Full of promise - but it quickly turns to dust
The location, next to the opera house was why we chose it. Our arrival was normal, the valet parking and front desk were fine and the bags came quickly. The lobby or reception area was a good old-fashioned one, very pleasant, but it went rapidly downhill from there. The room was like a shoebox, but we were there just one night so no big problem. We could not get the TV (an old fashioned CRT set) to work at all, but there was a good radio. The street noise was a problem, with trams and seemingly every fire engine in San Jose going by. The sound insulation was very poor indeed and if we opened the bathroom door it crashed onto the toilet bowl and to reach round to get at the toilet paper you bang your arm on the holder - great design, the safe was too high for either of us to see into, but the Internet worked fine.
The restaurant is a pretentious Italian one (Il Fornaio). Looking in, we did not like their presentation so had dinner elsewhere - were we wise?
Breakfast was something else! The girl on the restaurant desk was absent for 20 minutes and nobody else was in charge of ingoring us, so we waited - and waited and waited. Once we got a table, the orange juice had run out, so we had apple. The coffee reminded me of the old joke "This coffee taste like mud" - 'Yes Sir, it was ground this morning'. It was truly dreadful. When it arrived the 'waiter' had slopped it into the tray and simply wiped the cup bottom and put it back in the saucer still coffee covered. The Uova alla Benedetina (sort of Eggs Benedict) was covered with a strange white goo. I could not determine what it was, but the taste was not good. My wife ordered fruit and toast, the fruit was fine, but the toast arrived with no butter and no marmalade - just dry toast. The waiters were surly, untidy and had poor English. There are 20 million unemployed in California can the hotel not find better staff?? The penny tip I left was too much!
Taken overall, we cannot see how anyone civilised could give it a good review, the many things wrong were not things that change from night to night - perhaps Americans are overawed with the grand setting - who knows? All in all, it was the worst hotel in our four weeks in California.
PS. The opera 'Faust' was quite as good as any second tier European city such as Toulouse, Dresden or Birmingham.