Creating Connections

Founder and CEO of LDV Hospitality John Meadow thrives on bringing diners together in culinary hotspots serving up a taste of la dolce vita.

Words: Lauren Jade Hill • Portrait Photography: © Briana Balducci

John Meadow’s affinity for hospitality started early. “As a child I was a hopeless romantic,” he says, as we sit down at his restuarant Sette by Scarpetta, situated in London’s Bulgari Hotel. “Age six, I told my mother at Easter brunch that my dream was to own The Plaza. My first ever ambition was this very realm.”

After studying at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, Meadow did in fact enter the hospitality world via The Plaza, working at the hotel initially as manager of the Oak Room and then as Beverage Director. But his entrepreneurial impulse soon took over. “In 2004, at the age of 24, I opened my first bar,” he says. “It was simple, with a roof deck, one of the first roof-deck bars in New York. To this day it’s one of the best businesses I’ve ever been a part of, but I wanted more.”

Meadow launched his next project, his debut restaurant, in New York’s Meatpacking District, but without the success of his first venture. “I went from this wonderful start to failing miserably,” he admits. “I was 27-years-old and broke, so I said ‘I’m going to do one more restaurant and this will be my career, but if that fails, I’ll go and get a real job’. That’s when I opened the first Scarpetta back in 2008. We were nominated by the James Beard Foundation for best restaurant in the country after opening and got a three-star review in The New York Times.”

This restaurant’s success marked the beginning of the thriving business Meadow runs today. “It was our ‘aha’ moment to really run with and build the Scarpetta brand,” he enthuses.

LDV Hospitality now encompasses a steadily-growing collection of restaurants and bars, with Scarpetta-branded restaurants located across the US and in London. The first Scarpetta celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2018 by relocating from its original site in the Meatpacking District to The James Hotel in New York City’s NoMad District.

As well as Sette, there are Scarpetta outposts at Gurney’s Resort in the Hamptons, The Fontainebleau Miami Beach and The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. The LDV Hospitality portfolio also comprises American Cut, Dolce Italian, The Regent Cocktail Club, The Beach Club, The Seville and Nolita Social – an intimate lounge and cocktail bar tucked beneath Sette that opened in 2019.

Yet, despite his success, Meadow didn’t set out to establish an entire hospitality brand. “Initially, it was just about creating,” he says. “My grandfather was the patriarch of our family and I always looked up to him. He was an architect, so the idea of creating public spaces was something that appealed to me from a young age. To me, restaurants represent a forum for socialising, centred around this joyous communal indulgence of food and drink. Human congregation, people coming together to connect; this was the passion that brought me into it.”

To this day, this philosophy guides each of Meadow’s restaurants, with his hospitality group LDV taking its name from ‘la dolce vita’, meaning ‘the good life’ in Italian.

“To me, restaurants represent a forum for socialising, centred around this joyous communal indulgence of food and drink.”

Sette by Scarpetta focuses on indulgent Italian dishes, with small, shareable plates borrowed from the brand new Scarpetta Mercato concept

“I want to serve food that pulls on the heart strings and makes you want to eat more,” Meadows says. Nothing encapsulates this vision more than the Italian word ‘scarpetta’, which refers to the act of taking a piece of bread to make scarpetta (meaning ‘a little shoe’) to scoop up every last morsel on the plate.

“That’s what we want to give, and that sensibility, whether it’s American Cut, Dolce Italian or Scarpetta, stays consistent in all our restaurants,” says Meadow. “I have no interest in avant-garde theatrics. It’s not that I don’t want Instagram followers – I do, of course. It’s just that we stay very classic Italian and put forth the human passion, so people connect with that and want to come back.”

Sette debuted in London in 2019, and pandemic-related lockdowns hit shortly after. The venue relaunched for a fresh start last September, with Nolita Social following suit in October. “We’re not reinventing anything because we were never fully born,” explains Meadow. “The point now is to get back to where we were going and have that foundation to go forward with, drawing on the optimism within the team.”

Indulgent Italian dishes here span antipasti such as creamy polenta with truffled mushroom and pasta plates like Scarpetta spaghetti with san Marzano tomato and basil. Meat and fish dishes include black cod with tomatoes and caramelised fennel, rounded off with desserts such as crème fraiche panna cotta.

Some of the small plates on the menu are also highlighted at the group’s first-ever burrata bar, a six-month Scarpetta Mercato restaurant concept, which launched last October at Dubai Expo 2020. “Scarpetta Mercato is really focused on the shareable components of our menu, allowing guests to come in all day long,” Meadow says. “It’s funky, eclectic, accessible and casual but still with that same quality.”

Several more yet-to-be-announced openings are also on the horizon. “We have an interesting project in Miami where we’re creating a members’ club with five different restaurants,”

© Lateef Photography

Sette by Scarpetta’s plush interiors reflect LDV Hospitality’s passion for creating spaces for joyous, convivial socialising

he reveals. “That will open in 2023 and we’ll also be announcing some more international openings.”

As the business grows, the vision behind it has also evolved.“The shift I’ve experienced is in what drives me most,” Meadow says. “It used to be in the creation of environments. While that’s still what we do, I now get real passion from the alignment within our team of people having this collective goal.”

He adds: “It’s all interconnected, it’s just that the lens has shifted slightly. More than creating new restaurants, I want us to grow as a group of people. Through the pandemic, the most significant aspect of clarity for me was that I’m fortunate to have all these wonderful people around me who believe in this dream for a collective us and still want to be a part of the sector through all the chaos.”

LDV Hospitality’s collection now involves a number of prominent hotel partnerships, such as Bulgari Hotel London, circling back to Meadow’s earliest inspiration: an appreciation for the hotel environment.“Hotels are this wonderful public setting where people from all over the world and locals can walk into the same place and connect in some way, shape or form,” he enthuses. “For me as a New Yorker, one of the things that’s so appealing about London is that mixture of international people coming together and you really feel that in a hotel like Bulgari.”

He continues: “Every hotel we’re in, we have multiple outlets under one roof, too. People who come for dinner at Sette by Scarpetta in London can then go downstairs to Nolita Social for a nightcap. We can really curate the overall guest experience. We have all these additional opportunities to create and connect with people in a hotel setting.”

Where does Meadow see the group going next? “My greatest ambition, and I’m now very grateful to be able to live it, has long been to open Scarpetta internationally in different communities,” he says. “We have a whole slew of international openings coming up and that’s exciting.”

He adds: “What’s fun for me is how the company has evolved. I’m focusing on the fact people now want real experiences, they want authenticity. Now more than ever, that’s what it’s all about.”

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