By holding two disciplines at once: staying as pure as possible while continuing to evolve. The operators I interviewed changed constantly but in small increments, refused to disturb the things they had already got right, and said no to any growth that would have required lowering the standard or splitting the senior team's attention.
Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, gave me the answer in one sentence, and the two halves of it do different work.
“The key is to stay as pure as possible while trying to evolve.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
Stay pure means refusing the deals, the trends and the guest preferences that would, if accommodated, turn the property into something it is not. Try to evolve means refusing the opposite temptation, which is to calcify into a museum of the property’s own past. The hoteliers and chefs I interviewed who endured did so because they held both at once, in tension, every day, for decades. Neither on its own is enough. The property that only evolves becomes something else. The property that only preserves becomes irrelevant.
The practical version of evolving without eroding is incremental. Eneko Atxa of Azurmendi in Larrabetzu, Spain, told me his kitchen does not believe in radical changes from one day to the next. It believes in reflection, observation and calm, and in constant but small change, with one rule attached: the things that are already great do not get changed. The menu, the technique and the room are continuously refined, but no single change is large enough to disturb what makes Azurmendi recognizable. His dishes, as he puts it, are alive and never finished, and yet the kitchen’s identity persists across every version.
Growth proper, the second property or the third, is where identity is most often lost, and the people I interviewed were specific about why. An investor proposing an expansion that requires lowering the hiring standard, or splitting the senior team’s attention across two new properties, or compressing the development timeline that produced the existing standard, is making a request that is almost always corrosive. The operator who accepts it will, two or three years later, have an original property whose standard has slipped and a second property whose standard never reached the original. The operator who declines gives up this year’s economics and keeps the asset that attracted the investor in the first place.
The same arithmetic applies to the chef with three consulting offers in three cities. Some of those offers are worth taking: the right partner, the right city, the right time. Most are not. The chef who accepts every offer that flatters them is, within five years, running a brand spread too thin to hold its standard. The discipline is saying yes to the right one and no to the others, repeatedly, with the compass set to what the property is rather than to what the market is excited about.
What protects identity through growth is substance. Sjefke Jansen, then general manager of Belmond Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg, described an industry that no longer sells commodities, and a property whose 141 years are its operating substance rather than a marketing line.
“Selling a commodity is not difficult, offering something authentic is.” Sjefke Jansen, then general manager of Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, St. Petersburg
A property that knows exactly what its substance is can grow around it. A property that has only a marketing position will find that position copied within eighteen months by whoever expands fastest.
Chapter 11, Staying True, follows this through the courage to say no, brand as substance, identity rooted in place, and the test of whether an identity survives its founder.