Review: Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town

What a wasted opportunity.

I found myself muttering that over and over as I stared out at the spectacle of Table Mountain, only to turn back toward Mount Nelson and feel like I’d just spotted a turd in the middle of the Sistine Chapel.  Another triumphant reminder that “World’s 50 Best” remains one of hospitality’s greatest works of fiction.  This is Cape Town’s grand dame. But what does that actually mean? I see heritage, sure. But I mostly see a property drowning in averageness, living off past glories like a tramp reeking of piss, fish and desperation, proudly reminding you he “used to be somebody” — and that he’s a good guy because he only occasionally beat his wife and kids.

Getting There

Small mercies: it’s only a 20-minute drive from the airport. On arrival, the security guard couldn’t find our reservation and spent a solid ten minutes faffing around. Every time we would later return, our driver simply said “drop off”, like it’s some secret handshake.  Apparently, that’s all it takes.  Prison Break would have been a really short show in this timeline.

Setting

Mount Nelson sits in a part of Cape Town where, according to the concierge, I was “fine” to walk to the Waterfront and unlikely to be murdered. Their words, not mine. If you attempt the same after reading this and die, please address your complaint to them. I went anyway. I’m pleased to report I returned with all limbs intact.

The setting is, without question, its best feature.  Possibly its only one.  Mount Nelson sits close enough to Table Mountain that it acts as a co-star, and when the clouds are pouring over the top, it’s hard not to be impressed.  It is epic.

The fact that it’s all tucked behind security gates does give it a faint resort feel.  It creates this sense of separation from the city, even if you’re technically right in it.  Once you’re through the gates it feels removed.  Not remote – it’s too busy for that – just slightly contained and safer.  You’re not immediately worried about stepping into traffic or being flattened by an Uber.  Granted, there are still plenty of cars drifting around at times, and now I’ve blown the secret handshake, it may turn into a terrorist hotspot.

The hotel is wrapped in gardens.  Lawns that look like someone trims them with nail scissors.  Palms.  Flower beds handmade with love.  Fountains. It has an Italian hotel feel with the gardens and pink exterior, but my dad kept referring to it as feeling like a Spanish all-inclusive resort due to how crowded it was.  I can see who I got my joy for life from.

It’s spread across multiple buildings and courtyards, so you’re constantly walking through greenery.  Early in the morning, before everyone wakes up and descends with their towels and afternoon tea reservations, it’s genuinely beautiful.  Calm.  Elegant.  Almost magical.

But just like that inheritance money from your mysteriously vanished parents — the ones the police always quietly suspected you over but could never quite prove — it doesn’t last long.  By late morning it’s been trampled to death — the life squeezed out of it; everyone pressing their feet against the windpipe, slowly suffocating the joy out of it.  The loungers fill up.  The afternoon tea crowd arrives in waves.  Weddings appear.  It starts to feel like a dress rehearsal for hell. Everyone within a 50-mile radius seems to congregate.  It has all the ingredients to be extraordinary, but doesn’t survive first contact with reality.

But you know what?  Every time I saw Table Mountain peaking out, behind the hotel, it made me smile. It is the one happy place here: somewhere else.

Facilities

There are two tennis courts side by side within the grounds.  That’s nice.  For it might be the only place where you can escape the madness.  The main pool is absolutely rammed.  Loungers crammed in around it.  People everywhere.  Live music drifting across the water.  If you enjoy a vibe, you’ll call it atmosphere.  If you’re me, you’ll walk straight past, confidently knowing exactly what the review will be about.

The adults-only pool is much, much more civilised.  Quieter.  Calmer.  Less of a social experiment in how close strangers can sit to one another.  

The gardens, however, are genuinely beautiful.  Clearly maintained by people who actually care.  The grounds team are the quiet heroes of this place.  Sitting having lunch by the fountain really is lovely.  The gentle trickle of water.  The pink façade.  The greenery.  I’m not petty enough to deny them that.  But the service drifts in at glacial speed, and the sense of exclusivity feels about as serene as a weekend at your mums during her wild years.

Spa & Gym

The spa and gym are found amongst the gardens, in their own area, near the Chef’s Garden.  The gym is split into three separate rooms: cardio, strength and core.  The rooms are small, but there’s a decent amount of equipment for the space.  Most of the cardio kit is brand new Technogym.  But like the rest of the hotel, when it’s busy, it’s busy.  The cardio room becomes a tight little box of shared oxygen and heavy breathing.  Intimate in ways no one asked for.

The spa itself has eight treatment rooms and a genuinely nice relaxation room.  Separate male and female changing areas, each with sauna, steam and a cold plunge.  It’s a solid setup.  No complaints there.

On paper, the facilities are strong.  In practice, much like the rest of the hotel, it depends entirely on how many other people you’re willing to share them with.

Room

Rooms and suites are spread across six separate accommodation wings.  At least I’m fairly certain it’s six, because the utterly useless person who showed us around told me a bunch of “alternative facts”, couldn’t explain the restaurants and vaguely pointed at things “over there”.  I ended up fact-checking half of what she said. I would have got more clarity asking a Labrador. I don’t mind exploring a hotel.  I enjoy it.  But I shouldn’t have to explore because the show around was so incoherent it may as well have been delivered in Wingdings.

The point is: this isn’t one neat hotel building. It’s a small estate of distinct blocks, and where you land absolutely shapes your experience.

In Helmsley, where we stayed, we had possibly the worst view but one of the larger suites. Which explains the significant size ranges you’ll see regarding the room types. The room category may be the same, but your reality can differ wildly depending on whether you’re facing manicured gardens or, like me, a road, nearby buildings and a car park. Out the back, that was my panorama. If you leaned optimistically enough, you could catch a tiny glimpse of Table Mountain. Mostly, though, you were admiring asphalt. The front at least looked into a pretty courtyard.

I know it’s lazy, but I don’t like being in a separate building to the main area – the convenience is a little too inconvenient.  It wasn’t much of a walk, but enough that if my Dad left behind his life saving medicine, I at least need to give it some thought.  I stayed in room #514 with my Dad opposite, in the same room type, at #515. Both One Bedroom Suites – they upgraded him, just not me – mean.

Decoratively, the rooms are nothing impressive at all.  It doesn’t even feel charming.  It just… is.  The balcony is probably the best feature, with it wrapping around the building, but having a strange open divider between neighbouring rooms.  Housekeeping also left my balcony door open.  Always reassuring.

The living room is a genuinely substantial size, which only made the tiny TV bolted to the wall feel even more tragic.  A few steps down take you into a very large bedroom with a sofa at the end of the bed, desk, chair with footrest and another TV mounted at one of those awkward, slightly neck-straining angles.  There’s plenty of space.  Almost too much, given how little personality fills it.  A walk-in wardrobe separates the bedroom from the bathroom, and then the bathroom is bizarrely small.  All that square footage elsewhere and this is what we’re doing here.

Then the noise.

A constant thumping that I could replicate every time I tried to close the balcony door.  Cabinets rattling whenever I had the audacity to walk around the room.  More rattling whenever someone, somewhere in the building so much as shifted their weight.  Windows that wouldn’t close properly, due to housekeeping kindly leaving them open, causing relentless banging – and not the good kind.

I could have called to fix it.  But that would have meant dealing with someone from the hotel.  Someone that would have found a way to make it worse; likely showing up three hours later and Hulk Smashing their way into my room at 2am. So instead, I lay there listening to the soundtrack of what sounded like a herd of people stampeding beneath me. Maybe they were large. Maybe they were featherweight and the building was constructed from reinforced Weetabix. We shall never know.  

The TV system deserves a mention for its incompetence.  Restaurant listings presented like an alphabetical index card from 1993, in no logical order whatsoever, with absolutely no information.  Utterly useless.

Also, having to manually turn off every lamp at night.  Add it to the list.

Service

To be fair, they had noted my memory foam pillow preference, there was non-alcoholic sparkling wine in the room, and three decent macarons waiting for us. All things considered, it was fine.  

Concierge on WhatsApp is responsive.  I’ll give them that.  But operationally, chaos.  After a hike, it took over 40 minutes to be collected despite being 20 minutes from the hotel, and having paid for the hotel car to be there.  Apparently no one told the driver where we were, even though I even sent a pin of our location to the concierge, which they acknowledged.  When I asked for his number, they gave me his registration plate instead.  It’s a theatre production quality of incompetence.

At meals, no one proactively gets involved.  Service drifted.  The only moment of genuinely good service came at second breakfast, when a waitress offered me hot chocolate “like what you had yesterday.”  That stood out precisely because nothing else did.  Otherwise, everyone exhibits the enthusiasm of a frog about to be dissected.

There were multiple points where I know a truly good hotel would simply make life easier.  When the window was banging all night, I couldn’t be bothered to call.  When my dad was sick and needed medicine, it felt simpler to go sort it myself.  That is the opposite of luxury service.  In a great hotel, they remove friction.  Here, everything required effort.

Even the final encounter, settling the bill, had to result in some issue.  Naturally, even though the number sat in front of him, he entered the wrong amount for me to pay, in their favour.

I think of myself as a nice person (no, honestly) but I found myself losing my shit in dealing with people here. Like housekeeping coming after 3pm two days running, and then showing up for turndown only two hours later. And trying to get into the Verandha which was the only restaurant in the hotel open for dinner and I had to speak to three different people watching them pass the parcel to the next as they were “fully booked” only to let us pick which table we wanted to eat on. Every bill arriving with a tip line, while I quietly wondered if they should be compensating me for the time I’d spent managing their inefficiencies.

The overwhelming feeling is not hostility.  It’s indifference.

Food

Unsurprisingly, the dining is centred around its gardens and terraces. There’s actually a substantial amount of options on premise, but between scheduled closures and lack of availability, every time I came for dinner there was a problem and I’ve had to fight to get a table somewhere.

Trying to eat in the bar on a Monday evening and being told there were no tables was absurd.  Every dinner involved some form of negotiation.  Fully booked.  No space.  Come back later.  Then suddenly a table appears if you push hard enough.  I shouldn’t have to fight to eat in a hotel I’m staying in.

Oasis overlooks the main pool for breakfast, lunch and its Jazz Sunday Brunch. Planet Bar spills onto the terrace for cocktails, while The Fountain offers similar all-day dining in front of the pink façade. It erm has a big fountain in the middle, in case that was not clear.  Red Room is the moodier, basement option with an Asian menu. Interesting setting.  Menu didn’t do it for me.  And Amura is the newer, more design-forward restaurant that feels the most polished of the lot.  Very polished.  Slight Maroma energy in the aesthetic.  Couldn’t get in though.  Thanks, concierge.

The Verandah serves the infamous afternoon tea by day, which appears to be the hotel’s main way of annoying me.  By night, with softer lighting and a piano playing, it’s actually the best part of the hotel.  Which, of course, is like picking your favourite landmine.  What I’m saying is: small crowd; nice atmosphere.  The food is nothing extraordinary, but pleasant.  By day it’s a full-blown zoo.

Nowhere was a stand out dining experience, and no one was ever in a rush to either serve us or bring the food.  At The Verandah, it was the kind of meal you wouldn’t send back, but you also wouldn’t mention to your mates. Perfectly fine, entirely forgettable. At Verandah, parts were ok, some was lovely, and my dad’s steak was tough and instantly forgettable. The duck at Red Room — supposedly the signature — wasn’t worth the energy it took to chew it.

“Er, excuse me, what was that about duck you said?”

But one thing I will say: the food is cheap.  Very cheap by UK standards.  Portions are generous.  My dad ordered a club sandwich and couldn’t finish it, so they’re certainly not stingy.  But I suppose lots of rubbish is still rubbish.

However, no amount of cheapness could convince me to head to their Jazz Sunday brunch at Oasis.  A buffet…..it gives me Maldives flashbacks and PTSD.

Breakfast is also served at Oasis.  At 7am, it almost felt civilised.  Almost.  You’re staring straight at the main pool and its endless formation of loungers, but at least the masses haven’t clocked in yet.  The à la carte offering is fairly minimal.  Nine options.  The usual egg classics — Benedict, Royale, Florentine — plus avocado toast, porridge, tofu scramble, French toast and grilled kippers.  There’s also a buffet with plenty of fruit, and mostly heated English breakfast staples.  Some of the pastries were excellent, especially the cheese croissant.  South Africans know how to bake.  For me, breakfast works.  Bowl of fruit and berries, Greek yoghurt, chia pudding, done.  But even at breakfast the tables are far too close together.  Is this place some kind of skin-on-skin bonding retreat?

My poor dad was vomiting and shitting himself on final morning.  Whether coincidence or otherwise, I shall let you decide.

The Good

• Gardens
• Breakfast

The Bad

• Service
• Getting a table
• I did get bit by one mosquito, which I’m sure we can all agree would never have happened in Ellerman House

The Luxurious

• The view

Conclusion

Once again, I stay at a hotel on the World’s 50 Best list, and once again I laugh at its inclusion.

This is a key lesson for me in not being so snobby about site inspections (where you go visit a property and don’t stay), as within a few seconds of arriving I knew this wasn’t for me.  I stayed here out of the kindness to our clients to know, what I already knew, that it was not going to be as great as Ellerman House.  But go I must, being the soldier I am.

And Ellerman House it is not. It’s 198 rooms. It’s busy. On arrival, the afternoon tea crowd created the kind of buzz you can normally only get in trench warfare. The gardens are beautiful. It’s not horrible. It’s just not what I look for in a hotel.  Mount Nelson is an afternoon tea parlour with rooms; Ellerman House is a luxury experience.

If you want buzz, atmosphere, locals drifting in and out, weddings with thumping music and a sense of energy, you might love it.  For a city hotel, the grounds are genuinely lovely.  At 7am, before the hordes descend, it’s almost magical.  It feels like a completely different property.  

I can accept a busy hotel.  I can accept that a so-called grande dame built for locals will have energy and noise.  But you need at least a thin veneer of service to support that reputation. I’m not saying you’re wrong if you like this hotel, I’m just saying you’re wrong.

My main issue is this: the place feels like it doesn’t care about you.  Hospitality, at its core, is performance.  Sometimes you are acting.  My wife, having worked in hospitality, knows that well.  Not the faking it in our marriage, obviously.  But the fact that sometimes you pretend to care because that is the job.  Here, they don’t even bother pretending.

We had more warmth and attentiveness on a simple show around at Ellerman than during our entire stay here.

If they want my advice (and who wouldn’t?): keep all the grounds men and fire everyone else.

As for your advice, dear reader: come and see it.  Have the tea.  Walk the gardens.  Then go and stay somewhere, anywhere else, that actually understands what luxury feels like.