Every few months a European hospitality name announces an American outpost, and every few months I get asked whether it will work. The honest answer is that it depends less on the brand than on the pace — and the past two years have produced three live case studies that say more about the transatlantic bridge than any trend report.
The slow one: Maybourne
The Maybourne Hotel Group — Claridge's, The Connaught, The Berkeley, The Emory, and its own Riviera property at Roquebrune-Cap Martin — opened its first American address, The Maybourne Beverly Hills, in 2023. It is now into its second consecutive year of Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star recognition. What is instructive is where the group chose to hold the line. It did not hand the property to a local studio: it brought Bryan O'Sullivan across with it — the hand behind the Connaught's Red Room and the penthouse at Claridge's — along with the imported pieces that travel, the Dante bar most visibly. Continuity of hand was the point. The discipline sat in the pace instead: one American hotel, three years in, and no second announced. For a group of that size, restraint on the second door is a decision, not a delay.
The deliberately slower one: Cheval Blanc
LVMH's Cheval Blanc has been open about running what it calls a "very slow" expansion strategy. New York and London are both on the group's list of cities it is "exploring," with no confirmed date for either. Its next confirmed opening after this year's Cheval Blanc Pitrizza — a management takeover of the storied Hotel Pitrizza on Sardinia's Costa Smeralda, not a ground-up build — is Dubai, and LVMH itself has said that one is still four or five years out. For a house with LVMH's balance sheet, the restraint is the strategy: Cheval Blanc has five Maisons worldwide after more than a decade under the LVMH banner, a pace that looks glacial next to a group like Aman or Rosewood and is clearly intentional. The lesson for anyone advising a European house on a US entry: capital is not the constraint. Sequencing is.
The one that took ninety years, on purpose
The clearest transatlantic case study, though, predates all of this. Harry's Bar opened in Venice in 1931. The Cipriani family did not open in New York until 1985, with Harry Cipriani inside the Sherry-Netherland — more than half a century of running the original before exporting it. They bought the Wall Street building that now houses their private club and residences in 1997, and did not open Casa Cipriani New York, the members' concept built for the American market specifically, until 2021 — a full ninety years after Harry's Bar's front door first opened. The family is now extending the same model to Milan and, per its own announced plans, into Miami's Brickell neighbourhood, with a beachfront Casa Cipriani in design and a Hospitality Fund earmarked for members' clubs in Geneva, Madrid, Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo — a slate that treats each city as its own negotiation rather than a rollout.
What actually breaks when Europeans rush
The structural trap is not taste, it is compensation. Restaurant service in continental Europe runs on salaried staff and split shifts; American front-of-house economics run on tipping, which by some estimates supplies well over half of server income. European operators who have tried to import a no-tipping, service-charge model into the US have found the reverse of what they expected: staff, not guests, revolt. Reported attrition in US restaurants that dropped tipping has run as high as 30–40% of legacy front-of-house teams, because take-home pay fell even where the sticker price didn't. A European group opening in America has to choose, deliberately, which parts of its operating model travel and which have to be rebuilt from the studs — starting with how the people in the room get paid.
None of this is a case against expansion. It is a case for treating the Atlantic as a genuine border, not a time zone difference — which is, not coincidentally, the exact service I sell.
— Camille