What Luxe Hospitality Can Learn About Engaging the Senses From a Live-Fire Chef
Photo Credit: Pictured are antelope at dawn at Belmond Eagle Island Lodge in Botswana. Belmond partners with Leica to host First Light nature walks. Hospitality brands can create luxury experiences for guests with offerings that deeply engage the five senses. Belmond
Skift Take
The state of luxury is evolving and morphing. And the commonality of those who are forging resonant experiences is that they are looking outside of some of the tried-and-true formulas, mining heightened sensory territories that evoke something deeper in guests.
On Experience
Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.
[caption id="attachment_366852" align="alignright" width="207"] Chef Francis Mallmann, master of open-fire cooking. Photo: Best Made Company[/caption]
Francis Mallmann is an unlikely culinary hero. He’s a Patagonia-based chef who frequently retreats to a remote Argentine island to think, study, and cook over beautiful, lovingly crafted open-air flames.
He was propelled from South American cult figure to global culinary fame with the first season of Netflix's Chef's Table. A true bon vivant, on the show he spun a tale of his background, having been subtly rebuffed by French culinary society and finding his precise methodology and approach to cooking — and life.
His cooking is deeply sensory: Think beautifully crafted fires with varying types of wood for specific types of heat. How he talks about cooking is not unlike how a shaman talks about gently conjuring a spirit. Imagine meat cooking in adobo style, steak sizzling on a plancha-style flat top or huge chickens suspended
