This sort of reception, not only by contrast, but in all its other implications, is typical of everything the traveler encounters everywhere in Mexico. No tourist ever need fear being caught without some reasonable sort of accommodations, no matter how full a town may be, as the busiest hotel will go to enormous pains to see that he is put up elsewhere. The arts of public hospitality, of hotel conduct, restaurant management, and all the details of traveler satisfaction in Mexico are so far in advance of their equivalent in the United States as to make the average tourist accommodation north of the Rio Grande seem by comparison right out of the dreariest times of the war years and what passed as “the national emergency.”
For the authentic or feed-box dope on anything connected with the more de luxe aspects of travel and tourist life in fashionable Mexico, the one perhaps irrefutable source of reliable information is A. C. Blumenthal, lessor of Mexico City's celebrated Reforma Hotel, proprietor of Ciro's equally well-touted night club, and definitely the head man among the glitter set of expatriates, film celebrities, and expensive folk who make a not too reluctant practice of sitting down to dinner at eleven-thirty in the evening and taking off their boiled shirts about the time the banks open in the morning.
Besides the Reforma, a hotel of vast international implications and strictly American plumbing which occupies in Mexican affairs almost precisely the position once occupied by the Ritz in Paris, Blumey is proprietor of the vast Reforma-Casablanca at Acapulco and is at the moment busily engaged in starting a string of Longchamps restaurants featuring Yankee chow and an approximation, somewhat bewildering to all concerned in its functioning, of Yankee service. He is also building a staggering addition to the original structure of the Reforma itself, a wing which will feature two presidential suites and will nearly double the existing and available luxury hotel accommodations in Mexico City.
Whatever may be the source of his claim to a not inconsiderable position and authority, Blumey, according to his own and everybody else's authority as well as the factual evidence at hand, enjoys a very firm “in” indeed with the Mexican government, a hierarchy normally about as appreciative of foreign enterprise as, say, the Kremlin is. Perhaps the explanation is that, instead of undertaking to exploit Mexico's natural economic resources, Blumey's businesses constitute the main single attraction for luxury tourists south of the border and that, while he is an unparalleled expert at inducing the scatterbrained Mexicanos to participate in a functioning undertaking, he is by no means so avaricious or highbinding as he is customarily portrayed in the press of the United States. The “hundred-dollar lunches” at Ciro's, mention of which seems to fascinate New York and Hollywood columnists and paragraphers, are purely and simply a figment of the newspaper imagination. The house lunch is a flat ＄2.50 in American money and is the only lunch served there, or almost exactly the cost of a single portion of hors d'oeuvres at the Colony, Jack and Charlie's, or Mike Romanoff's. The very elaborate house dinner at Ciro's is a flat ＄4 American, without drinks.
Pinterest
