If three makes a trend, then Peruvian cuisine is definitely becoming trendy. I’ve seen three articles on Peruvian food in the major media lately, including this piece from Reuters: Peru Lures Culinary Tourists.

You didn’t used to hear much about Peruvian food unless it was something about the nasty things they eat there, including the cuy guinea pigs. Most people who visit are pleasantly surprised at meal time, however, with more complexity and variety than expected. Who thought alpaca could be so tasty?
It used to be pretty tough to find a Peruvian restaurant outside Peru too, but that’s changing. More are popping up around the U.S. and one of Miami’s highest-rated restaurants in Zagat is Francesco, in Coral Gables.

Just when you start thinking there must surely be a limit to how much money the super-rich have to burn, a story comes along to show us differently. Apparently the world’s largest jet will not go into commercial use, but is being bought by an unnamed Middle Eastern head of state. For $300 million. That doesn’t even include the interior, which will cost an estimated $100 million to $150 million more. Here’s the article, One “World’s Biggest Jet” Please.
Just for comparison, the total tab is higher than any yacht ever built and over three times the price of any house on the market anywhere in the world. Oh, but they are figuring out how to include a screening room and a whirlpool tub at least.

Just one little hitch: the thing is too big to land at anything less than a major airport. So they can forget the private airstrips and high-end ski resort towns.

Two investment companies controlled by some of the planet’s richest guys are buying the world’s top luxury hotel chain. Somehow it all seems appropriate since the buyout numbers bandied around are between three and four billion. The Gates here is Microsoft’s Bill Gates and the Bin Talal is a Saudi Prince. As this Bloomburg article states, ” Alwaleed is bidding through Kingdom Hotels International, and Gates will purchase his stake through Cascade Investment LLC.”

So the guy who makes you curse at your computer and one of the people who sometimes makes you curse at your gas pump will own the hotel chain that’s supposed to take all your cares away. Let’s hope it’s a “hands off” ownership arrangement (especially considering a Saudi woman can’t drive to a hotel on her own, much less stay at one by herself.)

One item buried in much of the coverage was this tasty morsel: “Isadore Sharp, Four Seasons’ CEO, will receive $289 million as part of the transaction.” Is that a payoff or what? Isadore Sharp, pictured here, is the founder of the company though, so it’s not quite as obscene as it sounds–he’s been working on this since 1961.

On this site we try to bring attention to the superlative experiences and hotels. We use the word luxury in its true sense, but admit that it’s an easy word to abuse.

A car review article in the Wall Street Journal this past Friday summed it up well.

“Does ‘luxury’ mean anything anymore? Overused by marketers of virtually every sort of consumer product, the term has been so abused by automakers lately that legendary General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan must be turning in his grave.”

Incidentally, the car being called a “luxury vehicle” was a ho-hum, gas-guzzling monster known as the Chrysler Aspen. It comes with sloppy steering and gas mileage that the reviewer found to be less than 13 miles per gallon. If we’re going to contribute that heavily to global warming, let’s at least do it behind the wheel of something special. Like a Rolls-Royce limo.

Concierge.com has posted the results of Conde Nast Traveler’s Top-100 hotels online. These are the 100 hotels that garnered the best scores overall in their annual reader’s poll. I’m quite skeptical of these polls as they tend to favor hotels that have been covered a lot by the media, including a few that are so remote and small that there’s no way any large number of subscribers has visited them. Plus you see hotels that are obviously favored by business travelers but aren’t really all that special, such as the J.W. Marriott in Cancun.

Nevertheless, it’s always good fun to see which places show up on there. There are more from Latin America each year, which is confirmation that standards are rising all the time there. Some of these we have not posted as I write this, but we will be getting to all of them soon.

La Casa Que Canta, Zihuatanejo, Mexico
Royal Hideaway Playacar, Riviera Maya, Mexico

Hotel Monasterio, Cusco, Peru

JW Marriott, Mexico City

Four Seasons, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Swissotel, Quito, Ecuador