Polished performances
The world’s top shoeshining services
Published in the Financial Times Globetrotter column, 1 March 2022
One of the most visible effects on my appearance of protracted lockdowns, aside from untrammelled hair growth, was the increasing shabbiness of my shoes. Having depended as much on shoeshines as on regular haircuts, I quickly found myself sliding into an underworld of feral footwear. I came to realise that a pair of polished shoes was not only a byproduct but also an essential element of travel.
A good shoeshine can serve a number of purposes. Above all there is the soothing and intensely satisfying feeling of being immaculately shod. Rising one morning at The Ritz in Lisbon, I found that not only had my shoes been wonderfully polished but their frayed laces replaced — it was as if I had been given a foot lift.
There is also the social side of the live shoeshine: to have one’s shoes shined gives one a brief but significant interaction with the host country, often more spontaneous (and amusing) than the more stylised encounters of a business meeting. I always try to make time for a quick shoeshine in the domestic terminal at Johannesburg airport, in the lobby of Santos Dumont airport in Rio or under Eero Saarinen’s magnificent roof at Dulles airport in Washington, DC.
There is also a people-watching dimension, particularly in those hotels which still have boot-shiners in their lobbies. It is always fascinating to perch on the shoeshining throne in the lobby of the Fleuve Congo Hotel in Kinshasa and see who has just arrived from Beijing, Brussels or Tel Aviv. And a good shoeshining chair, like a barber’s chair, can also be an excellent place for a quick nap.
Hotel shoeshining services vary enormously. Many hotels do no more than apply those scratchy little sponges one sometimes finds in one’s bathroom, besmirching one’s Oxfords with a synthetic sheen. Others go wild and transform one’s loafers into patent-leather pantoufles, to the point that one finds oneself scuffing them deliberately under the breakfast table in an anxious attempt to subdue one’s next sortie to the buffet. Another extreme is for the shoe shiner to apply a beehive’s-worth of waxy polish without then rubbing it off, leaving one’s feet sickly and sticky for the day ahead — Lobbs reduced to pungent blobs.
The quality of hotel shoeshine is also dependent on its location — in general, the more a place is known for its shoes, the better the shoeshine. While I have never stayed in a hotel in Northampton, I can vouch for the shoeshining services in London hotels, and, in particular, at The Ritz (which endearingly adds a little Marie-Antoinette flourish to one’s immaculately finished brogues in the form of a pink satin ribbon) and The Lanesborough. Mr Topi, halfway up the BurlingtonArcade, is also reliable, while at Heathrow Terminal 5 South, Mr Manoj has kept his transatlantic clientele immaculate for the last 10 years.
In Ethiopia, we discovered that the shoeshiners had adapted their trade to provideperfect cleaning services for the ubiquitous synthetic trainers, using all manner oflittle brushes, tweezers and whitewash to rejuvenate one’s plimsolls and stockingevery conceivable type of replacement lace.
While not a city known for its bootmakers, Tokyo excels at shoeshining (in the same way that it does when it comes to perfect pizza-making). The shoeshining service at the Palace Hotel is flawless. Guests are provided with a leather box in which to put out one’s shoes at night. In the morning, the magical box is just where one left it, but the shoes within perfectly polished (with a copy of the FT alongside). And then, on arrival at Haneda airport, the pageantry of the polish begins all over again at the remarkable John Lobb shoeshining Wunderkammer at the back of the JAL first-class lounge — a space half laboratory, half sanctuary, in which one’s shoes are placed on what resembles an altar for anointment by a high priestess of the polish.
And in Paris, as you would expect from the city of Berluti and Hermès, you will also find perfection in polish. Le Bristol prides itself on its palette of polishes, eschewing transparent products.
A good hotel will never require a phone call to arrange a shoeshine and will always ensure that shoes left outside the door at night are returned before one wakes (I will never forget the trauma of having to wear amorphous hotel slippers to breakfast in Belo Horizonte while the staff frantically searched for my shoes). Le Bristol in Paris, The Carlyle in New York and the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong have Jeeves-like overnight shoeshine services. And a hotel should never charge for its shoeshine service or make a fuss about it being complimentary. Shoeshining is an essential service.
Placing my shoes outside the door of our bedroom at Geneva’s Beau-Rivage recently in the knowledge that all would be well in the morning was nothing short of delicious — I realised that life was slowly returning to normal.