Eat, Drink, Sleep, Repeat: Chef-Owned Hotels Have the Perfect Agenda
Restaurant margins are notoriously slim, so it was only a matter of time before enterprising cooks turned to hotels to make a buck.
In 2009, Michael Stipe and his R.E.M. bandmates went to eat at Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana after a concert in Bologna, Italy. They liked the town of Modena so much, they wanted to stay. But Bottura couldn’t find a place for his friends to sleep. “I said, ‘How is there not a place here for people to stay? I need a hotel.’ ” A decade later, in May, Bottura will open Casa Maria Luigia, a centuries-old estate 10 minutes outside town. The 12-room inn will have a professional kitchen in the old carriage house and will showcase part of its owner’s museum-worthy modern art collection.
Bottura is one of an ever-growing gaggle of chefs for whom running a hotel restaurant isn’t enough—they want to own the entire operation. After all, the profit margins on beds are higher than the slim ones earned at tables. This isn’t a brand-new concept: In the 1990s, Alain Ducasse opened the Provence retreat La Bastide de Moustiers. But the current king of the chef-run hotel is Nobu Matsuhisa, who created his own brand beginning with his first location in Las Vegas in 2013; it’s become a small empire on track to have 20 properties by 2020.