| Traveler Edge | Roanoke |
| Roanoke, Virginia | |||||||||
| Visits : | |||||||||
| Virginia Home | |||||||||
| Hotel Roanoke (Click for enlarged view 104K) | |||||||||
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Roanoke is the biggest city nearby the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is very close to the parkway entrance
so people don't need to suffer from too much wasted driving. There are a lot of nice hotels and
restaurants in the city to choose from. In our travel style we prefer to spend the night at a somewhat
upper-class hotel and have a nice dinner after a whole day spend on the wilderness. Therefore
we always stay in Roanoke for the night when we visit Blue Ridge Parkweay.
Hotel Roanoke itself is a historic building. It is also the biggest hotel in town. I particularly appreciate the castle-like exterior of the hotel. Beside, the cost here is relatively inexpensive if you have ever lived in New York. | |||||||||
| Hotel Roanoke at night (Click for enlarged view 84K) | |||||||||
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| Jazz Trio at Hotel's dining room | |||||||||
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The dining room featured live Jazz trio. The ambience of light, atmosphere as well as the music
made it a very comfortable environment.
We like this restaurant and always have dinner here whenever we visit Roanoke. However, the food that night (our late October 2004 visit) fell far behind their usual standard. We had a very very nice crab soup before our entrees were served. However, the steaks we ordered were far from satisfactory. Two of the thinner cuts were already cool when they reached our table, probably due to the waiting for the thicker cut to be ready. The other problem was that all three steaks were overdone. We ordered medium rare but got something between medium and well-done. The third problem was that the steaks were pan-seared, not charcoal grilled. Well, pan-seared was not really a problem, it was just more difficult to make steak delicious especially without sauce. The steaks usually turns fatty and oilly as the temperature drops. That was exactly what happened that night. We told our waitress honestly how we felt about the dinner. The way they handled it turned our bad experience around. They apologied and waived the cost for the two cool steaks from our check. It made us feel that they were willing to agree the mistakes they made and cared about their customers' dining experience. | |||||||||
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| We were too exhausted after dinner so we went to bed early. The next morning we took some pictures around the hotel then we headed Blue Ridge Parkway to continue our journey. | |||||||||