“My grandmother really wanted me to be a banker,” says Düsseldorf, Germany-born Marcus Bauder.
“She was horrified when I told her I was drawn to hospitality. After we completed the equivalent of high school, all my friends were going into finance, but I had a job at Breidenbacher Hof cleaning female toilets,” recalled the general manager of the Shangri-La Hotel, Tokyo. It was immediate good training. He was schooled by then-General Manager Welf Ebeling. Georg Rafael, whose company managed the hotel, was often around.
Looking back, Bauder has no regrets about taking the German apprenticeship route rather than going to hotel school. His mentors have helped more than any formal school training, he said firmly.
“Not long ago Mandarin Oriental, with whom I was working in Bangkok, wanted me to do an MBA as it would be helpful in getting promotion to GM, even though I knew some of the company’s senior directors did not have one.”
Bauder’s mentors list today is topped by his current boss, Shangri-La’s Executive Vice President Wolfgang Krueger, based in Hong Kong. It was Krueger who hired him to Shangri-La in 2006 and brought him back earlier this year. Bauder also admires the passion and energy of Christian Grage, GM when he was EAM/F&B at The Corinthia Prague, Czech Republic.
Food remains a key element in the Bauder business plan. As in all top hotels in Japan, Tokyo’s 200-room Shangri-La, leased from the Mori Trust, finds big local take-up for its restaurants. The choices include, not surprisingly, Japanese, but also Italian. Tokyo’s fashionista ladies-who-lunch flock up to the 28th-floor, 110-seat Piacere—“Pleasure”—restaurant to an ambience by top Hong Kong-based designer André Fu, with more than a little help from Murano, makers of the room’s golden chandeliers. Thirty percent of these ladies are regulars, and that number is rising. They obviously like a beautiful hotel (there is a real gold collage on the wall running the whole length of the extended front desk, and there are over 2,000 original artworks throughout the property).
Bauder appreciates all this local business. He fully supports his Italian chef Andrea Ferrero’s obsession with products that are natural and organic. Piacere serves prosciutto from Nanshu Farm, Kagoshima, which has a waitlist of six months. Sourdough loaves are supplied by an artisan baker who studied pizza making and uses half local and half imported-Italian water. The hotel’s breakfast menu includes yogurt from Makae Ranch, Mount Fuji, preserves from Nakahira Farm, Nagano, and butter from Taiki Farm, Hokkaido.
“On June 6th, 2016, the chef, with purchasing manager, director of communications and a movie crew, flew to Hokkaido and spent five days visiting our supplier farms, plus local markets and restaurants. I am now going through their videos and these will be posted on YouTube in September, a better return on investment than putting them up now, during the summer vacation,” explained the banking-refusenik.
“I believe this will have far more effect than the occasional expensive appearances by guest chefs that everyone else in our competitive set does. Such events involve flying in not only the celebrity name but at least one assistant, and then you have to sell all the seats. By showing that our chef really does care about natural, healthy products we are appealing to so many senses. Promoting our suppliers will be more effective, and far less costly,” said Bauder-san—who then went off to perfect his command of the local language, currently rudimentary but benefiting from help. “I met my Japanese wife in an elevator at Grand Hyatt Tokyo, but that is a long story,” he laughed.