How Much Is The Christmas Brunch At Garden Court Hotel Palo Alto

In this week's "Get a Room," a sporadic roundup of accommodations news, trends and oddball items of interest, we're welcoming the triumphant return of a delightful, if a bit affected, holiday tradition: the hotel-hosted holiday high tea. We're also celebrating an underdog hotel distinguishing itself on the climate change front. And we're noting that Bay Area luxury hotel openings seem to be plowing ahead as planned, pandemic be damned.

The Fairmont Hotel, a luxury hotel building in the Beaux-Arts style, San Francisco, 1920.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Not being British, the idea of high tea is as much novelty as comfort or sustenance. It follows, then, that the winter holidays make for a particularly delightful time to disregard Ted Lasso's dismissal of tea as "garbage water" and splurge on an elegant afternoon tradition. Bay Area hotels have begun announcing their dates, prices and menus — which vary considerably — and opening up their reservation calendars. Traditionally a late afternoon or early evening meal accompanied by tea, the Americanized version of these affairs may not meet the queen's exacting standards, but they're awfully fun.

The Fairmont San Francisco is perhaps the most tradition-steeped of the bunch, having hosted their seasonal annual event in the hotel's grand Laurel Court since 1907. The Fairmont's holiday tea — which runs from Nov. 26, 2021 to Jan. 2, 2022 — is served "with all the polished silver, fine china and Victorian accouterments" and requires reservations for the twice-daily seatings. The menu, which includes "house-made scones, tea sandwiches on artisan bread, luscious fruit-topped pastries and French sweets" and "requisite sides" (lemon curd, Devonshire cream and fruit compote) for an eye-popping $149 per adult and $89 per child, 12 and under.

Guests approach the entrance to the iconic Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, Dec. 25, 2018.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Up north in Sonoma, Hotel Healdsburg is offering holiday tea ($55 for adults, $25 for kids under 12) on Saturdays and Sundays from Dec. 4 through 19. The hotel's Dry Creek Kitchen provides the "dainty finger sandwiches" and house-baked pastries (plus wine or classic cocktails for an additional $14) amidst the live piano and festive decorations. This would make a great day trip when paired with a trip to "Snoopy's Home Ice" (aka Redwood Empire Ice Arena) and the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Budget-friendly Comfort Inn becomes San Francisco's first zero carbon hotel

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference underway in Glasgow, there's much talk this week about the grave threat of carbon in the atmosphere. While it's doubtful anyone thinks that one hotel in San Francisco can make a dent in the problem, the Comfort Inn by the Bay — part of the budget-friendly Choice Hotels chain, is laying down a challenge to higher end boutique hotels that claim to be green while having a massive carbon footprint.

"We believe we are the first hotel in San Francisco to be zero carbon and one of the first if not the first in the country," said owner Brian Bainum in an email to SFGATE.

The Russian Hill hotel, which has rooms starting in the low hundreds, has joined with the Chicago-based carbon offset organization Tradewater to offset "100% of the emissions of our hotel - including employee commuting, procurement, and utilities/energy consumption," Bainum said. Guests are encouraged to use Tradewater's "Travel Carbon Calculator" to voluntarily offset the carbon costs of their own trip and help the hotel meet its "net zero" goals.

Big hotel openings around the bay

The pool at the newly opened Four Seasons Napa Valley.
Courtesy Four Seasons Resort and Residences Napa Valley

The Bay Area just got three new luxury hotels, including Napa Valley's first Four Seasons, which opened Nov. 1 on the north side of Calistoga. Aside from its jaw-dropping room rates (starting at $1,200, $2,500 for a suite), the new 85-room hotel is notable for being the only resort in the valley located on a working winery, Elusa Winery. While the decor is described as "farmhouse-style," there's nothing modest about Four Seasons Napa Valley, which has brought in a Michelin-starred chef to run its restaurant, Truss, who has aspirations to serve caviar at every meal.

All of this seems awfully fancy indeed, but the most appealing thing about the hotel may be what it doesn't do: force guests to drive all over the traffic-choked valley in search of food and wine tastings. "Usually when you come to Napa you stay in a hotel but everything you do, you have to be in a car," the hotel's general manager, Mehdi Eftekari, told Robb Report. "Here it's all encompassing."

Calistoga's new Four Seasons is the first Napa resort to on a working winery.
Courtesy Four Seasons Resort and Residences Napa Valley

Not far away, in another corner of wine country, the Stavrand Russian River Valley opened in October on an orchard near Guerneville, which was once the Applewood Inn. The 6-acre property has fruit trees — plum, apricots, figs, quince, apple and pear — planted in the 1920s and is surrounded by redwoods. With only 21 rooms, owner Emily Glick, who was previously the longtime manager of the San Francisco's Kimpton Buchanan hotel, describes the hotel and its staff as "small but mighty."

The Stavrand property, formerly the Applegate Inn, dates nearly 100 years in the Russian River Valley.
Emma Morris

Last year, when the pandemic shuttered the Buchanan (which remains closed), Glick raised money from friends and family to buy the defunct Applewood and renovate the property's historic Mediterranean Revival structures. Rooms start at a startlingly reasonable — by Bay Area standards — $235 per night.

A room at the newly opened Russian River Valley hotel The Stavrand.
Emma Morris

Down on the Peninsula in Palo Alto, the 35-year-old Garden Court Hotel got a luxury facelift and is now the "Spanish-inspired" el Prado Hotel. The former incarnation of the hotel as a place "known as much for hosting visiting dignitaries as for opening its doors to local nonprofits and community organizations" was eulogized in a Palo Alto Weekly story, which called its closure (ahem, "rebranding") the end of an era. But the hotel's renovation hasn't been a total transformation. Much of the 62-room hotel remains unchanged even as its interior design becomes more explicitly referential of a "stately Spanish home" with neutral hues accented with "the flor do toxo of Spanish hillsides" and "rich black forest greens, stone blues, touches of terracotta orange." The hotel's second-story tapas bar is "coming soon." Rooms start at $329.