VANCOUVER, Canada, October 20, 2026. The Luxury of Attention: What the World’s Greatest Hoteliers and Chefs Know About Leadership (Black Truffle Press) launches today. The book distills eighty conversations with the world’s finest hoteliers and Michelin starred chefs, conducted across five continents, into a single leadership discipline: attention. It is written for the people who run hotels, restaurants and the service businesses around them, and for any leader who wants to understand what separates the very best from everyone else.
The interviews include the leaders behind Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris, The Savoy in London, The Plaza in New York, Four Seasons Florence, Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills and Rosewood Hong Kong, and chefs including Eric Ripert, José Andrés, Joan Roca, Virgilio Martínez, Ana Roš and the late Anthony Bourdain.
“Every person in this book built a career on the same thing: paying close attention to another human being and acting on what they noticed,” said Kanani. “In an age of AI, that is the one thing no system can do for us, and it is becoming the rarest thing a business can promise. The hoteliers and chefs here have been practicing it for decades, and they were generous enough to explain how.”
The Luxury of Attention shows how these operators turn attention into leadership, and leadership into experiences people never forget. Their edge is not budget or brand. It is a way of noticing that any leader can practice, and that modern life is steadily training out of us. Organized in three parts and fourteen chapters, the book follows the journey from becoming a leader to mastering the craft and confronting what comes next: the calling and the apprenticeship; creativity, perfection, the human touch, anticipation and recovery; technology, resilience and the future of luxury. From the kitchens come the chapters restaurant leaders will recognize first: the apprenticeship in an era of shortcuts, holding a three star standard without a culture of fear, and what the best teams do on the night a service breaks.
A free Field Guide and instructor kit accompany the book, with a companion library of more than 200 pages at theluxuryofattention.com. The Field Guide turns each of the fourteen chapters into a lesson of about fifteen minutes, paced over three weeks, with a self check at the end of each one. A printable workbook collects the exercises. The instructor kit adds a 22 page teaching guide and a course map that fits a one semester module in a hospitality management or culinary program.
“What these leaders know is already in the book,” Kanani said. “The Field Guide and the instructor kit make that learning something a class or a team can work through together. For students, managers and anyone who aspires to excellence in this work, I wanted the barrier to be zero.”
The companion library also answers 85 questions that hospitality leaders and those entering the industry ask most, defines the book’s fifteen key ideas, gives a page to each of the eighty people interviewed, and places the book among a reading list of eighteen titles on hospitality and leadership, with companion guides for readers of Setting the Table, Unreasonable Hospitality and What Could Possibly Go Right?
Hubert Joly, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and former CEO of Best Buy, calls the book “a master class in leadership, persistence, and creativity, with lessons that reach far beyond the realm of hospitality.” Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy and former Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy at Airbnb, calls it “the most thorough syllabus I’ve read.”
The Luxury of Attention is available in paperback, hardcover and Kindle editions at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBNV5V8G and on Amazon in Canada, the United Kingdom and other markets. Instructors can request desk copies at https://theluxuryofattention.com/educators/.
About the author
Rahim B. Kanani is the author of The Luxury of Attention and the two volume series A Wealth of Insight: The World’s Best Luxury Hoteliers (2017) and The World’s Best Chefs (2019), which carried a foreword by Ferran Adrià. He has interviewed more than 600 leaders across hospitality, business, politics and the arts, including eighty of the world’s most decorated luxury hoteliers and Michelin starred chefs. Bio, photograph and cover: https://theluxuryofattention.com/author/
About Black Truffle Press
Black Truffle Press publishes books on leadership and hospitality by Rahim B. Kanani.
Media contact
press@theluxuryofattention.com