My wife and I just stayed at the Cheshire to celebrate our wedding, and I cannot recommend this hotel to anyone.
When we made our reservations, we requested one of the King Suites and the Romance Package. We arrived at the hotel directly from our reception, I still in my tux, she still in her gown. As I have noticed to be common in weddings I have attended, neither of us, as bride and groom, had actually gotten much to eat at the reception, as our time was spent greeting and meeting with our guests. So we rushed up to our room to change.
We were very disappointed to discover that rather than a king suite, we'd been given a double queen room. The "romance package" was a bottle of champagne in ice. While I realize that I could have, and in hindsight perhaps should have, gone to the desk and complained, my wife and I were both tired and too happy to strike up an argument with anyone. Instead, we decided that a queen bed would work well enough, and we'd utilize the other bed for her dress.
We then proceeded downstairs to the much touted Fox & Hound Tavern, which was largely empty. We seated ourselves after noting no hostess. After waiting, seated, for several minutes without being approached by any wait staff, I went to the nearby front desk and double checked that we were to seat ourselves, and that we could expect service. I was reassured by the desk staff that I was, indeed, correct, and that a waitress or waiter should be along any minute to serve us. I returned to our table, found my wife still unserved. We waited another five minutes, enjoying one another's conversation, and finally I went to the bar and ordered us drinks.
The bartender was surly (especially after I declined to start a tab, opting instead to pay in cash, and despite tipping generously), but competent. My wife and I tried moving from the fireside seating to a table located adjacent to the isle between the bar and exit, hoping that this might increase our visibility (though we'd been centrally located prior). Over the next fifteen minutes, we finished our drinks without being served. Over the course of this fifteen minutes, the two waitresses, and the bartender (who seemed to be doubling as a waiter) passed our table numerous times without acknowledging us.
About ten minutes into this fifteen span, one of the waitresses stopped in front of our table, facing away from us, and asked a single man if he had been served. He intoned that he had, and she began to walk away, still directly adjacent to our table. My wife called out that we had not yet been served, the waitress stopped in place at my wife's call, and then continued to walk away without acknowledging us. As previously noted, we then spent the next five minutes finishing our drinks, without receiving any service, at which point we definitively turned our backs on the tavern and left.
After having to drive to the Loop area of University City to find a restaurant that wasn't fast food, we returned to our hotel room and began to discover other eccentricities of the room. The decor was sloppy. Rather than any meaningful, or thought out theme, a series of six irregularly sized diagrams relative to pens and quills had been haphazardly hung on one wall, while a pair of pictures depicting overlarge book spines were crookedly hung on a sidelong wall. While appreciating this attempt at interior decoration, my wife and I both managed to painfully strike our knees on the excessively extended frame of the bed.
We then noticed that the light in the bathroom was on, though we hadn't used the bathroom yet. We entered the bathroom in an attempt to turn the light out and discovered there was no light-switch. Rather, the light was apparently triggered by a motion sensor. The issue with this is that, having failed to completely close the bathroom door, the jet-engine loud air conditioner was breezing the door back and forth slightly, which apparently continuously triggered the motion detector, keeping the light on.
I securely closed the door, and, five minutes later, the light finally turned off. This was substantially less fortunate when I got up at about 4 in the morning to use the restroom (after an evening of wine and champagne), and despite the expediency of my trip, found the light remained on for five minutes after my departure. The flipside of this mechanism reared its head the following morning when I apparently wasn't active enough in the shower, and the light turned itself off, leaving me flailing my arm out the side of the shower to reactivate the thing.
The continental breakfast was bare. The walls of our room were too thin. When our next door neighbors began to hold an indoor church service, complete with evangelical prayer and singing, we heard every word of it. I would be more specific on these points, but I'm nearly out of characters.
The room was below average, the service was awful, the price twice what it should be. No peace, no quiet. read more