKIKI MINI-VACATION: Sheraton and La Mer

From the Royal Hawaii I walked over to the Waikiki Sheraton and, after some discussion, was finally provided a suite.  Nice persistence manytimes works.  The reason why I had difficulty is that the suite upgrade was only a request, and I later saw an email indication that my request failed.  This will also be the case for the Moana Surfrider tomorrow.  Wonder if I should again play that nice persistency ploy.

The Waikiki Sheraton, with 1695 rooms on 31 stories, is the second largest in Hawaii, next to Hilton Hawaiian Village (3,000 rooms), which is just outside of Waikiki.  Amazingly enough, the Sheraton has no really great restaurant, catering mostly to the comfortable, but not the luxury class.

My Sheraton suite is huge.  It takes forever to get around the various rooms.  Even the bathroom is bigger than a typical hotel room in Japan.  The view from my fourth floor ideally points in the Diamond and Pacific Ocean direction, were it not for all those coconut trees:

Better yet, this hotel has improved the amenities for Platinum members.  After check-in they send you to a special room, where a paper bag is provided, allowing you to fill it as your gift.  If you pushed it, you could stuff in two champagne bottles, but I took only one, and added an assortment of chips and several energy bars.  Also, their Executive Club on the Penthouse is now called the Leahi Club and my status allows for free beer and wine, in addition to a nice buffet.  Others pay $35 just to enter.  The view is spectacular:

Only peanuts because next is La Mer at the Halekulani.  This is the entirety of Waikiki Beach:

That pink building is the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where I stayed last night.  The Westin Moana Surfrider, my Sunday night hotel, is halfway up Waikiki Beach.  This is an interesting photo because the shiny area is a perfect mirror image of the other side, Ewa towards the Honolulu Airport:

This is the largest executive club in the Starwood family. The buffet was very adequate, with a full salad bar and two entree items, one being a snapper dish.  You can ask for 90+ Wine Spectator wines for an added fee.

La Mer remains, to me, as the best restaurant in Hawaii, but perhaps now next to Vintage Cave.   They stopped giving that free initial champagne.  I ordered a Talbott Chardonnay and a Margaux Bordeaux:

I had the Menu Degustation, which began with a green asparagus vichyssoise, which was pleasant, followed by a foie gras with shiitake mushrooms, which was fabulous.  The abalone meuniere could have been further dried to get that abalone taste, which was missing:

The morel gnocchi was excellent, with a clarified sharpness that surprised me:

The filet of prime beef with foie gras, truffle spiced mashed potatoes and Perigueux sauce, was the highlight of the evening:

At this point I was already approaching supersaturation, so I asked for the rest of the courses to be delivered at the same time: warm comte cheese with shaved proscuitto, halzelnut cale with tomato ice cream, coconut with matcha (green tea) and mint sponge, plus petit fours:

You can't get the sense of the creativity involved with each, so here is just one:

I was entertained by the Sunset Serenaders and Radasha Hoohuli, Miss Hawaii of 2006:

That's House without a Key, of course, and that catamaran at the top is the Mai Tai, which should have been there yesterday (scroll down to the next posting):

But that was not all.  The Sheraton gave me a free drink at Rumfire, so I had a Waikiki Sunset:

-