The Pizza Principle

The past 10 years or so have come to see an overbranded grandiosity characterize the smart hotel. During this time we have come to misunderstand luxury travel as an agglomeration of celebrity name checks: the design, the décor, the restaurant, the spa. This mania for branding everything from lunch to light fittings threatens to turn hotels into nothing more than complex webs of interconnected and self-reinforcing names that do little to enhance the quality of one's stay.

When this hyper-hotel experience began around the turn of the century with the rejuvenation of such revered inns as Claridge's in London, it was intriguing and fresh. But success brings imitation, and what was a clever idea soon became a business model: lease out your restaurant to a celebrity chef, call in a well-known designer, give the bar a makeover and engage a trendy "mixologist." In the words of one friend who is a veteran of the hotel industry, it all went very Las Vegas. I began to shudder when I found myself contending with another sub-Starck, dumbed-down Ducasse–like experience, or the horrific riot of décor and jarring dining options that, rather like poor plastic surgery, risk disfiguring a much loved grand hotel.

I suppose that I am every hotelier's nightmare guest, in that I am fussy, snobbish, conservative and yet also believe myself to be an iconoclast. Oh yes, and I am careful—downright tight-fisted—with money; just watch me quibble over those extras. However there is a method in my meanness: I think the test of a really grand hotel is how it does the simple things, not the fancy ones.

For want of a better name, I call it the pizza principle. If faced with the choice of a swanky, multiple-course dinner or a pizza, I will usually take the pizza, as long as it is a good one. In addition to liking pizza, I prefer my luxury travel to be understated, rather than pompous.

Of course it need not be a pizza. It could be a plate of spaghetti. One of the most enjoyable things about the lavish all-night parties I have attended in Europe during the summer is not the gala dinner, but rather the spaghettata: the plate of pasta supplied at 3 o'clock in the morning by a thoughtful host hoping to fortify his or her guests until dawn.

For a long time I worked as a restaurant critic and, eating in fancy restaurants for a living, I acquired a highly developed taste for the simpler things, albeit served in ritzy surroundings. As a young man I was fortunate enough to stay in the south of France as the guest of friends. I was keen to visit the legendary hotels of the area, but one good lunch at La Colombe d'Or would have wiped me out financially. So I would do the grand-hotel thing on the cheap, like have a sandwich and a glass of beer at the Eden-Roc bar of the Hôtel du Cap on Cap d'Antibes: same real estate, same view, same vibe, just more relaxed and less expensive.

The pizza principle plays well almost anywhere, but especially on the Amalfi coast. A couple of years ago I wrote a travel piece about Ravello and the Hotel Caruso. The setting was magical, but for me the best thing was the pizza I ate at the poolside restaurant. I did not have to have a gastronomic "experience"; instead, I was able to enjoy eating a really well-made pizza, with snowy white proper buffalo mozzarella, accompanied only by the sun and the view.

The pizza principle can be applied to city hotels too. In New York, when staying at the Carlyle, I like nothing more than a plate of pancakes for breakfast and perhaps, straying off menu, a tuna sandwich for lunch. On assignment in Paris once, I reported from luxury's front line at the Plaza Athénée, where I was hunkered down in the Royal suite, a set of rooms so sprawling that it should have come equipped with a bicycle (from Hermès of course). I was invited to sample the hotel's Alain Ducasse restaurant, but instead I asked for something simpler and was directed to the Relais, an art deco brasserie that reminded me of pictures I had seen of the dining rooms on the Normandie.