Hip Hotels

W MINNEAPOLIS
W Minneapolis–The Foshay received as gaudy a launch as a company can buy when it opened last summer. By the size of the crowd still filling The Living Room, its plush and cosseted ground-floor bar adjacent to Manny’s Steakhouse, the allure is wearing well, even at a time when an unsuspecting reveler might cough up blood at paying $23 for a glass of single-malt scotch. Word has already gotten around about where to hang to look like you belong—the four high-backed love seats ringing the gas fire pit.

And that’s before you stop at Prohibition, W’s 27th floor redoubt for what I took to be the Twin Cities’ yachting class’s off-season retreat. Remarkably lean, etched, lifted, and pulled, the Prohibition crowd, tucked into clubby nooks around the central elevator bank, made careful study of every new arrival circling for a seat. Besides immaculate grooming, a discreet logo of The Carlyle Group on a cuff-link or collar would send the proper tribal signal.

You sense the place has aspirations to be Minn-eapolis’s central social gathering point—or living room, if you will—at least for a subset of Manny’s Bludgeon of Beef crowd. In caricature form these would be the four 30-something guys, two in a black Range Rover and two right behind them in a white Escalade, who flipped keys to the W valets. Wearing only open-collared shirts, sport coats, crisp designer jeans, and cowboy boots or sockless loafers, they strode through the snowfall to a baronial dinner at the upscale steakhouse. (All of them and nine of their golfing buddies from the Yellowstone Club could survive a week on one slice of Manny’s cheesecake, which can be ordered from the W Living Room, delivered by hand cart with pneumatic lift.)

Nothing about the Foshay restoration is second-rate. From every angle on every floor the implicit message is, “The original designers never imagined the place would look this good.” It is, however, not a large building in terms of square footage per floor. Our room layout (car to room time was 13 minutes, by the way), again with a king bed, 20 stories up, was an efficient use of space, complete with a handsome frosted glass shower stall (but no tub) and a view from the “facilities” overlooking the giant TCF clock. Room sizes here vary immensely, due to the building’s ever-narrowing floor plates.

As at Aloft, Mrs. Lambert was not happy that the room offered no space to sit—in a comfortable chair—and read. Enjoying a novel in the swivel chair at the desk area is a little too, well, officey.

Also, the W may be pushing its play on all things “W” a bit further than a discerning, sophisticated clientele might tolerate. At some point after the fourth or fifth “What is your wish?” greeting from the hotel operator (my “wish” was an HD channel for a football game, which I never found) and various in-room tsotchkes toying with “whatever,” “wonderlust,” “whenever,” and so on, I was ready to scream, “Where in the world is that wily wacky wabbit?” I mean, weally.