Harbin’s Hotel Moderne Examined
Posted: July 20th, 2012 | 1 Comment »I first noted Harbin’s terrific Hotel Moderne back in 2008 (here) and remain a fan of that building though wouldn’t recommend it as a hotel to anyone (except those who like to try and channel old White Russians like me). I note that there is an essay online in the East Asian History journal all about the Hotel Moderne by Mark Gamsa of Tel Aviv University. Well worth a read – here’s a pic of the hotel today and yesterday:
Staying in that hotel in 1982, I had to deal with a Baltimore Sun deadline (as I did every seven weeks) for a food story. I had the flu and could barely move, much less dine. I interviewed the chef, who kindly gave me three recipes for moose nose. Each began with removing the hairs from the nose. I wrote them up for the housewives of Maryland, and the food section published the story unchanged as was its custom. It was my final food story before my Asia tour ended. A good thing, too, since I had long grown jaded with the task and taken to writing odder and odder pieces (snake and cat in Guangzhou, for example). When I returned to Baltimore I looked around the newsroom but didn’t see the food editor, Martha Schoepps, who had given me the original food-stories assignment five years earlier. “Oh, Martha died years ago,” someone explained. “You didn’t know?”