Hospitality Design - August 2010 - 57

HD: We were talking before this, that this is the right time. You will enter the market on the high end, instead of the low end. TH: I think the market is a two-edged sword. The fundamentals are down, but then there is opportunity because there are a lot of assets and owners who are saying ‘I need differentiation,’ ‘I need ﬁnancial results.’ And we provide both of those things. We are slightly ahead of everybody else because we’ve got the ﬁnancial results in the public spaces to underwrite the deal. It’s proven a successful brand. We’ve existed for 20 years, there’s longevity in the concept. One thing is incredible, if you look at our revenue per seat, one seat is equal to what you make in a hotel room. So if you open a restaurant of 150 seats, and you make the same in the restaurant as you do in a hotel room, you don’t even have to open the hotel room, you are underwriting the deal on the back of the restaurant. HD: And Trevor and Struan. Why did you bring them in? RD: We liked their approach, their feeling, their style, everything, felt that they got it, so again we should move forward. If you don’t move forward, you don’t know anything. Meir Teper: We actually met 15 years ago at the Metropolitan. [Nobu did a restaurant at the London hotel when Horwell and McKenzie were with COMO Group.] TH: We actually spent over a year and a half talking about [Nobu hotels], how we would do it. For us to leave Hard Rock, it was important to do the right thing, but we really believe we tried to HD: Why is it time now for Nobu Hotels? RD: I think that very simply, I was seeing that [other] hotels were asking Nobu to be in them, that it was a draw for the hotel, so I thought why not do a Nobu hotel? It’s a great idea; if we can get it right, it would only extend everything. It was that simple. HD: Is it determined how the hotels will be named? Trevor Horwell: We are doing two types of hotels: a hotel that will have more oversized public spaces, more hard hitting public spaces. That would be called Nobu. It’s the place where you go to be seen. Then you have a Nobu Collection hotel, the place where you don’t want to be seen, more relaxed, quiet, intimate, but that could have another name. It’s more of a resort model, or a special hideaway in a city. We believe size-wise, depending on the market we are looking at, 125 to 200 rooms in the luxury market. This is a size and model of the future. A typical hotel of 300 rooms is not the model. You either compete for convention markets with hotels of 400 rooms upwards or you sit in the top ﬁve percent of a city in ADR. HD: You had a clear vision with the Greenwich. What’s your vision, what do you see for the Nobu hotel? RD: Some things I don’t know. If we create it, it will take on a life on its own. And you just don’t know where it is going to go. To say you want to do this and that, everybody wants to do this and that, but I am thinking about the reality. We are going to start, come up moment-by-moment, designing, ﬁguring it out, creating something, so I can’t say it would be this or that. I have some ideas in my head, manufacture a lifestyle at Hard Rock, which is different for Nobu, because it already exists. It’s easier to do with Nobu. Struan McKenzie: When we were saying people are using Nobu brands to create hotels, we were the guys using their brand to create our hotels. [Nobu hotels] are a natural ﬁt. TH: To be honest with you, we used Nobu to legitimize the Metropolitan, the Hard Rock San Diego, and the Hard Rock in Vegas. To a certain degree we provide differentiation for other peoples’ brands.

Opposite page, from left: Struan McKenzie, Meir Teper, Robert De Niro, and Trevor Horwell, Nobu Hospitality, in the private dining room of Locanda Verde at De Niro’s Greenwich Hotel in New York. Above: Chef Nobu Matsuhisa.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality Design - August 2010
