Regenerative hospitality goes beyond minimizing harm. It describes properties and kitchens that actively restore the ecosystems and communities they operate within, through conservation work, land integration, soil restoration and food redistribution. At the top of the market it is becoming the ground on which brands compete.
Sustainability, at the upper end of hospitality, has moved past the marketing story. An operator who is not running a meaningfully sustainable operation today is beginning to lose the guests for whom the question matters, and those guests are concentrated in exactly the segment that pays the highest rates. The forward direction is what the field now calls regenerative hospitality: an operation that does more than reduce its footprint and instead works to restore the land, water and community it sits inside.
The examples are no longer marginal. Singita’s conservation work in southern Africa, the &Beyond properties’ integration with their surrounding lands, chef led farm restaurants doing serious soil restoration, boutique resort developers building around marine protection commitments. A decade ago these would have been experiments at the edge of the industry. Now they are the templates the larger operators study when designing their own programmes. Eneko Atxa at Azurmendi and Matthew Orlando at Amass built their kitchens around these principles years before the rest of the field treated them as table stakes.
Massimo Bottura’s Food for Soul is a useful adjacent example. Its community kitchens in cities around the world redirect food that would otherwise be wasted into meals for people who need them. The point, in Bottura’s framing, is that a kitchen can be a contributor to the social fabric of its city and a serious operating business at the same time. The two are not in tension, and the hospitality and culinary operations of the coming decade will increasingly be measured against both standards at once.
On the plate, the most visible expression of the shift is the move toward plant forward cooking in serious kitchens. Emmanuel Stroobant saw it arriving in his own dining rooms in Singapore.
“I foresee that there will be a growth of more Michelin-starred vegetarian restaurants, especially with people embracing more and more vegetable-based ingredients.” Emmanuel Stroobant, chef, Saint Pierre and Shoukouwa, Singapore
Stroobant also pointed to school curricula that now cover sustainability and environmental protection, which means the next generation of diners will arrive with the question already settled in their minds. Daniel Humm’s plant based pivot at Eleven Madison Park in 2021, and his reintroduction of meat and seafood in 2025, read less like a single trajectory than like a working chef testing where the upper end of the field is heading. Wherever any individual chef lands, the kitchen of the coming decade will in many cases run a different protein to vegetable ratio than the kitchen of a generation ago, pushed by guest preference, ecological pressure and a cohort of cooks whose training took the question seriously.
Kwong Wai Keung described the same adjustment from behind a three-Michelin-starred Cantonese pass, where the tradition is anything but vegetable led.
“As diners are more health conscious, we must not only be careful in our selection of ingredients, but we must also strike the right balance between meat and vegetables in any given dish.” Kwong Wai Keung, chef, T’ang Court at The Langham, Hong Kong
The practical advice for a chef preparing to lead is to develop a plant forward register with the same seriousness as the primary cuisine, even where that cuisine remains centered on protein. The market will expect both registers to be available at equal sophistication. For a hotelier, the advice is to assume that by the time you reach senior responsibility, the regenerative dimension of the operation will no longer be a brand attribute you can choose to add. It will be the ground on which the brand competes, and the guest will already know the difference between a programme and a press release.
Chapter 14, The Future of Luxury and Craft, treats regeneration as one of six shifts reshaping luxury hospitality and the culinary arts, alongside experiential luxury, branded residences, wellness, the next generation workforce and AI.