Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel

If business or pleasure brings you to Beverly Hills, Hollywood, or Los Angeles, consider a stay at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, which is now a Four Seasons property. Everything about our stay was simply perfect and the hotel managed to exceed our expectations in various areas - even for the standard we are used to see at other Four Seasons locations.

The service was simply amazing and everything was executed on a level of perfection that your rarely see. To give just a few examples: the concierge called us a few days ahead of our arrival to see if we needed help with any reservations and organized VIP experience tickets for Universal Studios for us. Upon arrival, the door man inquired about my name as he opened the door of our car. By the time he had reached the rear of the car to unload the luggage, he greeted my son with the words "And you must be Calvin" - obviously having received all our family member names from reception via some secret service wireless gear. Very clever!

The rooms were great, the beds super-comfortable, and the breakfast was flawless as well. We can highly recommend the Wilshire Eggs Benedict with black truffles.

Our rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ (5 out of a possible 5 diamonds).

Spago - a little bit of Austria in Beverly Hills

Spago is certainly the flagship restaurant of Wolfgang Puck and the Beverly Hills location, opened in 1997, maintains a cutting-edge role as a creative culinary force, with a combination of Spago classics and Austrian-inspired recipes from Wolfgang's childhood.

Coming from Vienna, Austria, we thought it would be only fair to conduct a little "Austrian review" of Spago to find out how true to Puck's roots the dishes are - even when the chef is not personally in the kitchen anymore.

The first pleasant surprise is that the menu contains four dishes (2 appetizers and 2 entrees) marked with an * and identified as original recipes from Wolfgang Puck's grandmother's recipe collection. All the other dishes are also nicely selected and offer a fresh fusion of Californian and Austrian cuisine.

The wine list has quite a few Austrian wines and for our dinner we picked a bottle of the Bründlmayer Grüner Veltliner from the Kamptal region in Austria. This is a very fresh and fruity white wine that goes extremely well with fish, but is also great with meat dishes.

We tried three of the four original grandmother recipe dishes: the Wiener Schnitzel was enormous and very well prepared. It could easily measure up to our expectations, although the portion of potato salad that accompanied the dish was definitely too small when compared with Vienna standard portions.

The Kärntner Käsenudeln were remarkable and delicious - although they led to a lively discussion between the authors of this blog, whether they were true Käsenudeln or more related to the Osttiroler Schlipfkrapfen (sometimes also called Schlutzkrapfen). After some research we concluded that they were indeed Käsenudeln - the mint in the filling was a clear give-away.

The Goulash was spicy, yet the beef was tender and could almost be cut with a fork - exactly the way it should be.

For desert we had the Kaiserschmarrn, which was truly fabulous and airy. The true connoisseur of Austrian cuisine would, of course, need to notice that  it was almost a cross-over between a Kaiserschmarrn and Salzburger Nockerln, which gave it a fluffiness that is rarely found in pure Kaiserschmarrn.

Unfortunately the low-light conditions in the restaurant made our photos come out too dark and lacking color and appeal - they would simply not do the dishes justice, so we decided to instead include a photo from Wolfgang Puck's own website above.

But our overall impression of Spago was that it does without any doubt deserve its reputation - even when you measure the Austrian cuisine by Austrian standards!

Our rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ (5 out of a possible 5 diamonds).