No Reservations Gone Are The Days When Hotel Restaurants Were Bland, Boring Or Just Plain Bad. Check Into Some Top-flight Eateries With Ambitious, Adventuresome Menus.

Been to a hotel restaurant lately?

Probably not, if your memories are of pink-tablecloth affairs where grandmothers stopped for tea and sandwiches, or roadside eateries with lukewarm steam tables and gray roast beef, or martini-flowing beef barns for undiscriminating business travelers.

But those days checked out a while back.

Two years ago, Conde Nast Traveler magazine reported that seven of the best 50 restaurants in America were located in Philadelphia - and four of those seven were inside hotels. The top restaurants - the Four Seasons' Fountain and Swann Lounge, the Grill at the Ritz-Carlton and Founders at the Bellevue - with their artistically arranged, richly sauced entrees and sugar-powered dessert carts, have become destinations that appeal to local gourmets more than traveling salesmen.

And that's only a part of the trend toward better dining in hotels. In the suburbs, many innkeepers are scuttling the bland, interchangeable middlebrow restaurants that were in vogue a couple of decades ago.

Today, a hotel restaurant boasts what Philadelphia magazine once rated the region's best jukebox (Red Hot and Blue in the Cherry Hill Holiday Inn), as well as perhaps the top Indian restaurant in the area (Palace of Asia in the Fort Washington Inn).

It seems that hotel managers finally realized what should have been obvious way back in the Johnson administration: Most of their dining rooms were boring.

``Hotel restaurants for years had a bad reputation - no one wanted to eat there,'' said Gary Carr, who tracks hotel trends for PKF Consulting in San Francisco, adding that the improvements started during the economic downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when hotels were looking for new sources of income.

``Now they've become a destination for diners, not just people staying at the hotel.''

Top-end hotels such as the Four Seasons or the Bellevue want to entice you to use your credit card on the premises rather than hop a cab to Le Bec-Fin. And budget motel chains are stressing convenience and familiarity, installing fast-food-type restaurants, food courts or well-known chains such as TGI Friday's.

With that in mind - the good stuff, not the chains - I indulged my love of high-end hotels and visited some of the classiest restaurants around today.