ATLANTA — Steve Palmer wants to rewrite the narrative of how hotels and restaurants intersect in hospitality.
As founder, managing partner and chief vision officer at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group — a Charleston, South Carolina-based hotel and restaurant company — Palmer's vision is for guests to enjoy personalized stays and unique dining experiences. But while travelers are used to checking in to their hotel and immediately walking out the door for dinner off-property, Palmer's team has been developing original hotel restaurant concepts that keep guests and non-guests on-property.
"One of the biggest reasons we felt like we could engage in the boutique hotel space was because of our food and beverage, and we often say — it's subtle but important — we're not a hotel restaurant. We are a restaurant that's in a hotel," Palmer said in a video interview during a break at the recent Hunter Hotel Investment Conference.
As the broader hotel industry has devoted time and effort into creating lifestyle hotel brands, Palmer said one of the best ways to promote "lifestyle" is through a hotel's bar or restaurant.
"But what is the lifestyle of a hotel? It's the coffee bar, it's the lobby bar, it's the restaurant space," he said. "The key is approaching it as if you're opening a restaurant on the street, which means knowing the market, knowing where the market is in their sort of dining evolution, and then meeting the market where it is and offering something that's unique and not in the market."
In Asheville, North Carolina, The Indigo Road Hospitality Group has The Flat Iron Hotel, a 71-room property built in 1926 in the city's downtown. The hotel's Italian restaurant, Luminosa, reflects Asheville's appreciation for artists and community, Palmer said.
"When you look at The Flat Iron Hotel in Asheville, it's a very hyper local market, just a super-intense focus on local artisans, local food," he said. "We thought, for us, the best thing we could do is open a local restaurant instead of the fifth version of some other thing that we've done. So we opened Luminosa, which is a modern Italian restaurant with Appalachian roots, hired a local chef. Those are the unique experiences that I always say, no matter how many times we do an opening, they're all different."
The Indigo Road Hospitality Group currently has five hotels in development, including the 25-room Hotel Richemont that will open this spring in its hometown Charleston. Hotel Richemont's restaurant is Two-Bit Club, a Vietnamese restaurant.
During his hospitality career, Palmer has seen a lot of dining trends over the years. Presently, customers are seeking out both local dining hotspots but also want menus that blend delicious ethnic food.
"Things like focusing on local, we were having that conversation 10 years ago, so that, to me, is like a standard. If you're not doing that, you're not relevant," Palmer said. "I will tell you, in American dining right now, I think ethnic food is really seeing an increase. We went through that decade of farm to table, and I think now you're seeing Korean barbecues open more and more. And we obviously are in the Japanese space."
As both a hotelier and a restaurateur, Palmer said food-and-beverage costs are always top of mind. Other than inflated egg prices, there haven't been any effects on prices due to U.S. tariff policy, though Palmer's interview took place in mid-March weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump announced sweeping global tariffs.
"We got a lot of good practice with rapid increases in COVID, and I think it requires being nimble. We print our menus every day, every week, so we're already in a mindset of changing, but we haven't seen — other than eggs, poultry, there's been an increase — but other than that, we have not seen any increases yet," Palmer said.
"We're concerned about European wine, obviously, but on the food front, it's just really being in touch with what's going on, talking to your purveyors. If you're buying local, there's a little bit of insulation from that, because you're not dealing as much with the broader commodities. But I think it's just about being intuitive and being flexible," he said.
Another key to delivering one-of-a-kind dining and stay experiences is by staffing restaurants and hotels with people that make an unforgettable hospitable impression to guests. Palmer said establishing that culture goes beyond "a feel-good word" at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group.
"At the end of the day, a hotel is a building, a restaurant is a building. It's the people that bring it to life, that give it soul, that create vibe and all the buzzwords that we hear now, our people are the thing," he said. "You know, we need them a lot more than they need us. They can all go get other jobs. So I think when you lead from that perspective, you have a duty to take care of your employees."
For more insights from The Indigo Road Hospitality Group's Steve Palmer, watch the video embedded above.