Local Finds: MML Hospitality finds success on the edges

Across the street from Mojo Coffee, on a stretch of Magazine Street that is pockmarked with potholes but equally distinguishable for its menagerie of gritty tattoo parlors, stylish boutiques and elevated food scene, is Hotel Saint Vincent, which could easily be mistaken for one of the sundry grand mansions that pepper the Lower Garden District of New Orleans. 

That might just be the idea. 

Hotel Saint Vincent was developed and is now operated by MML Hospitality, whose meat-and-potatoes business had always been in the food-and-beverage business, concepting and running restaurants from Aspen to Austin. MML is led by a troika of lifestyle aficionados: The founders, Larry McGuire and Tom Moorman, are chefs by trade; in 2021, tastemaker Liz Lambert, founder of Bunkhouse Hotels, was added as a partner.  

Austin is MML’s home base and where McGuire, looking relaxed in his office in a crisp white, oversized T-shirt, was born and raised. Austin is the cultural hub of Texas, known for such festivals as South by Southwest and Austin City Limits; its iconic slogan—“Keep Austin Weird”—serves to instruct this independent-minded capital city. That reminder is baked into what MML does, creating vibes within spaces that offer an experience that is anything but standard. 

MML was a slow build at first, like a match that burns down slowly and right before it extinguishes is touched off by fresh phosphorus. The process repeats. It started in the mid-aughts, with McGuire and Moorman opening restaurants; in 2006, the duo opened a barbeque joint called Lamberts with, in an instance of foreshadow, Liz Lambert’s brother, Lou. It was in those early, formative days that McGuire got his education in hospitality, shadowing the Lambert siblings as Liz made her mark with her first hotel project, Hotel San José, on South Congress Avenue. (McGuire likens himself to a quasi-nephew to the Lambert duo.) Back then, South Congress was not the bustling thoroughfare it is today, and the hotel was at the vanguard that helped usher in and remold the area into a locus for creative types. “I was in awe of that transformation,” McGuire said. 

Our Own Thing 

The wonder McGuire had then carries forward. Today, MML comprises 17 restaurants and bars and two hotels, with two more under development. One of MML’s hallmarks is location choice. Consider Hotel Saint Vincent: It’s in a major U.S. city, but the pocket it inhabits is not the French Quarter; there is no 24-hour revelry; there are no beaded tourists ambulating Bourbon Street with drink in hand. Instead, denizens laze in adjacent Coliseum Park and the tourists that do come are there to admire the southern live oaks and Greek-Revival homes. (The actor Jude Law bought a home in the neighborhood, which he calls nurturing and an oasis. Jennifer Coolidge of “The White Lotus” also owns a home close by.) 

Hotel Saint Vincent was originally conceived as an orphanage in 1861 and operated as one for more than 100 years. A century in, the building fell into disrepair and later became a hostel of some disrepute, the kind of place where bulletproof glass shielded the front desk. New owners got hold of it and ripped it down to its original brick. In 2021, fresh off restoration, it reopened as a 75-room hotel, a blight turned beauty with its red-brick facade and wrought-iron accents. It includes the signature San Lorenzo restaurant and Paradise Lounge; in the evening, guests and locals take to the hotel’s porch and patio to sip spirits. Next door, adjacent to the car park, bánh mì and pho are dished out at Elizabeth Street Cafe. (New Orleans has a strong connection to Vietnamese food culture.)  

The property became the first hotel project that McGuire and Moorman worked on with Lambert attached, along with local developers, Jayson Seidman and Zach Kupperman. As the story goes, Lambert passed by the property years prior to its redevelopment and thought it had the bones to make a great hotel. Ten years after that initial thought, she received word that it was under contract. “That is our partner now,” McGuire said.  

Partnering with local knowledge is crucial to MML’s strategy and success, McGuire said. It isn’t structured as a full-scale development company; its focus lies on design and creative vision, dreaming up a project’s look and feel, from rooms to F&B. “We like to partner with best-in-class locals—that’s our model,” McGuire said. It’s something of great importance because MML likes to be part of long-term projects absent short-term exit strategies. “We’re trying to build super-special places,” he said. 

One To Two 

Its latest addition is already something special. In August 2025, MML and its partners paid $92 million for the 113-room Nine Orchard in New York’s Lower East Side, where room rates can exceed $1,000 per night. In keeping with tradition of landing heritage assets in radial neighborhoods of major cities, Nine Orchard is right on target, located on a buzzy downtown corner, surrounded by hip restaurants and boutiques and far south from the tourist packs of Times Square. As a matter of fact, Nine Orchard occupies its own microneighborhood called Dimes Square, a riff off Times Square that is roughly the five blocks on either side of Canal Street between Allen Street and Essex Street. 

The Lower East Side is where the monied mix with the downtown creative set. Nine Orchard, a former bank, stands as sentry and invitation, beckoning those to revel among its Beaux-Arts style design, which includes a domed tempietto on the rooftop, and its three F&B outlets, including Corner Bar, a cozy bistro that abuts Allen Street.  

How MML became associated with the hotel is not entirely dissimilar to the Hotel Saint Vincent deal. Some transactions come together over a smile, a handshake and a shared vision and commitment. McGuire was already familiar with the hotel having lived at one point in Chinatown, which runs just east of the hotel. Word came that the owner, DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners, was looking to sell the hotel. Soon after, McGuire had breakfast with Andy Rifkin, managing partner of DLJ, and the deal progressed from there. “It was a competitive process, but we ended up with [the hotel] because we had a real relationship with the owner. We have very similar ideas and tastes,” McGuire said. For Rifkin, the hotel was a passion project: few expenses were spared to restore the Jarmulowsky Bank Building, which was built in 1912. “It ended up being a very friendly deal. We want to preserve it,” McGuire said. Not much will be changed to the hotel, beyond what McGuire called a “gentle repositioning” of the F&B and event spaces. In that sense, the deal has the feel of someone selling their home to someone else who will carry it forward in its original incarnation. “We want to engage with the neighborhood and make the hotel a cornerstone of it,” McGuire said. 

He is short to call MML’s asset choices intentional, likening the selections to what he refers to as “fringe luxury,” and in neighborhoods that are already cool, but still haven’t hit their ceiling. He’s proud to say that Hotel Saint Vincent, for one, has helped to transform the Lower Garden District. “It’s a very special building and there’s just the scale of where it sits in the neighborhood,” McGuire said. He draws parallels to the Travis Heights neighborhood of South Austin he grew up in, where a quiet, leafy community has become a sought-after destination to live and hang out, largely because of the rejuvenated South Congress Avenue.  

Tying It Together 

MML hotels are distinct for what they don’t have: a brand. It’s not by mistake but part of MML’s ideals, especially as it revolves around F&B and scene setting, and how it believes its guests want to travel. That’s because McGuire is his customers. “A lot of times when I travel, I want to feel like a local and experience cities that way,” he said. “People, now, want to experience things through other people’s eyes, where things are real.” 

Austin is the one city that McGuire and his partners don’t have to act like locals. It makes sense, then, that they should have a hotel there—they are working on one. A 57-room hotel will be part of Sixth&Blanco, a five-story, mixed-use development in the Clarksville neighborhood that will also feature residences, a members’ club, retail shops, galleries, public gardens and, a MML staple, restaurants. The development features mass timber design by Pritzker prize-winning Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, which was behind the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into the present-day Tate Modern. 

Like Rifkin’s ardor for Nine Orchard, McGuire has an intensity for Sixth&Blanco, an enthusiasm because the development literally in his backyard, an acre and a half of land behind his office and around some of his first restaurants. He’s been working on the project for five years now and the expectation is a 2027 opening.

MML has a penchant for following in its restaurants’ tracks. Beyond its multiple restaurants and bars in Austin, MML also operates eateries in Aspen, where it is also developing a 59-room European-style chalet, a renovation of an existing building it bought in 2020. Like Austin, it’s also scheduled to open in 2027. That’s the collection right now, McGuire pronounces: New Orleans, New York, Austin, Aspen. “That’s our four.” 

One gets the sense that this new spotlight on MML was an unintended consequence. Like Pharrell Williams, an erstwhile behind-the-mic producer before the world embraced him with frenzy for his vocal and artistic talent, MML never intended to be a front-facing name and brand. “We struggle with it; it’s kind of just become that as we’ve grown,” McGuire said. All four properties operate and will operate as a collection of independent hotels and there are no plans currently to build out a brand. While Austin might keep it weird, MML likes keeping it on the down low: “We’re not like celebrity chefs or operators; we’re pretty low key,” McGuire said. But he does envision people piecing the hotels together. “I see someone saying, ‘I love Saint Vincent. Oh, it’s the same people as Nine Orchard. I think they’ve also got a hotel in Aspen,’” McGuire said. “We want to be practical about it, but we do think about it.” 

Though McGuire might prefer to keep a low profile, the amount of money MML is investing forces it to be more proactive in burnishing the company and its assets. For a group that hangs its hat on creativity, McGuire will admit that marketing has never been its strong suit. “We’re starting to think about that because the size of the investments is so big,” he said. “It’s about being good at every part of the business.”  

Still, McGuire chafes at the idea of doing anything more than what MML was created to do: concept, design and operate great, convivial places to gather, dine and drink. “Our real love will always be hospitality,” he said