IT would be going too far to say that the motion of La Ronda, the revolving restaurant on the 34th floor of the Furama Hotel, leaves you feeling a little sick. But it is disconcerting. It confuses the inner ear and where the inner ear goes the brain follows.
This means you cannot immediately locate your table again after helping yourself to some buffet. Two or three times I found myself gawping around the restaurant, looking for a familiar landmark that would help me navigate my way back to my wife. But La Ronda is a sea of tables, all the same, and a sea of faces. It is one of those medieval-looking paintings with steps that lead up and up, but which always take you back to where you began.
La Ronda does not look like a glitzy Hong Kong hotel restaurant, all shining marble and jazz piano. It is reminiscent of a radio tower I once had the fortune to visit in communist Bulgaria. I mean that in the nicest possible way. It has the feel of an institution (not the mental kind), with thick carpeting, shining chrome banisters and a ceiling that plays host to a thousand and one bare light bulbs.
The house quartet, two violins, a piano and percussion, adds to the unsettling feeling that you have wandered into a black hole and emerged in Vladivostok or Ljubljana. They play Slavonic dances and are rather good, although no-one seems to notice. The quartet does not revolve, but remains stationary on a small stage while you revolve around them.
Which brings me indirectly to the greatest labour about dining at La Ronda. The toilets are a long way away. They are a floor above the restaurant up a wide staircase. This can prove a real inconvenience for habitual peers.
No-one pays much attention to the quartet because everyone is doing what Hong Kongers do best. La Ronda is busier than Repulse Bay beach on a bank holiday Sunday, or so it was the night we were there. Tables are not easy to get hold of. We did not book, but turned up at 7pm and were told that there would be nothing available until 8.30pm. The hostess, decked out in a cheongsam like the girls at upmarket fish restaurants, took our name and we retired to the Lobby Bar on the first floor, where we spent a pleasant hour drinking Mexican beer and chomping free peanuts.
