As a child, Bill Kimpton loved Monopoly. As a grown-up investment banker and entrepreneur, he now gets to play on a much grander scale. Kimpton’s formula of buying up run-down historic buildings and transforming them into intimate, idiosyncratic hotels with stylish adjoining restaurants has made his Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group one of the fastest-growing such enterprises around. The most recent additions to the Kimpton family are the Hotel Burnham and the affiliated Atwood Cafe, both in the Loop’s landmark Reliance Building.
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Twenty years ago Kimpton was working on his second hotel transformation, the Vintage Court in San Francisco, when his concept took shape. “Masa Kobayashi, one of the finest chefs in the country at the time, was searching for a prime space and I had it. We struck a deal and the success of the restaurant brought a 90 percent occupancy rate to the hotel, a rate unheard of for a privately operated small hotel.” His first restaurant, Masa’s was a hit with both guests and locals. At most hotels “guests feel alienated and rush out for a meal rather than eat at the hotel–one reason that hotel restaurants, in general, usually operate at a loss,” Kimpton says. “By keeping our restaurant standards high, we’ve reversed this process.”
The Hotel Allegro, the first Kimpton Group Chicago hotel, inhabits the former Bismarck Hotel, which was built in 1894 at Randolph and LaSalle. After a massive renovation the 18-story, 483-room hotel, by far the largest of the three, opened in March 1998. The adjoining 312 Chicago opened that May, serving Italian-inspired American cuisine created by executive chef Dean Zanella (Grappa, Charlie Trotter’s). Zanella finds the work gratifying, saying, “The Kimpton Group’s philosophy of treating the restaurant as a freestanding business gives me the autonomy and input I would have at any other privately operated restaurant.” Most important, he adds, there’s a separate kitchen in the hotel that handles room service and banquets, responsibilities he’s happy to sidestep.
Atwood Cafe is at 1 W. Washington, 312-368-1900.
