GLOBAL REPORT—When visiting New Orleans, locals advise staying away from the French Quarter. “There’s so much to see outside of it,” they’ll tell you, bemoaning its reputation as a tourist trap.
But for the uninitiated, there is no place that aches more to be seen. Hedonism meshed with long-forgotten European culture mingled with tradition and no inhibitions. It has everything, which is why—even amid the city’s overpowering summer heat—millions of travelers flock to the borough’s venerable hospitality institutions each year.
One of the most popular? The Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone.
Monteleone is a name synonymous with New Orleans culture, adorning the corner plot of Royal and Iberville Streets in one form or another since Antonio Monteleone purchased the then-64-room hotel in 1886. Putting a literal twist on the traditional hotel bar concept, his son Frank added a rotating merry-go-round to the space in 1949 after finding a carousel in Chicago and shipping it down to New Orleans.
“People like tradition,” Kent Wasmuth, the director of sales and marketing for the hotel, said. “They might like the trendy thing, but overall they like tradition. Part of the Monteleone ambience is that tradition.”
Others have come to similar conclusions. As palettes become more refined and nostalgia takes hold, hoteliers are wising up and capitalizing on the past, creating unforgettable bar experiences that operate as perpetual profit centers.
Enveloped in history, Carousel Bar is a showcase for this intersect between past and present. An iconic watering hole where William Faulkner and Truman Capote imbibed and Liberace played piano, the bar closed its doors in November to undergo a multimillion-dollar renovation to add more seating and lounge areas. Reopening the bar 1 December and debuting the new lounge to the public 29 days later, the Carousel’s owners are hoping to accommodate the influx of tourists and locals angling to get a seat at the legendary revolving bar, which makes a rotation every 15 minutes—a noticeably slow pace when sitting in a sober state but one that only seems to spin faster with each Sazerac.
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| The Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone has been a part of New Orleans culture since 1886. Source: Hotel Monteleone. |
Back to the future
Much of the regeneration of hotel bars is owed to those fleeting moments of the past, reproducing pre-Prohibition cocktails and reverting to times when drinking was as easy as sidling up to the hotel bar to order a Negroni.
Before Prohibition, hotel bars and drinking culture were on the fast track in America, born from the creation of inns in colonial America, said Dale DeGroff, author of “The Essential Cocktail” and “The Craft of the Cocktail.”
“You couldn’t legally organize a town or township unless you had an inn and that inn had a tavern where travelers could eat and sleep,” he said. After the Industrial Revolution, people migrated en masse to more urban areas. Taverns were no longer sufficient, and hotels and restaurants developed in their place. As the middle class started moving around, the idea of a “big fancy hotel” became part of the American landscape.
Those bars in the 19th century were “a sacred repository of the best cocktails and master bartenders,” DeGroff explained, highlighting New York’s Knickerbocker Hotel, where the dry martini was invented.
Yet, when Prohibition was ratified in 1920, it changed the course of history for American hotel bars. Once epicenters for social gatherings and the changing cocktail culture, hotel bars saw their talented operators and mixologists immigrate to Europe just as suddenly when the manufacture of alcohol was abolished.
The American Bar in the Savoy Hotel in London reaped many of those benefits. Henry Craddock, an American master bartender, moved to London to take over the property’s bar and continued to change the cocktail landscape from abroad. “The Savoy is so far ahead of the time,” DeGroff said. “Those guys in Europe never had Prohibition or had to deal with sour mix.”
But those global hotel bars are the exception, DeGroff said. Nowadays, he laments the devolution of that reputation as bartenders in the U.S. are discouraged from experimenting.
“Bartenders were beaten down by union rank and file,” he said. “They introduced work rules,” and the industry changed because of this, relying on sour mixes, pre-packaged powders and soda guns. “Fine service went by the wayside.”
“In certain circumstances, the union bartender is not as receptive as non-union bartenders. They’re more settled in their ways, and it’s challenging to operators to implement new concepts in an established hotel,” explained Francesco Lafranconi, whose résumé includes stints at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, the Intercontinental Hotel in Cologne, the Cipriani in Venice and the Palace of Gstaadt, Switzerland. He now serves as master mixologist at Southern Wine & Spirits, one of the largest wine and alcohol distributors in the U.S.
Though those obstacles might have deterred hoteliers from focusing on the hotel bar in the past, Lafranconi said a new generation of cocktailians and hotel beverage managers are entering the fray, especially “young, hip bartenders and mixologists that really want to prove their expertise.”
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| With its views of Chicago, Roof at TheWit attracts locals and tourists to its rooftop bar. |
A bar renaissance
Plagued with drink-making shortcuts, hotel bars may never be what they were centuries ago, but there’s a gleam of change happening behind the till.
Jacques Bezuidenhout, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group’s master mixologist, is a pioneer for the brand, transforming the standard bar program in the chain’s 56 hotels into a fresh and innovative offering. But even as Kimpton’s bars become part of the upper-echelon of the bar scene, Bezuidenhout said iconic hotels aren’t trying to shake the status quo and are relying on dwindling reputations to draw guests.
“There are some beautiful, grand hotels in New York and San Francisco and around the country—grand, beautiful buildings—and yet they have these horrible bar programs,” he explained. “If I go to New York—a city with a great bar history—I wouldn’t walk into some hotel bars; they’ve lost that culture.”
But now, as cocktail culture enters into the mainstream, hoteliers are taking notice and revamping their bar areas.
“Eight years ago if someone walked into a (Kimpton hotel bar) asking for an Old Fashioned or Sazerac, and they did it three or four times a year, that would be shocking. But now, it’s a common thing. It’s about the mixology culture. People are expecting it now,” Bezuidenhout said.
It’s a sex appeal that not only can be attributed to cocktails and contemporary design but also to bartender uniforms and an environment that is attractive to the younger consumer. “Right now the guests are judging hotel bars no longer as a service; the environment has to be influential. Operators focus on design to focus on all the five senses,” Lafranconi said.
Guests from near and far expect a luxurious ambience, and hotel bars are providing it. Mark Shouger arrived at TheWit – A Doubletree by Hilton in Chicago six months after it opened in 2007, and when he told native Chicagoans where he worked, they were indifferent. “You don’t need a hotel for a city if you already live in a city,” they told him. It was just another hotel in a major metropolitan.
But Roof, a slick rooftop bar located on the 27th floor with panoramic views of the city, changed the perception. “It helps identify you, especially to the locals,” Shouger said.
Now as the GM stands in the lobby on a Thursday or Friday evening, people are interchanging theWit, the hotel, with Roof, the hotel bar.
A team of extraordinary bar managers
Though the most well-known hotel bars—the Vesper Room in The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, the Library Bar in Hollywood’s The Roosevelt hotel, The Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Paris, to name a few—use their high-end reputations to attract guests, it’s the large brands such as Marriott International that are making waves by refocusing their attention on the hotel bar. In 2007, DeGroff helped the Bethesda, Maryland-based company create its now-standard Bar Arts program.
Lou Trope, Marriott’s VP of restaurants and bar, said the ground-breaking program refocused what the chain was doing, helping it rebrand its bars by offering fresh ingredients. “It’s repetition. It’s training to get to a final great product. It’s taking a methodical approach to training just like you would a chef. At the end of the day, your bar experience was touching a lot of guests in a hotel; it really has to be special and professional,” he said.
With more than 500 Marriott Hotels & Resorts, Marriott’s new focus is on building an emotional brand connection with guests. “Hotel bars in the past were the place to be many generations ago,” Trope said. He wants to recapture that state of mind, adapting the space to parallel the guest who will see the bar as a way of life—a place to interact socially and professionally. “People are making a choice from our local area to meet with colleagues and do interviews. Our guests are starting to stay in the hotel longer rather than going out.”
Bezuidenhout has worked toward a similar end since joining San Francisco-based Kimpton five years ago to help launch the Urbana Restaurant and Wine Bar at the Hotel Palomar in Washington, D.C. He was hired on for a single project but then a few more came up and “the whole position evolved where it is now and is still evolving every day,” he explained.
Since then, Bezuidenhout has spent the last three or four years training bartenders, traveling two weeks out of every month to train the GMs of Kimpton to be as passionate about using fresh ingredients and crafting cocktails as he is in an effort to appeal to a more diverse clientele.
“Bars are fun places to be, places where to meet,” DeGroff said. “They’re where we go to live our lives.”
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| The Golden Bee in Colorado Springs, Colorado, takes on a 19th century ambience that has garnered attention for years. |
Going local
Attentive bar staff and quality offerings are only half the battle. As speakeasies and themed bars pop up throughout city blocks, the stakes are higher for hotel bars as the learning curve becomes steeper.
“There is a need for a cocktail bar in a hotel to be contemporary, trendy and up to the times because there is a little more difficulty there than to try to steer a free-standing bar,” Lafranconi said.
The bureaucratic hierarchy at the hotel bar—the GM, the food-and-beverage manager, the beverage manager—can cause difficulty and inefficiency in enacting quick changes. “Sometimes there isn’t freedom to do something more boutique,” he explained, but sometimes “marketing dollars (from those large brands) can allow you to put out a good promotion.”
For all the challenges hotel bars faced in the post-Prohibition era, hoteliers are finally seeing how focusing on quality drinks and capitalizing on being part of the cultural zeitgeist can be a profitable endeavor. Hotel bars can offer Mimosas for brunch, happy hour drinks at dusk, pre-dinner cocktails and nightcaps for guests during the evening. The result is a 24-hour revenue generator for hotels. “The hotel bar can be very versatile,” said Lafranconi. “It can bring in a lot of money.”
The authentic 19th century Golden Bee at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has people waiting as long as three hours to get a seat at the pub. “When people come home from college or for the holidays, it’s where they meet up and go with their families; it has a local following and has been the go-to spot for people for years,” said Lindsey Hafemeister, the hotel’s food-and-beverage marketing and PR manager.
But serving great cocktails only works if the bar staff is mixing those drinks with enthusiasm. Ultimately, “what makes (a hotel bar) stand out is if you have a fun person behind the bar,” DeGroff explained. “I don’t care how good the drink-maker is or how good the bartender is—if he’s not friendly, if he’s not making a connection with a customer, then put him in the kitchen. You have to have a guy out there that makes them want to come back.”
A strong brand identity is also a revenue driver, as more and more guests aren’t leaving the hotel, instead opting for the short walk downstairs and spending hours at the bar. If the locals are eating and drinking there, then out-of-town guests will want to, Bezuidenhout explained. “For the most part, we want (the hotel bars) to feel like a local bar in the hotel,” he said.
DeGroff reminisced and relented on some of his strong feelings about hotel bar’s cocktail culture. He had worked at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles and spent his life seeing where the cocktail world meshes with the hotel world.
“The reason I love hotel bars is they’re so satisfying and so much fun—the world passes you by,” he said. “You have an eclectic and unusual crowd. I love that feeling the hotel bar gives you—one of adventure.”