The Bill Bensley-designed Capella Hanoi is a maximalist homage to 1920s New York and its top-floor Hudson Rooms to Grand Central Terminal bringing period rail-car glamour, oyster luges, and a hidden speakeasy to Hanoi’s opera district. Step aboard.
It can feel pointless to seek logic in Bill Bensley’s design concepts. J.W. Marriott Phu Quoc as a beachside university? Capella Bali as a steampunk jungle camp? Fantasy beats reality. And we’re okay with that.
Capella Hanoi: Making Some Kind Of Sense
Capella Hanoi makes some kind of sense. The French-era Hanoi Opera House is 200 meters away, and its influence saturates the hotel’s seven floors – both literally and conceptually. One floor celebrates artists, with rooms dedicated to Picasso and Kandinsky. Another celebrates music, with rooms dedicated to Carmen and Turandot.
Throughout, a maximalist, theatrical atmosphere reigns: divas drift through the lobby, costumed mannequins line the restaurant, and the top-floor Hudson Rooms evokes 1920s Grand Central Terminal, a period when 37 million passengers passed through the station every year.
The Hudson Room’s Oyster Luge Ritual
At the Hudson Rooms bar counter, Beverage Manager Sean Halse walks us through their signature oyster luge ritual. “Sip the oyster’s brine first,” he instructs, “then take a sip of your whisky. Slurp up your oyster. Rinse the empty shell with your whisky, and with the shell as your vessel, sip and enjoy.”
The sweet, smoky whisky notes mingle with the oyster’s salty brininess, while the oyster’s mild astringency and umami depth mellow the whisky’s alcoholic heat.
Behind Track 61’s Secret Door
In the secretive space behind the bar, called Track 61, Patrick – assisted by Jesse, both in retro-train-carriage attire – serves welcome sips of their ‘Ferdinand Magellan’ cocktail, squeezed from a rustic leather pouch to one table, Manhattans from the new ‘Evolution Of Manhattan’ menu to another.
The hidden room is accessed with tickets Hudson Rooms’ staff hand out selectively, following a clue that leads to a cabinet containing the door-opening mechanism. Inside, the room is calmingly beige, all soft edges and even softer lighting. There’s a smoking jacket you can slide on to match the team’s dapperness, and at one end, the small bar glimmers with rare bottles of whisky.
Presidential Precedent
Track 61 was real: a private railroad platform beneath New York’s Waldorf Astoria. The track was used by General John J. Pershing, later General Douglas MacArthur, and between them, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even decades later, with the same kind of secrecy Hudson Rooms guards the entrance to Track 61, the railroad was intended as an emergency escape for President George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
The Ferdinand Magellan was one of a series of train cars named after famous explorers: David Livingstone, Henry Stanley, Marco Polo, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen. The Secret Service had it armored and beefed up to serve as Roosevelt’s private rail car, U.S. Car No. 1.
Understandably, President Roosevelt appreciated the privacy and security the railcar offered. Capella Hanoi’s ode to it is comforting too. As with the best speakeasies, the bar is pure escapism. “That’s very deliberate,” Sean says as we slurp down another oyster.
“We researched every detail to create an environment that feels both elegant and intimate. The lighting, the materials, the flow of the room – they were all crafted to evoke the same sense of calm Roosevelt described,” he says. “It’s a retreat from the noise outside, a place where time slows down and conversations feel more meaningful.”
Tracking The Manhattan’s 165-Year Journey
The new Manhattan menu charts the cocktail’s evolution like stations on a rail line, mapping each iteration chronologically as the drink mutates across 165 years – fitting, given the train carriage setting (elsewhere in the menu, rail tracks serve as flavor maps). The Manhattan exercise tracks how a three-ingredient classic became a vehicle for showing off the back bar.
It starts straightforward: the 1860 Manhattan – a time when the drink was, by all accounts, newborn – with Michter’s Kentucky Straight Rye, Mancino Rosso, and bitters.
The creation story is appropriately murky for a drink this darkly red. The popular version – that Dr Iain Marshall invented it at a banquet hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill at the Manhattan Club in the mid-1870s – is almost certainly fiction. Churchill was in England at the time, pregnant with Winston, not hosting cocktail parties in New York.
The more plausible theory points to a bartender named Black who might have mixed the first one in the 1860s at a bar near Houston Street on Broadway. Details are scarce, but it was likely just another riff on existing whiskey cocktails.
The first proper written recipes appear in the 1880s, in George Winter’s ‘How to Mix Drinks’ and Charlie Paul’s ‘American and Other Drinks.’ By then it had a name – borrowed from the Manhattan Club, where the drink was popular enough to become synonymous with the venue, even if Lady Randolph hadn’t invented it there.
“That would be my preferred destination, if I could go back to any era of the Manhattan,” Sean says. “The golden age of the original Manhattan. I would want to taste it exactly as it was first created, along with those early variations that shaped its identity. There’s something magical about experiencing history in its most faithful form: spirit-forward, elegant, simple.”
More Is More
For all that, like Capella Hanoi itself, there’s maximalism in the menu. The ‘President’s Carriage’ section dishes out spirit-forward cocktails with a highball for respite: blends of different mezcals, rums, and whiskies. ‘The Signatures,’ named after those other train carriages and legendary explorers – Marco Polo, Roald Amundsen, David Livingstone, Robert Peary – come with edible Explorer’s Club flags and garnishes of entire oysters.
The endpoint of the Manhattan menu, Track 61’s 2025 Manhattan, also embraces the philosophy that more is more. Inside: Michter’s Straight Rye, Michter’s Bombardier Declaration Small Batch Bourbon, Vè Dé Dì Crème De Cacao, purple rice wine, Punt E Mes, and a stout reduction. Six ingredients where three once sufficed.
“Everything must serve a purpose. Nothing exists simply for decoration,” Sean says. “For the Old Fashioned-style Robert Peary, the oyster on the side isn’t just garnish – a touch of brine adds texture and salinity. It’s interaction, not ornamentation.”
The Robert Peary arrives with a miniature ship and an edible explorer’s flag, “a playful nod to Peary himself, who served as the third president of the Explorers Club.”
And that Manhattan takes the classic – maybe first mixed at a bar near Houston Street on Broadway – and packs it with Vietnamese ingredients. “Storytelling through flavor, aroma, and experience. Always intentional, never excessive.”
Let the fun begin.
