New York Palace

The café on the ground floor was declared 'the most beautiful café in the world' when it opened in 1894, and nobody has seriously challenged the title since. The Hungarian architects responded to that ambition with an interior of gilt, frescoes, marble columns, and chandeliers so lavish it makes the Palais Garnier opera house look positively understated by comparison. Legend holds that the writer Ferenc Molnár, a regular, threw the café's keys into the Danube so that it could never again be closed, a gesture the hotel has treated less as vandalism and more as a mission statement. 185 rooms, and a café still worth the walk alone.