FALL TRAVEL ISSUE: SEEKING PERFECTION
 

The Grand Obsession
What makes a room worth $425 a night and up? At Chicago's top hotels it's the details-and the people-behind the scenes.

By Toni Stroud
Published September 26, 2004

It's close to midnight, and septuagenarian Dorothy Raybon sits in a worn office chair in a gray stairwell at 160 E. Pearson St., readjusting the once-white bath towel on her lap. She pulls the tools of her trade from a black wooden box: an old toothbrush, Kiwi polish in black and neutral and a washcloth. One by one, she cradles the shoes in her lap and buffs them by hand because, she says, the machines downstairs just don't do a good enough job to suit her.

On an average night, Raybon, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of five, will hand-polish and tissue-wrap up to 80 pairs of shoes during her 11-to-7 overnight shift at the Ritz-Carlton Chicago. In the process she keeps the luster on something far more precious: her employer's standing as one of Chicago's, indeed one of the world's, most luxurious hotels. She has been with the Ritz for 24 years, shining shoes every night for the past 17.

A hotel is more than just a room for the night. Whether it's the Motel 6 in Meridian, Miss., or the George V in Paris, a hotel is also the facilities, the services and the staff behind the room. In the hotel business, that support system is called the back of the house.

At a luxury property, it's a mesmerizing, closely guarded, larger-than-life city within a city-a world of gargantuan appliances and elfin supplies, technological wizardry and hand-scrawled check lists, constant quality inspections, 'round-the-clock briefings, ever more training sessions, insider jargon, details, details, details and people, people, people.

At Chicago's three highest-rated hotels, the back of the house sees to it that the most exacting expectations are met. It's the fairy godmother to Cinderella's ball, the genie of Aladdin's lamp, the ultimate 24/7.

Ordinarily, the door to the back of the house is closed to guests. The welcome mat is out front. But with a graciousness befitting their reputations for accommodating requests, the 435-room Ritz-Carlton (built in 1975 and managed by Four Seasons since 1977), the 343-room Four Seasons (opened in 1989) and the 339-room Peninsula (completed in 2001) allowed a recent peek into their remarkable inner workings.

IT'S PAST 6:30 in the morning, and Colette Clancy of the Flower Firm is shopping at one of Chicago's wholesale flower markets, choosing blooms at their peak from around the world. She estimates that she spends 15 to 20 hours a week buying flowers just for the Four Seasons, a client since 1996. Most of the Four Seasons' arrangements will be designed at the Flower Firm's studio, then photographed so that they can be installed in the hotel as designed.

Her first team of three or four assistants arrives in the hotel about 8:30 a.m. and works until noon. A second team drops by in the afternoon to check water, pull fading foliage or rotate the displays from one part of the hotel to another. She describes the floral arrangements as "destinations within the hotel," and says she enjoys watching people admire and comment on them.

Hans Willimann, general manager of the Four Seasons, likens the hotel's flowers to great theater, seeing them as opportunities to draw people closer together. In an architectural environment, he says, "flowers equal warmth, life, reality." And although the Four Seasons' annual flower budget runs to $200,000, Willimann says that's a modest sum compared to what some hotels allot. "The George V in Paris spends $850,000 on flowers," he says.

Luxury hotels are renowned for their abundance, even their overabundance, of plush facilities and creature comforts. The Peninsula's indoor swimming pool comes with a floor-to-ceiling view of Chicago's skyline. Its guest bathrooms are fitted with remote-control TVs built into the bathtub wall. At the Four Seasons, the humidor in the Seasons Bar is stocked with some 200 cigars, and loyal patrons have their own private cigar lockers. Its guest beds are topped by pillows stuffed exclusively with down from Pyrenees Mountains geese.

Any hotel can lay marble floors and hang chandeliers, and fine decor is a matter of taste, says Peter Roth, resident manager of the Ritz-Carlton. What sets the true luxury hotels apart from merely upscale ones is their level of service-all three hotels have a staff-to-room ratio of at least 1.5-and the quality of the staff who provide it.

"It's people who have an attitude and passion for service," says Roth, who manages-depending on season and amount of banquet business-about 650 employees. Larry Riordan, human resources director at the Peninsula (505 employes), and Lisa Gutierrez, who holds the same position at the Four Seasons (600 employes), couldn't agree more. All three hotels conduct four or five of what they call behavior-based interviews before hiring anyone. They follow that up with multi-day orientations and ongoing employee-development sessions taught by experts in their field. And when they have a job opening, they're not necessarily looking for hotel experience.

Anyone can learn the proper way to make a bed or pour a drink, says Roth. "But attitude, you can't teach it."

IT'S 9 A.M., and the Ritz-Carlton's department managers are seated at a circle of tables in the employee cafeteria. They're going over the day's SAG (special attention guest) report, which lists the requests, preferences and stay-histories of the day's check-ins who require certain extras. The executive who's assigned to Room 2605 doesn't want a private bar key. The former chairman of a manufacturing company who has 285 stays under his belt wants Bombay Gin-regular, not Sapphire-and lots of olives waiting in his room, along with two limes and two lemons cut into quarters, large ashtrays and small fruit.

This is the sort of personalized-service information disseminated to front-line employees over three shifts, throughout the back of the house, lest any request slip through the cracks.

At the Peninsula, it is noted on a dry-erase board that Axle the dog expects scrambled egg whites with onions upon arrival. Datrice Vanzant, a housekeeping assistant, remembers the time that one guest requested Frette linens for a baby crib. The hotel didn't have them on hand, so she went shopping and returned with $500 worth of the Italian sheets. The guest's expectations were met, and the Peninsula now counts a set of Frette crib sheets in its inventory.

IT'S PUSHING 10 A.M., and Earline Clayborne and Regina Murphy are in the Ritz-Carlton's laundry room, feeding clean sheets into a machine that will press and fold, assembly-line style, between 400 and 600 sheets a day. Another machine folds just towels.

Clean laundry is returned to housekeeping, as it would in any hotel. But housekeeping at the luxury level is a vastly more ambitious undertaking than making beds, changing towels and rinsing out the tub. If the restaurant needs a light bulb or a guest forgets a toothbrush, a housekeeping coordinator will receive the call and dispatch a "houseman" to deliver the item within five minutes.

Those calls might also come from the housekeepers themselves, who in addition to general cleaning must stock the rooms with specified counts of everything from stationery to cotton balls. And they also must make sure their rooms meet a list of other particulars. Among some 200 requirements on the Ritz-Carlton's checklist: The door to the bathroom must be left 9 inches ajar, and the desk chair must be positioned with its far corner tucked under the desk and near corner "open" to the guest.

Pet-designated rooms get a special going-over when animals check out. At the Four Seasons, that means they pull the furniture away from the walls and deep vacuum behind, followed by a heavy shampooing, says assistant executive housekeeper Chris Dove.

"We want people to feel like they're the first person to stay in the room," says Bill Taylor, general manager of the Ritz-Carlton. "If a guest points out the flaws, we've failed." So four times a year, painter Steven Tepich, furniture refinisher Peter Schuller and carpenter Bob Pauscher-all on staff-go over each room, repainting, touching up the furniture, vacuuming vents, even going so far as to make sure the grooves of the screws in the switchplates are all in vertical alignment.

IT'S 11:30 A.M., and Four Seasons receiving clerk Willie Mack is inspecting a shipment of fruit. On an average day, he'll OK $3,000 to $5,000 worth of produce, mostly from California. Today he's rejecting the apricots, he says, because they're too soft and mealy. Satisfied with the rest of the fruit shipment, he turns his attention to boxes just delivered by Wabash Seafood Co. He checks a roast-sized cut of tuna for firmness and the gills of whole fish to make sure they're fresh. In another box, all lobsters are alive and squirming. Today's seafood bill comes to $1,300.

All of this food is headed to the maze-like kitchen, divided into various preparation areas, that cooks for room service and four restaurants, including the famed Seasons. On an average night, the kitchen will serve 225 dinners, says Four Seasons executive chef Robert Sulatycky, and as many as 700 on special occasions like Valentine's Day. His kitchen is one of the few places where the public is allowed behind the scenes when they reserve dinner at the Chef's Table.

Executive steward Ricardo Barajas estimates that the Four Seasons has some 11,000 dishes for banquets alone, and perhaps another 20,000 pieces for the restaurants and room service. On the stock shelves, Bugs Bunny dishes are scattered near what Barajas estimates is $1 million in silver service items, kept under lock and key.

Later in the day at the Peninsula, executive chef Terry Crandall is in his kitchen overseeing a staff of some 70 sous chefs, cooks and stewards, as well as the day-to-day operations of the kitchen behind Shanghai Terrace, The Lobby, The Bar, Pierrot Gourmet, room service and the acclaimed Avenues, not to mention some 15 banquets a day.

His imposing Alto-Shamm oven, about twice the size of the average home refrigerator, can cook by steam, convection or conventional means. Crandall especially likes it for turkeys, which come out moist and brown in only 2 hours, he says, shaving two hours off the time of traditional ovens. Engineers come three times a day, he says, to check the temperatures on a bank of walk-in refrigerators.

In addition to their restaurant kitchens, each hotel has an employee cafeteria. Lesser hotels post their star and diamond ratings out front where the guests can see them. But the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons and the Peninsula hang their awards in the cafeteria, where the staff can see them.

IT'S NOONISH, and Four Seasons cook Lilia Trejo is balancing on a step stool in the uniform room for a fitting. Uniform-room manager Brenda Estes and tailor/seamstress Rosie Blackburn are taking her measurements. Estes has just completed inventory, and she reports that 2,153 uniforms are present and accounted for, three per employee.

At the Ritz-Carlton, tailor Carl Gullens and seamstress Carolyn Holliday say the number of uniforms issued to an employee depends on his or her job. Kitchen staff get the dirtiest and therefore are assigned four sets. Gullens also has a stable of sewing machines-straight stitch, zigzag, blind stitch, plus two for backup, just in case-for hemming pants and making repairs. His department has come to the aid of many a bride whose dress needed last-minute repairs and has loaned suit jackets to desperate executives.

IT'S 1:30 P.M., and Maria Razumich-Zec, general manager of the Peninsula, is striding purposefully toward the elevators with several department heads. They choose a floor and for the next 45 minutes they scour landings, halls and four to six rooms, moving quickly, looking for flaws.

On the landing, Razumich-Zec is first off the elevator and immediately notes that one of three ceiling lights is burned out. The group turns left down a corridor. One of the team finds chipped paint, a spot no bigger than a fingernail. The ceiling light and the paint will be fixed at once. The team enters an executive suite. Room service manager Andrew Langford is part of the group today, and he checks the expiration dates on the stock in the minibar and examines the glassware for water spots. Meanwhile, someone is running their fingers along the tops of picture frames and along the window sills, watching for dust. Another is opening drawers. Razumich-Zec looks under seat cushions and, in the bathroom, makes sure the shower is gleamingly free of soap buildup.

This room is clean. They move on to the next.

At the Four Seasons, lead supervisor Joan Nichol conducts a similar search and finds spots on the curtains and the carpet in one room. She calls Fred Jenkins, who everyone has nicknamed The Spot Man. He arrives in three minutes with stain-removing supplies, and in a matter of seconds the spots are gone.

These quality inspections, and the cleaning that precedes them, are all part of "turning the house," a term hoteliers use to describe all that's involved between last night's checkouts and today's check-ins.

IT'S AFTER 3 P.M., and Arturo Montejo and Rafael Araiza are monitoring computer screens in a lab filled with high-tech equipment at the Peninsula. The two electronics technicians are part of a team that troubleshoots the hotel's signature bedside command centers-from which guests can control TV, radio, lights, temperature, do-not-disturb sign, curtains-and the panels by the door that give temperature and humidity readings. Montejo and Araiza say they usually can fix any problem without having to enter the guest's room.

They also can call up screens that, for instance, tell them which guests have activated do-not-disturb signs. So the system, in a sense, doubles as a security measure.

In hotels that attract the wealthy, the famous and the powerful from around the world, security has to be handled with discretion; that is, without a uniformed "police" presence. High-tech systems go a long way in meeting that need. For instance, Ralph McGinnis, security director for both the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons, says his hotels have digital cameras that can pan, rotate and zoom. But, because of their above-and-beyond service philosophy, luxury hotels already have a de-facto security guard in each of their employees who, because of their attentiveness to guests, often can quickly spot someone who seems out of place.

IT'S 5-ISH in the afternoon, and real-estate developer Miles Berger is settled in for afternoon tea, sitting in a wingback chair beneath the skylight in the Ritz-Carlton's Greenhouse restaurant. He checked into the hotel while his apartment was being renovated. That was maybe six years ago, he says. He liked the lifestyle so well he never left.

"It doesn't matter how goofy you are or how goofy your request is," he says, "they do it and do it with a smile." Berger, himself a former hotelier (the now-closed Mayfair-Regents in Chicago and New York), is amazed that the hotel is so large and yet "succeeds at what is so hard to maintain, that feeling of intimacy." Besides which, they're nice to his dog, and they've never lost a pair of shoes.

"They make you feel like the sultan of Brunei," he concludes, "without all the wives."

Berger isn't the hotel's only permanent guest; there's also Sophia Roth, the 2-year-old daughter of the Ritz-Carlton's resident manager. In her first few weeks in residence here, the Ritz-Carlton's "Eloise" has already made fast friends with some of the staff.

IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT, and the Ritz-Carlton's overnight baker, Pancho Arellano, is taking chilled dough from a tray in the pastry kitchen. He flours the dough, rolls it, then stretches it uniformly along the granite counter. He's been doing this for 20 of his 24 years here, so his hands know from long experience exactly how wide to spread the dough. He reaches for a special rolling pin that cuts the dough into long triangles that he swiftly curls into croissants. He won't put them in the oven until just before the first round of room-service breakfast orders are due to be delivered.

Earlier in the evening, in the kitchen at the Peninsula, Yvette Brown sits in what could be compared to a control booth. Her desk is glassed-in to block out the kitchen noise, the better to hear her guests' room-service orders. On the wall across from her booth are three clocks. One is set at actual time, one is set for cold-dish delivery, and the third is set for hot-dish delivery. These clocks are positioned so that everyone can see them and be sure the meal arrives when promised.

Luxury hotels aren't confined to their own menus. Brown says she has sent runners out to buy a particular brand of cottage cheese, Buffalo wings and Eli's Cheesecake, for example, because that's what the guests craved. "No matter what they ask for," she says, "our answer is always 'Yes we can.' " As soon as the hotel knows who is coming, what their preferences are, they prepare ahead of time. Tonight, in the Peninsula's line of room-service carts that stand ready to roll, is one set with a personalized dog bowl: Axle's name is written right on it.

IT'S AROUND 1:15 A.M., and things are a little slow for Al Pina, overnight chef at the Ritz-Carlton. For 20 years he has been putting the 24 in 24-hour room service. He cooks the guest orders that come in the wee hours and the staff meal that will be served at 2 a.m. After that, he does a lot of preparation work for later in the morning. Other kitchen staff are setting the Ritz-Carlton's lineup of room-service carts with linens, condiments, tableware. At the Four Seasons, they're making similar preparations for what room-service manager Christian Klaus calls "eggs on wheels" because they deliver an average of 220 breakfasts every morning.

In a few hours, the sky will lighten, the sun will rise. And at each of these luxury properties, the night's stay that cost $425 and up will draw to an end. In the back of the house, shifts will change, and the service will go on.

Travel reporter Toni Stroud likes room service, but she draws the line at breakfast in bed. (Additional material by Robert Cross.)

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune