Culture Trends 2025: Will hotel fine-dining see a renaissance?

“Did you notice that this restaurant has two entrances?” asks Maria Joao Galante, Director of PR & Communications at the Corinthia Hotel, Lisbon.

I confess I didn’t. And this may seem like a banal observation, but it is in fact key to understanding how a cultural shift in dining behaviour is taking shape.

I sit in a comfortable, bright room in Erva, the restaurant on the ground floor the 5-star hotel. Click the link and you’ll not see anything about the hotel. It offers itself as an entirely separate entity. And that’s why there are two entrances.

Erva is a fitting example of why things are looking up for in-house restaurants.

According to a new report dining in hotels is going to take off in a big way in 2025.

Travel tech behemoths the Expedia Group analysed first-party travel data from 25,000 travellers to discover compelling travel trends for 2025, and this is chief amongst them.

“When booking hotels, travellers are not just making room reservations — they’re making dinner reservations, too,” says the study. “Hotels around the world have opened critically acclaimed restaurants featuring Michelin-starred chefs and rotating seasonal menus to attract guests.”

“We changed the concept, the decoration, the staff, we gave the restaurant independent doors so people wouldn’t feel like they were in a hotel,” explains Galante.

The appearance is one of sanitised rusticity. Brass lights and copper cookware flank the open kitchen. “Our grandmothers used to cook with pans like this,” she says as the cod tempura arrives. “Hotels have started to look to the community so that locals can be dining clients too.”

And it’s not only the design that underpins this ergonomic shift. Staff have had to undertake training to de-stuffify themselves. White shirts and black trousers gave way to rolled up shirts and aprons, and the chilled-out approach extends to the behaviour, too.

“We want the staff to be fun and vibrant, and interact with people in an informal way,” Galante says, adding that the staff were initially “suspicious with the shift of mentality.” Unlearning decades of 5-star hotel customer service behaviour cannot be easy, but the interactions I had with the Corinthia gang were easy, lighthearted but still ruthlessly efficient.

The house speciality is slow-cooked ribs, which are taken off the bone by the waiter next to the table. A nice little bit of theatricality that ensures communication between staff and diner. It’s good work from the kitchen team, led by chefs Miguel Teixeira and João Moreira.

The menu changes every month to showcase a different region of Portugal. There is joined up thinking here.

Many hotels report that guests only ever visit the on-site restaurant once during their stay. The first goal is to double that. And offering a well-curated selection of dishes that reflect a true sense of place is the first step to competing with what many diners, myself included, have considered the more authentic city offerings, namely anywhere that isn’t in a hotel!

Oscar and Emmy-winning visual effects supervisor Doug Larmour is no stranger to hotels and often has extended stays due to filming projects across the globe.

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“If the hotel has a fine dining restaurant with a reputation then I’m keen to try it out. However getting a reservation at that restaurant may not be easy, the price of that meal may not be conducive to regular visits, while everyone wants to mix up the flavours of what they eat during a week so one restaurant that plays on the strengths of a particular chef may not want to have a variety of different style of foods on its menu, as having that is often seen as a lack of style,” he tells Euronews Culture.

“I’m a fan of luxury hotel dining and I like it when there is a great restaurant in the hotel as it’s a boon when you don’t have to go looking for good food. The successful big hotels have more than one dining experience at different price points that keep you interested. And if they have a top end restaurant then they will be happy if I visit that restaurant twice in a week and use one of their other restaurants a couple of times too.”

One of Larmour’s extended stays was in Berlin’s five-star Mandala Hotel, a stone’s throw from Potsdamer Platz. Their FACIL restaurant has two Michelin Stars and, as you would expect, chef Michael Kempf has some serious chops.

His Faroe Island langoustine is flavourful and peppery and the accompanying oatcake with pointed cabbage and corn is complemented expertly with its granny smith, lime and chipotle mayonnaise – and the paired 2019 Kirchberg Sylvaner from Porzelt is the finest example of the varietal I’ve ever tasted. It’s an exercise in acids and is beautifully balanced.

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The website refers to FACIL’s cuisine having ‘unexpected elegance’. It has completely expected elegance for a two star establishment. But does the hotel encroach or enhance?

It’s a very linear room. Obvious lines create a clarity and an easiness to manoeuvre but it’s not warm or emotive. Does it display the less approachable side to traditional fine dining or is it more reflective of the culture? A certain precision, an engineered luxury?

Lighting is a little stark in this atrium room and the glass roof is supported by six string-draped pillars, making me wonder for a moment if this is an echo of burlesque curtains that in time will reveal something sensual.

A marble back panel gives the space a sturdiness while a water feature in the centre gives light and a sensation of freshness.

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The cooking has all the colour, passion and finesse that is absent in the space. A truly remarkable lightness of touch is displayed in the caviar dish.

Cream of buttermilk with tofu sits on the bottom layer while fried and stewed cauliflower mushroom combines with Osteria caviar to create a real showpiece sitting in turbot broth and fig leaf oil.

Delicacy and flavour are at one here and the silk texture is sharply cleansed with the citrus peak of an old vine white field blend. Caviar is famous for going rather nicely with itself, but here the flavour and texture of the sturgeon is not sacrificed, just fattened and complemented. The experience is traditional and it seems to be the moving away from this style that is making sense for a future trend, but I cannot help but think that cooking of this skill level and ingredients of such intense quality will always have an audience.

Eating out, eating in

As part of the new study, it is cited that “positive reviews about hotel restaurants, chefs and bars increased by 40% YoY on Hotels.com.” This could suggest that people are becoming more used to engaging with the post-experience communication, but equally it could simply be that the hospitality industry are getting a lot right a lot more often.

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The report also finds that “nearly a third of British travellers say restaurant tables reserved exclusively for hotel guests would make them more likely to book.”

Larmour concurs. “The best hotels need ring fenced resident reservations if they want to keep staying guests eating in the hotel.”

At the Mandala, I was surprised to find the (admittedly excellent) breakfast the following morning was held in FACIL.

Larmour also found this jarring. “I think hotels have to find a way of not serving breakfast in the same surroundings or with it set out the same way. People generally find it difficult to allow themselves to spend a large amount of money on eating somewhere where hours earlier they had a sausage sandwich (no matter how good the sausage sandwich was) if the staff and surroundings are exactly the same.”

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Surroundings matter to diners, and one place with an advantage is Lisbon’s five-star Altis Avienda.

It’s not Michelin dining but the experience offered by their Rossio Gastrobar has freshness at its core and a cracking view of the city as its decor.

I explain to executive chef João Correia my worries about chefs in hotels not being able to truly express themselves as they are part of a larger organism.

“It’s changing,” he says, earnestly. “and that’s why I’m still here.”

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“I can do whatever I want. I can use whatever I want. It was challenging in the beginning to achieve this platform that we created now in which I can buy the Toro (the fatty, sashimi grade tuna) which is like 800 euros a kilo and sell it and make people happy. You’ve got to make the administration and the managers believe in what you’re doing, and to understand it,” he explains.

The bar overlooks Dom Pedro IV Square where the national theatre is housed in a rebuilt 19th century palace. To the east, the castle is lit up like a Lego fort a top one of Lisbon’s many hills, and as night falls the black horizon swallows the Tagus and only the occasional glint from aircraft disturbs the blanket.

I’m served tuna belly with smoked dashi jus (charcoal smoke pervades the whole menu and is ubiquitous on Lisbon’s culinary scene).

“Smoke opens the senses for the drinks,” says Correia bringing a vinho verde to match.

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The quality of the tuna belly flags Rossio’s seriousness as a gastronomic entity. Hamachi in gorgeous thin slices is resplendent in olive oil and coriander. Correia’s clear affinity with fish and Japanese culinary style makes this much more than a wonderfully located rooftop bar.

It fulfils the remit that Maria Galante set out at the Corinthia, that guests should be attracted enough to visit more than once. I suspect I shall be a multiple visitor upon my return.