Mandarin Oriental Boston opens today

People touring The Mandarin Oriental Boston learned the guestrooms' jade-colored silk imported from Asia is sumptuously smooth, but the road to the hotel's grand opening today was anything but that.

In 1995, the veteran Four Seasons Hotel Boston general manager Robin A. Brown and real estate developer Stephen R. Weiner sketched out this luxurious hotel, residential, and retail complex on napkins at Au Bon Pain.

"Finding a site took six long years," Weiner recounted during the ribbon cutting ceremony to about 180 friends, relatives, and prominent Bostonians who crowded into the hotel's lobby.

Then there were the countless hours of consensus-building sessions with 22 neighborhood associations protective of the Back Bay's beauty. "The meetings were long and arduous, but in the end there was compromise and there was harmony," he said.

The city's first Mandarin is welcoming its inaugural guests to spend tonight in the hotel rooms, condos, and apartments. They'll all be a quick elevator-ride away from raising a champagne toast in front of the Asana restaurant's wall hand-chiseled from Jerusalem limestone and indulging in five-star service legendary for anticipating almost every desire.

"This will be the benchmark for a lot of other things going on in Boston," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said at the ceremony.

The exclusive Hong Kong brand only has four other hotels open in the United States: New York, Washington DC, Miami and San Francisco. That, Menino said, means "we're already ahead of Los Angeles and a lot of other cities by having a Mandarin here."
(By Nicole C. Wong, Globe staff)