
Belvedere serves real food, with great taste
That beautiful luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Peninsula Beverly Hills, has had lots of unwanted publicity recently – it was a favourite, for years, of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. But this is a gorgeous establishment that warrants publicity for all the good things it does. Under its long-time GM, Offer Nissenbaum, it never stands still, says the gal.
This very week it has a stunning new boutique, Marie France Van Damme, showcasing the Canadian-born designer’s wear-anywear clothes (check her out on Lyft, although nearly all her items have already sold out – not surprising since they are just the kind of versatile, no-crease garments that would be ideal for my wardrobe but my Porsche Rimowa wheelie just does not have a square centimetre of space to put anything else in, sadly). The utterly-modern, 1991-vintage hotel is also refreshing its rooms, just a Helen Glynn tweaking rather than changing anything dramatic, which would upset its large number of regular guests.
Offer Nissenbaum is a details man (a kind of Stan Bromley Mark II). The flowers in Belvedere Restaurant are always, well, divine – see above. And the menu is smack up to date. Take a variety of salads, perhaps, and add your choice of protein – say salmon atop a pea and burrata salad. Heirloom vegetables are served in the kind of containers one grandmother might have used. Old is today’s new in many cases when it comes to modern luxury.