Leisure: Guests stretch limit of hotel menus

Hotel guests make some strange demands on the managers, according to a review published yesterday. The Small Luxury Hotels of the World chain revealed that guests at an establishment in Wales said they were staunch vegetarians - then promptly asked to eat duck.

And a guest - who was clearly not counting the calories - at a Belfast hotel ordered buttered, deep-fried Mars Bar and ice cream.

Other unusual requests include an order for cheese-and-mushroom omelette with a bottle of Chateau Latour 1979, which was ordered at Amberly Castle hotel in Arundel, West Sussex. An Australian guest in the Hibernian Hotel, Dublin, ordered chargrilled ostrich with banana and shrimp; while guests wanted a rib of whale at a hotel in Normandy, France. In Tuscany, a guest asked for a mushroom salad without the mushrooms.

Management had a slightly different problem when children, aged three and five, who were staying at a hotel in Wester Ross, Scotland, played noughts and crosses with an indelible pen on the duvet cover.