Overview
Once a day, every day, the Mövenpick Hotel Hobart puts out an hour of free, unlimited Swiss chocolate for its guests. It is not a gimmick dreamed up for Hobart — the Chocolate Hour runs in every Mövenpick in the world — but it is a neat distillation of what the brand has always been about: doing the ordinary thing, hospitality, in a slightly more generous way.
The company began in Zurich in 1948, when Swiss restaurateur Ueli Prager opened a casual "dining bar" and named it after the way a seagull — Möwe in German — picks food from the water mid-flight. Mövenpick ice cream, coffee and wine followed, the first hotels opened in 1973, and in 2018 the group joined Accor. Hobart, which opened in 2021, was the very first Mövenpick hotel in Australia.
It is a fitting debut. The four-star hotel sits in the centre of town and, as Hobart's third-tallest building, lays claim to some of the best views going — out over the harbour on one side, across the city toward kunanyi/Mount Wellington on the other. Its 221 rooms and suites are done in a pared-back, Tasmanian-inspired palette, with Nespresso machines, rain showers and harbour or city outlooks; the higher Deluxe rooms guarantee water views. The hotel took Gold at the 2023 Tasmanian Hospitality Association Awards for Excellence.
Downstairs, Tesoro is the strongest argument for not leaving the building. The hotel's modern-Italian restaurant cooks Tasmania onto an Italian template, championing local farmers and producers: 50-day dry-aged Cape Grim beef, Marion Bay chicken, North West veal, Tasmanian rock lobster and longline-caught seafood, with pasta and pizza made by hand each day. And then there is the chocolate — that daily Chocolate Hour, plus free Mövenpick ice cream for under-12s, which makes this an easy one to do with kids in tow.
The location does a lot of the work. You are within walking distance of Salamanca, the waterfront and the city's galleries and bars; MONA sits 11 kilometres north, reached by ferry up the Derwent; and each June the whole city tilts into Dark Mofo, MONA's firelit winter-solstice festival, when a warm, central base is worth more than usual. It is a well-placed hotel that knows exactly what it is offering — big views, good Tasmanian cooking and an hour of chocolate you'll wonder how you ever lived without.
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