Claire Fontaine on Luxury F&B as a Revenue Engine

Food and beverage has long occupied an ambiguous position in luxury hotel economics — simultaneously central to the guest experience and notoriously difficult to run profitably. Claire Fontaine has spent time across the properties that are getting this right, and her account of what distinguishes them is instructive for anyone thinking about the commercial and experiential dimensions of hotel F&B.

The transformation she describes is fundamentally about audience. The luxury hotels generating the strongest returns from their restaurants and bars have stopped thinking about their F&B operation as a service for hotel guests and started thinking about it as a destination that happens to sit inside a hotel. That reframe changes every decision downstream — from the reservation model to the staffing structure to how the kitchen communicates with the front of house. When your restaurant is genuinely competing for covers in the local market, rather than waiting for hotel occupancy to fill the room, the commercial logic and the operational discipline both shift accordingly.

Claire talks at length about provenance and local sourcing, which she argues has graduated from a marketing claim to a genuine competitive differentiator at the top of the market. The guests arriving at flagship European and Asian properties in 2026 are not impressed by farm-to-table language. They have heard it everywhere. What moves them is specificity — the chef who visits the farm, the sommelier who can tell you the name of the grower, the menu that is genuinely impossible to replicate in another city because it depends on ingredients that do not travel. This is not a sustainability play, or not primarily. It is a product differentiation play, and the properties executing it most convincingly are seeing the results in covers, average spend, and return visit rate.

The conversation turns to the celebrity chef model, which Claire describes as under real pressure. Properties that have built their F&B identity around a single personality face meaningful risk when that partnership ends — and the economics of retaining major culinary names continue to escalate. The more durable approach, she argues, is building culinary identity around the team, the provenance story, and the culture of the kitchen itself. These things survive changes in personnel in a way that a named chef association does not.

She closes with what she describes as one of the most underdeveloped revenue opportunities in luxury hospitality: the non-alcoholic beverage programme. Demand from guests who do not drink alcohol — whether by choice, for health reasons, or for cultural reasons — is growing significantly, and the properties meeting it with serious, craft-led non-alcoholic menus are generating substantial incremental revenue from a guest segment that was previously underserved.