Stay in Athens

Not long ago Athens-bound business travellers didn’t have to worry about getting it wrong when it came to choosing an appropriate hotel, there were just three contenders – the Hilton, the Grande Bretagne and the King George – and they were all perfectly serviceable. These days the same travellers could stay in a different and highly individualistic property every night of the week. The newcomers are the Marriott. Meridien. the Astir Palace (part of an 11-strong national chain) and the Inter-Continental managed Hotel Athenaeum.
The increased competition, has also left hoteliers with shrinking occupancy rates. Now they’ll not only welcome you with open arms but offer such moderate prices that the already highly favourable exchange rates to the drachma make dollars, pounds and marks go a long, long way.
Equally good news is that Athens’s hoteliers treat their properties like showcases for art, classical and modern, as befits this culture-conscious capital. The most staggering example is the Athenaeum Inter-Continental. When this hotel opened at the end of 1982 it also opened the door to a US$80-million investment, one of the biggest foreign capital investments in Greece for years.
The entrance off Syngrou brings you to an 80-metre expanse of beige marble floor, lit from above by an aluminium ‘space frame7 (for which read spider’s web). Modern paintings – abstracts and cross columns, heads of Aphrodite and giant Campbell soup cans In unadulterated blues, reds, silver and gold – and terra cotta statuary contribute to a wholly arresting quality. Never mind about “but is it art?� the question is does it work?
It works: 600 guestrooms, most with Parthenon views and mostly junior suites with all mod cons. Restaurants include La Rotisserie which even rival hoteliers happily concede has “cornered the French market, and does a very nice job on service�, and the well-appointed Taverna – which is what it is -complete with strolling musical trio. The junior suites are a good size and encompass a decent sitting room at one end. Prices vary according to the floor and view but, for a change, hair dryers are mandatory. Single 18,000 drs; twin 20,500 drs; suite from 21,000 drs – all taxes, 22 per cent, and services included, as they are elsewhere in this report.
The 134-year-old Grande Bretagne (Constitution Square) isn’t state-of-the-art but rather Athens’s most traditional and senior hotel. It is also the one the police cordon off Syntagma Square for when the most vulnerable VIPs and politicians come to stay. And, as you’re bound to discover, it is where Winston Churchill nearly lost his life after a bomb was recovered beneath the building on Christmas Eve 1944.
The 400-room former royal palace guest house was built by Dane Theo Hansen (responsible for many fine Athens’s buildings) on a grand scale: endless polished corridors and Parthenon-facing rooms with generous private balconies from which you can also study the people studying the changing of the guard outside Parliament. The art you’ll see here is that practised by the Athenians greeting one another in the corner GB Coffee Shop, haunt of politicians and fashionable society, open 11am – 2am. “It’s the sort of place you stay out of if you’re well-known because everyone says ‘hello, how are you’,� 1 was told in all earnestness. The Grande Bretagne has another plus: the most comprehensive business centre in town.
Next door is Athens’s second most senior citizen, the King George Hotel (Syntagma Square), circa 1935 “and showing it� in the opinion of many: What it is also showing is a magnificent collection of fine art and antiques – but then again the hotel is owned and managed by Socratis B Calcanis. heir of the great art-lover who created the property. Service is well-heeled and the mod cons are just about up-to-date. In the evening spare some time to go up to the roof terrace – where there’s a pleasant restaurant with a “well-balanced international menu� – for yet another opportunity to gaze at the floodlit Acropolis.
The third hotel on this side of Syntagma Square is the NJV Meridien opened in 1981 with a spectacular spun glass stalactite ceiling. This smallish (182-room) hotel sees itself as a French business hotel. It proves the point by offering extras like a 24-hour English TV news and wire service and its business centre goes out of its way to help: “We can prepare a list of people in Greece with whom you might share a common interest and we can even make arrangements for a meeting.� Being Trench’ means that the Meridien’s Brasserie des Arts serves nouvelle cuisine – ‘tasteful portions’ is what they say. and by all accounts, does it very well. Banquets are also claimed as a speciality – “we can do them for up to 250 people.�
Back on Syngrou Avenue the Ledra Marriott opened in May 1982 and set about raising the Greek capital’s culinary expecta¬tions. Besides the Kona Kai (see restaurants), the Marriott has the masculine and club-like Ledra Grill featuring, such (apparently rare) cuisine as US corn-fed beef and both a summer and Sunday buffet which have become legends during their short lifetimes. “The secret of the buffet,� says F & B Manager Bill Winans. “is to arrive first, at 11.30am on a Sunday.� And he should know. During my stay a Scandinavian Kood Festival was in its closing stages smoked reindeer haunches and all the rest beautifully presented and a sellout every night. Marriott is very big in the Athens food and hospitality business and the atmosphere is distinctly ‘user-friendly’. Dther bonuses are the rooftop swimming pool (with buffet during summer from 8pm) and the fact that it is the only hotel in Athens to understand that business travellers like to have a telephone on the desk -Marriott put theirs bedside, bathsidea/id on the desk.
The Hilton has what is enviously regarded as the best business location in Athens, they call it “the Hilton area� or “around the US Embassy� And whatever your experiences with the Hilton chain elsewhere, treat this one as something different. It is. It is different because it has a talking lift, two Executive floors, a key card system (ultra secure and the only hotel in Greece to use them) and two appealing swimming pools. The Executive floor (for which you pay a modest surcharge) has 83 rooms which aren’t so very different from the standard ones: marble slab desks (without phones), double glazing against the traffic, balconies with interesting views and a touch of Art Deco style. The plusses are the club lounge (com¬plimentary breakfast, drinks, newspapers, magazines, chess and backgammon) and the separate check-in/out service, which would be well worth having in the busier summer months.
The Hilton also has art: a 5,783 square foot semi-abstract marble carving masterminded by the painter John Moralis and intended to remind you there are 300 sunny days in Athens each year, The rooms have tasteful paintings by well-known names and, across the street, the National Art Gallery has many more: Picasso, El Greco and Matisse being among them. It is a, thoroughly rewarding place to visit. Executive floor 22,542 – 25,104 drs. If you’re in the suite market, the Olympos, the Golden Fleece and the Hesperides will make you very happy indeed because they are works of art (prices on request).
Athens’s other significant business hotel is the Astir Palace Athens. Directly across from Parliament in reflective glass. Almost half its 78 rooms are suites and the clientele is native. It is functional and. like the rest of the chain, is geared to meetings and conferences. The Apokalypis restaurant is semi-subterranean and allows close inspection of part of the ancient wall of Athens with which it is cheek by jowl.
If you are in Athens over a weekend the perfect retreat is the Astir Palace. Vouliagmeni Complex. It is an enormous resort (1,130 beds) consisting of three hotels and 77 secluded bungalows 15 miles from Athens on a pine-clad promontory owned by the National Bank of Greece. During the off-season all but 300 of the 1.100 employees are dismissed and two of the hotels shut down. Conferences would appear to take over: “we do more than 200 a year� which is just as well with a March occupancy rate of 30 per cent. It is a lovely place: tall pine trees, exotic flowers, marina, private sandy beach, yacht charter, and the golf course at Glyfada a five-minute drive away. Vouliagmeni puts you 12km from the airport (but you don’t hear the jets like you do at Giyfada) and a comforting distance from the dangerous looking pollution hovering above Athens.
bar and Lengo (Nikis Street), a pretty basement bistro with Greek and ‘international’ food and good service. Both restaurants are open for lunch and dinner with last orders being taken around midnight. Idea of a good night out, is Bajazzo where what appears on your plate comes from the hands of creative chef extraordinaire Klaus Feuerach. This German-born wizard learnt his art the slow way, in chain hotels in South Africa, Amsterdam and Tehran where he “served the Shah a few times on his good days.� Bajazzo works as a co-operative – a trio of Irish girls and three males, one Jamaican, one Greek and Klaus. The setting is a beautifully restored mansion divided into three rooms, one a lunchtime bistro upstairs.
The decor is restful, the pre-dinner drinks parlour quite the last word in subdued good taste. With Columbine’s Boudoir, for example, you’ll get smoked salmon with scrambled egg, quenelles of chicken, pork medallions and chocolate mousse. The wine list is healthy and includes Germans and French, plus, if you’re lucky, the hard to obtain Greek Chateau Semeli. The evening menu is likely to read: hearts of lettuce with crabmeat, pinenuts and mango dressing, cold tomato soup and hot cream of celery and roast veal liver with parma ham.
This is imaginative Greek cuisine.