Our recent trip to Las Vegas shined a light on marketing in the food and restaurant industry. Our hotel and its sister property had restaurants created by Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Charlie Trotter, Wolfgang Puck, Thomas Keller, and many more celebrity chefs. These are all high-concept places, and they all featured stylish decor and menus that match the theme. And great food, of course. For prices that seem almost obsene, given October's Wall Street meltdown. (But yes, we did partake, and we really enjoyed it.)
Today's "name" chef has a chain of restaurants, a series of cookbooks, his/her own television show, web properties, their own wine labels, cooking equipment, just to touch the tip of the iceberg. In a place like Las Vegas, it seems like every hotel boasts their own celebrity chef's as part of their own marketing.
All the way up the food chain (sorry), companies are going to the bank with profits resulting from the talents of their chefs. I'm not quite sure how this trend became so firmly established, but I wonder what will happy to Las Vegas with such a high concentration of top restaurants in a tourist-supported city. With tourism, and dining out in general, dropping off because of the economy, will our celebrity chefs and restaurants lower prices or close their doors, or will they adopt creative "austerity" marketing programs to bring in customers and get them through the coming months?
I'll bet we see some of both results.
