Sommerro — Restaurant in Oslo

Sommerro will live most fondly in my memories. The best European buffet breakfast I have ever had, the heated bathroom floors, excellent staff, and luxurious Art Deco meets Scandinavian atmosphere plus super convenient to the train station.

Tip #1: Getting There: We took a taxi from the airport - about 45 minutes. Leaving, we took the train to the Oslo airport. The train stop closest to the hotel is National Theatret stop. If you exit the train station toward the Henrik Ibsen gate, you will be three buildings away from the hotel. Turn right when you exit, and go past the Norwegian Nobel Institute (Det Norske Nobelinstitutt). The Sommerro is a big building up some steps on the right.

Elevators are quite nice. Use your round wooden hotel room key to let the elevator know where you want to go, and you will be assigned an elevator to take you directly to your floor.

Sommerro is an American Express Fine hotel and we received an upgrade to a Deluxe Room, $30 per person credit for breakfast which paid for the buffet, $100 hotel credit, and a handwritten welcome note with a large Sommerro chocolate in the room. The room was very comfortable with an eating table and two chairs, well stocked mini-fridge, and snacks, free espresso maker and tea kettle, large safe big enough for a laptop with a cushion for jewelry, comfortable bed, lovely chandelier over the bed, and a heated bathroom floor. The bathroom is designed for privacy with doors to keep in the heat and a door for the toilet. The toilet room floor is heated, the sink area is heated, and the shower room is heated. I laid our wet clothes and bathing suits on the floor to dry quickly.

There was an empty bottle for water. We were on the 2nd floor. If I went down the hall with the green wall at the end and turned left, there was a tap for cold water or sparkling water for the bottle.

The breakfast buffet started at 6:00 am in Expedition Hall. You could order an item off the menu such as Eggs Benedict or an American style breakfast plus help yourself to the buffet. There was so much amazing food in the buffet that I never ordered from the menu. About a dozen types of cheeses (including the Brown cheese) and meats, cut your own fresh bread, hard boiled eggs, soft boiled eggs, a variety of fresh cut fruits including berries (except on Monday), assorted fresh yogurts, granola, nuts, muesli, matcha chia cups, croissants and pastries, Valhalla chocolate, and a variety of fresh juices such as orange juice, pomegranate, passion fruit, and grapefruit juice and of course tea and coffee. Service was consistently pleasant and good for breakfast.

The Front Desk and other hotel staff were always gracious and most helpful.

The hotel has a variety of restaurants and bars. Tak which is upscale Japanese was very delicious but closed on Sundays. Expedition Hall had a live jazz band and other entertainment in the evenings. There is an afternoon tea at the Two Sisters on Friday - Sunday.

Tip #2: the dress at the restaurants and bars is very chic and stylish. Men were wearing white collared shirts and even ties and suit jackets/blazers. Women were in dresses. It was funny, people were dressed up more for the Sommerro restaurants and bars than they were at the Michelin star restaurant we went to in Iceland. All I had was black winter sweatpants, black hiking boots and a black sweater or long sleeve shirt, fortunately we were not turned away or looked down upon.

Tip #3: Make reservations for the restaurants in advance or they may be full, especially Friday and Saturday. If they are, you can ask, but you may or may not be able to get in.

Tip #4: For the pool and sauna, there is a charge, around $15 per person. The pool was small but was comfortably warm and you could do laps and had a nice restored mosaic mural of walruses and people. The pool was not handicap accessible. There were stairs to walk down to the pool and ladders to climb into the pool, no steps into the pool. There are big, fluffy bathrobes and flip flops in a drawer in your room in the...

The bad: The door to our room did not lock. Literally. More on this below. Expensive - the value isn’t great. You’re paying for design, but there are many kinks this hotel still needs to work out. Extremely minimal difference between room statuses The main restaurant hours were not accurate on google maps and even their own website. The rooftop pool and sauna are tiny. No big deal, except they make you pay for it. The need to book a time slot to use them totally makes sense. Charging hotel guests to use it absolutely does not. Facilities at the rooftop pool and sauna are extremely limited. Want somewhere to store your clothes? You’re out of luck. Our in-room espresso machine either didn’t work or needed to be cleaned. The cleaning light was blinking. We brought this to the attention to the staff. They said it was just because the machine was new. Despite telling them something was off with the coffee (it tasted very bad), they didn’t believe us and refused to replace the machine. None of these things individually were that big of a deal. Collectively? It just reeked of amateur hour, especially at the price point we were paying.

The good:

The place is beautiful! Very ornate and high end art deco design, particularly in the restaurant. The staff is extremely friendly (even if they’re not solving problems). The location is very central. Easy to get everywhere we wanted to go

In the end: We will not be coming back. We did not feel the value was worth the price. The staff missed some easy softballs to right some disappointing situations. Great design and location though!

OK, the story about our non-locking room for those who are interested. On day 2 of our stay, my partner and i left the room, and realizing we forgot something, we by accident found out that the hotel room door did not lock from the outside. We could just push it open. We went to the front desk to mention this. We spoke with Thomas, who did not believe us. He insisted it was just a time-delay on the lock. When we went back to the room and confirmed the room was STILL unlocked, Thomas finally took a look himself and finally discovered that it was true. While we were away at dinner, to remedy the situation, he offered to upgrade us to a different room. That sounded like a nice solution to us! When we got back from dinner it was late. We waited about 15 minutes for the staff to change our room in the computer. They told us it would be a “double upgrade.” We were excited. When they finally got it sorted (seemed like they were new), we went to the new room and….It was pretty much the same room we already had. It did not appear to be an upgrade at all. Exhausted and disappointed at this point, we decided that instead of packing up our stuff and moving rooms, we’d just stick it out for our final night and deadbolt the door.

Realizing how everything had panned out the next day, Thomas was kind enough to offer us a little bag of skincare products, which, OK. That’s nice and all I guess. Couldn’t offer to cover the mini-bar...

It pains me to leave a negative review of any business, but I'm writing this in the hope it will allow this hotel to improve via constructive criticism and offer a better experience moving forward.

Firstly, the positives:

The hotel and rooms are genuinely beautiful. There is lots of style, thoughtful touches, and they've really utilised the art deco elements well - from the lift to cohesive design choices.

All the members of the team we encountered across our 3 night stay were extremely friendly, helpful and responsive - no complaints there.

Really good location, easy to get to lots of places/city centre, and also to less touristy areas via trams or buses (although Oslo is overall a very easy to navigate city)

The negatives:

The small touches are missing for the price point. I've stayed in many luxury hotels and this one feels as though it wants to price itself like one, but not put in any of the detail to justify it. Even small things like the quality of basic amenities in the room and the warm breakfast offering using what can only be described as portions based on war-time rationing measures. Plus, things like our bathmat being taken and then not replaced.

By far the greatest issue during our stay was in reality that a relentless thudding techno/DJ-esque music could be heard in our room (bearing in mind we were on the 4th floor) from mid-afternoon to midnight daily - presumably coming from the hotel's rooftop restaurant or pool area. This is not a complaint about something you couldn't control (like construction happening opposite) but quite literally a problem being created from your own space. While a member of your team kindly offered to look into moving us, we were already over halfway through our stay and decided it was easier to return post-music session each night instead of packing. Anyway, this was never followed up upon during our stay from your side.

In summary, it feels like this hotel, in trying to stretch beyond being accommodation and operate as a sleek lifestyle/health attraction, has forgotten some of the absolute basic rules like that guests require rest and relaxation while in their room (not involuntarily being part of a rave) and generosity (go the extra mile on the small things to justify the prices being paid - other top hotels do this).

Given lots of a great people work here and the building itself is stunning, there is potential but it's a way off meeting it based...