Shangri La at the Fort is a brand new hotel at Fort Bonifacio. At 66 storey high. It is probably the tallest completed building here. Its construction started in 2009, and it is now in soft opening.
In fact, today is the first day that it serves lunch. The only restaurant opened there that serves lunch is High Street Cafe at the ground floor. We ran into their Front Desk Manager Mr. Raymond Villanueva, who kindly gave us a tour of the lobby cafe as well as High Street Cafe. You can see him in the Youtube video at the end of this article.
You can see the lobby cafe in the photo above. Below is a photo of the hotel lobby.
The High Street Cafe is the main cafe of the hotel. It has nine stations, serving different cuisines, such as Japanese, Chinese, salad, seafood, meat and so on. The buffet costs around P1,500++ per head. Dishes are cooked as ordered. This price is comparable to the premium buffet restaurant, Niu by Vikings, at a nearby mall, SM Aura Premier.
Alternatively, guests can order ala carte, and they have a small menu for that, serving mainly south east Asian dishes such as fried noodle (mie goreng), spicy noodle soup (laksa) and roasted chicken. You can see the ala carte menu below.
The drinks menu has wide choices. The new in-thing is mixing tea with alcohol, it seems.
Since we were not in the mood to eat a lot, we ordered ala carte. Pictures below show Char Kway Teo (P580), which is fried flat rice noodle with sliced Chinese sausage and egg, mie goreng (P580), and seafood pot (P725). They all met Shangri-la cafe food standard, which is quite decent.
The nine food counters are spread out in different parts of the restaurant.
For a closer look at the High Street Cafe, watch the video below. In the restaurant, we also had our first experience in signing a ‘Food and Beverage Waiver Form’ for the food that we wanted to take out, so that the restaurant would be relieved of its responsibility of you got sick from eating the left over.
Below is photo of the waiver form.
Hotel rooms
At the end of the video, you can also see the layout of a standard hotel room. It is quite spacious, at around 40 square meters. Currently, the promo rate is P9,800++ per night, as against over P11,000. It is probably too small a discount, considering most of the facilities are not ready, and the windows are not clean. But if you reserve a room now for next month, you can still get the promo rate, and the facilities may be more complete.
Soft opening
The hotel is still in soft opening, and many facilities are not yet ready, such as its swimming pools and the other restaurants. But judging from Shangri-la hotel’s performance in other branches, we are sure that in due course, everything will be working splendidly.
In the low block, where the Kerry’s Sports Center and function rooms are housed, there are also shop spaces. Although only three shops are open so far, two of them are quite unique and worth a look.
