Mandarin Oriental

Mandarin Oriental answers a small question with far more than you asked for. Before we left Hong Kong for Thailand I asked the concierge at the Landmark where to buy sandals. Within the hour a big red envelope came under our door: every shop that sold them, a detailed map, and they’d already phoned ahead to check my size. Amber, downstairs, held two Michelin stars when we stayed in 2016 — we couldn’t get a dinner table, so we went at 7 a.m. before our flight and ordered an egg white omelet. The server arrived in white gloves with a black truffle the size of a baseball and shaved it in.

Bangkok is the one everyone local still calls “the Oriental” — a hundred years old on the Chao Phraya, with fax machines still in some of the suites. Dinner at its Thai restaurant is across the water, so you dress up and take a one-minute private boat ride to the door. Singapore hides itself the other way round: a flat, unremarkable facade from the driveway, and inside a building that turns out to be hollow twenty floors up. All 527 rooms are named for what they overlook. We took the Marina, and liked Cherry Garden’s Cantonese enough to order it to the room the next night and eat it in bathrobes.

Kuala Lumpur is next door to the Petronas Towers, and when the heat drives you back inside there’s an indoor golf range with real clubs and 48 of the world’s courses on screen. The bar makes a Thai-jito worth ordering twice,. Miami sits on a man-made island in Brickell with the only private beach in the city — Gastón Acurio designed the menu at La Mar downstairs, so order more ceviche than you think you need.