Hotel Girl

The Four Seasons in Boston has announced it's to close its fine dining restaurant Aujourd'hui and another hotel restaurant, Great Bay at the Commonwealth Hotel in the same city is also due to shut soon. OK that's in America, but the question of what to do with hotel restaurant spaces has proved an eternal dilema for operators.

Will the same happen over here? Are fine dining hotel restaurants doomed to go the way of Dieter Muller's disastrous Andaman offering at the St James' hotel and whither away with barely a whimper?

But perhaps this trend of out-sourcing these spaces to celebitry chef names - think Ramsay, Locatelli and Wareing may acutally help them survive.  

I guess the key question is how long will people pay top dollar for posh hotel grub and will it have to have a s'leb name above the door to succeed?

The Royal Lancaster Hotel in London is buzzing with the news that it is set to receive half a million guests.

Dressed in black and yellow striped garb the army of buzzy bodies will descend upon the Hyde Park hotel this week.

So many? Well yes, you may have guessed it, the guests are not human, but nature's favourite- bees

The hotel is installing beehives on its roof due to the sharp decline in honey bees, which is having a serious effect on food production around the world. 

The hotel is situated next to Hyde Park which is an ideal stomping ground for the bees to flourish.

The hotel will employ a "Bee Team" to care for the bees and collect the 40kg of honey produced every year- which will then be snaffled up by guests straight from the honeycomb in the hotel's restaurant, Island. 

Pots of honey will also be offered to VIPs and 'honey'mooners (groan), while the wax from the hives will be used to create candles for gifts. 

Honey Bee Facts   
* The average honey bee will produce only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life time.

* The male honey bees are called drones, and they do no work at all and have no stinger.  All they do is mate. (Nice work if you can get it)

* Worker honey bees live for about four weeks in the spring or summer, but up to six weeks during the winter.  They are all female and do all the work...

* The honey bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.

Internationally renowned chef Heinz Beck is to open a restaurant in the Lanesborough hotel.

This is his first resturant outside Italy, where he runs the three Michelin star La Pergola at the Cavalieri.

Apsleys - a Heinz Beck Restaurant' will open on September 7 and offer "traditional Italian fare" in the hotel's conservatory (below).

It seems the hotel restaurant needed a breath of fresh air, as reviews of the newly opened Aspleys in 2008 said it was having something of an identity crisis.

Beck is one of the most well-known chefs in the world, so this is quite a triumph for the Hyde Park Corner hotel.