AT LEAST THE FOOD AT LARIO'S WAS GOOD:

Fontainebleau owner leaves legacy (DOUGLAS HANKS III , 2/14/05, Miami Herald)

Frank Sinatra stayed there. So did James Bond (in Goldfinger, which was filmed there). In fact, nearly every celebrity visiting Miami Beach in the 1950s and '60s walked through the sweeping lobby of the 1,250-room Fontainebleau, easily the region's largest and most lavish resort.

As the Beach lost its allure in the tourism slump of the 1970s, so did the Fontainebleau. When it went bankrupt, Muss said a group of business leaders urged him to buy it. He didn't have hotel experience but said he considered rescuing the hotel ``a civic gesture.''

He and partners paid $28 million in bankruptcy court for it.

Hilton ran the hotel for Muss from the beginning, but he and his wife live in a suite there and so Muss is a near-constant presence. But he says running the Fontainebleau never held the same appeal as reworking it.

''I'm not a hotelier. I don't even know how to spell the name,'' he says. Muss described renovations and expansion as his main passion at the hotel. ''I'm a construction man,'' he says.

We stayed there last weekend for a medical conference and not only was the construction a blight and the hotel absurdly over-priced but the service was appalling and the much vaunted Tropigala show in such burlesque, Vegas--wannabee bad taste that the boy sat with his eyes covered saying how inappropriate it was after asking The Wife why the showgirls weren't wearing underwear. He dubbed the show the Butt-Crack Fiesta. Even the Wife was so miserable she changed our flight from Sunday to Saturday night and apologized for violating the State Border Rule.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2005 12:44 PM