Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Business trends

Table hopping

Text Boyd Farrow

Business breakfast

Budapest You don’t have to stay at the Four Seasons Gresham Palace (tel. , fourseasons.com) to schedule a breakfast meeting at the terrific Gresham Kavehaz eatery. With its magnificently restored interior and a great buzz, this is the perfect place to power-eat blintzes with clients or sneak back later with a newspaper to enjoy pastries or anything else on the allday menu. It is a jacket-and-tie kind of a place, though, and reservations are recommended, even for breakfast.

Business lunch

Rome With numbers of tourists thinning in the Eternal City, now is the time to head for Gusto (Piazza Augusto Imperatore, tel. ), a modern complex – all exposed brick, wooden floors, marble tables and industrial lighting – which has a restaurant (featuring 1,200 wine labels) and pizzeria. Not only is this perfect for combining a business lunch with sampling the best local produce, Gusto has shops selling wine, cheese, sweets, traditional kitchen gadgets and cookery books to solve those troublesome gift dilemmas. Arrive early to grab an outdoor table opposite the Mausoleum of Augustus and work becomes a holiday. Oh, this might enhance or ruin the whole experience but it also serves Japanese food.

Business dinner

Stockholm Now that the early rush has died down, it might be worth trying to book a table at The Restaurant Mathias Dahlgren at The Grand Hôtel, Stockholm (tel. ). Aided by the flair of British designer Ilse Crawford, the big-ticket chef (who co-owns the restaurant with the hotel) is aiming to creating “a new Swedish identity”. A different menu is presented each day and the restaurant is split into a 37-seater à la carte dining room and a 50-seater informal brasserie. Unless Dahlgren has also managed to create a new Swedish currency, this might be the place to visit only when you are armed with company plastic.

Between meetings in… Frankfurt

It isn’t just Berlin and Munich that are laden with gärten. If you have an hour free in Frankfurt, you could do worse than clear your head in the Palmengarten (61 Siesmayerstrasse, palmengarten-frankfurt.de), a 50-acre oasis in the Westend neighbourhood. The stunning array of tropical plants and beautiful greenhouses might even distract you from the park’s Café Siesmayer, which serves German banker-sized cake portions. The park opens at 9am and until 1 October it stays open until 6pm. Entrance costs €5. Entrance Palmengartenstrasse: trains U6, U7 or buses 32, 33, 50 to Station Bockenheimer Warte.

Hide and chic

Aristocratic furniture maker David Linley is poised to move into accessories, zeroing in on the corporate gift market. Hunting flasks and candlesticks might raise eyebrows (if not alarms) at airport check-ins, but the glossy leather business card holders, available in black or red for €120, might be something you want to carry. Meanwhile, Smythson celebrates 100 years of its Featherweight Panama diary in 2008 and is starting to take orders for individual company specifications with personalised title pages and leather covers coloured to match corporate identity. www.davidlinley.com, www.smythson.com

Carlton muscles into Brussels

Carlton Hotel Collection, whose portfolio boasts The George in Glasgow and the business travellers’ favourite Banks Mansion in Amsterdam, will open its first Brussels hotel on 1 November.

The long-planned Dominican, centrally sited just behind Grand’Place, will have 150 guest rooms and suites laid out around a central courtyard. There will be three business salons, in-room internet and entertainment package, and a gym. The hotel will not be adopting Banks Mansion’s all-inclusive drinks and snacks policy but – don’t sweat – it will have a ‘Grand Lounge’ serving food all day. If you must sweat, there is a sauna and steam room. Rue Léopold/Leopoldstraat 9, tel. 

A good night’s sleep in…

Monaco

With more corporate events and conventions being held in Monaco, it is good news indeed that the Fairmont Monte Carlo (tel. , www.fairmont.com) has finally unveiled its 18-month, €42m refurbishment. The landmark hotel is now all glass, walls of water and internal suspension bridges as it has giddily thrown itself into a nautical theme.

While going for ‘boutique’ touches, such as individual registration desks, the hotel is one of the largest in Europe (with 619 rooms and suites) and offers all the big-hotel benefits of the Fairmont chain. All rooms feature a desk, two telephone lines with voicemail, modem and interactive television with integrated internet system. The new lobby bar and Argentine-themed restaurant are open; the rooftop pool and fitness centre are still being tinkered with.

Mypod Generation

Although the concept has been talked about since The Ark, delayed or budget-conscious European business travellers are finally being offered the chance to stay at capsule hotels. Yotel, which launched inside the UK’s Gatwick airport this summer, will open at the UK’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and Frankfurt Airport before the year-end. Qbic, the ultra-stylish Dutch outfit is primed to follow its just-opened hotel inside Amsterdam’s World Trade Centre with launches in Maastricht and Antwerp, ahead of a bigger European rollout. And easyHotel, which has three London hotels and one in Basel, aims to open in Budapest and Zurich in the next couple of months. yotel.com, www.qbichotels.com, www.easyhotel.com

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