What's New in San Francisco Area Hotels

San Francisco hotels have been popular with travelers since frontier days, but the rough and ready hostelries of 150 years ago didn't offer crushed Zinfandel body polish, restaurant dishes of baby calamari, poached egg and pancetta dusted with parmesan cheese, bedside iPod docking stations or kiosks for printing airline boarding passes.

But today, high-end San Francisco area hotels are rolling out such luxurious -- and sometimes quirky -- amenities, even in a dodgy economy.

The baby calamari and poached egg are featured on the dinner menu at Luce, a showcase Californian-Italian restaurant in the newly opened InterContinental San Francisco, the first major, built-from-scratch hotel in the city in five years.

InterContinental Hotel Group opened the distinctive hotel in May in the trendy South of Market area, which has stolen some thunder from Nob Hill and Union Square, San Francisco's traditional destinations for retail therapy and elegant living.

Towering 32 stories and clad in a distinctive blue-glass skin, the 550-room InterContinental caters to business travelers and convention-goers at the next-door Moscone Center. But it is no no-frills business hotel; rather, it flaunts the luxuries of a high-end leisure hotel, among them the locally sourced, seasonally attuned cuisine of Luce's chef, Dominique Crenn.

The InterContinental, sister of Nob Hill favorite the Mark Hopkins Hotel, also pampers guests with its I-Spa. Nicely aromatic, softly lit, serenaded with New Agey space music and with a warren of treatment rooms, the I-spa offers treatments such as an 80-minute Swedish massage ($170) that my spa-loving wife pronounced excellent and a 20-minute hand and foot paraffin treatment ($65).