Shanghai
China


The Experience

It is perhaps the only hotel in the world that offers the option of city tours by Nazi-era motorcycle and sidecar, or dawn jogging expeditions with a marathon-running general manager. The Portman Ritz-Carlton has become part of the fabric of Shanghai -- and its staff know pretty much every nook and cranny of China's largest city. The Port-a-man, as locals call it, is located in a self-contained foreign enclave, fringed by branches of Starbucks, California Pizza Kitchen, Tony Roma's, a French fromagerie and European designer-brand stores. The mini-city could be anywhere in the world, but inside the hotel is the constant deal-making between American tycoons, Shanghainese entrepreneurs and Communist Party apparatchiks that has come to define contemporary China.

The Rooms

The recently renovated Ritz-Carlton rooms are a fairly standard 422 square feet, with Italian-marble bathrooms, separate shower stall, the latest 32-inch flat-screen television and 300-thread-linen bedsheets. They have an overall Western feel, with small local touches like modern Chinese artwork or cabinets inspired by Chinese medicine chests. The major drawback is that whichever way the windows face, views are likely to be of squeezed-together skyscrapers, tenements with pole-hanging laundry, teeming sidewalks or traffic-clogged streets. This is commercially oriented Nanjing Road, a long way, geographically and figuratively, from the romantic Bund.

The Service

Staff are cheery, speedy, chatty and resourceful, and good-level English is the front-of-house norm. They're drilled in the motto of the group -- "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen" -- and other platitudinous human resource-speak. Constant repetition does seem to have had an impact, though, in a city (and country) where service is so often indifferent and initiative-free.

The Highlights

Watch The Great Escape as a primer for staying in the Portman Ritz-Carlton -- at least if you're planning to take the motorcycle-and-sidecar tour with the resident musician, American jazzman Danny Woody, as guide. Zooming down busy Nanjing Road in a replica BMW machine is certain to provide an anecdote or two to take home. Another quirky Port-a-man option is to pound the sidewalks and park pathways at dawn with general manager Ralph Grippo, an avid marathon runner. A calorie-shedding jogging expedition (or a trip to the modest in-house gym) is likely to be a pressing priority after a meal at Palladio, the hotel's fine-dining Italian restaurant. At night, all roads lead back to the jazz bar, where, until the early hours, Chinese entrepreneurs and deal-hungry foreigners celebrate over malt whiskey and Cuban cigars…wholeheartedly toasting the late leader Deng Xiaoping's maxim that "to get rich is glorious."

-- Mark Graham

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