CESAR RITZ

César Ritz (23 February 1850 – 24 October 1918) was a Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz in Paris and the Ritz and Carlton Hotels in London (the forerunners of the modern Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company). He was an early hotel chain founder known as "King of Hoteliers, and Hotelier to Kings," and it is from his name and that of his hotels that the term ritzy derives.Thirteenth son of a family of farmers, he moved to Paris in 1867, where he worked at the Hotel de la Fidelité, then in a bar and later in a fixed-price restaurant.Around 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, he entered the House of Voisin, where he learned to serve and get to know the great international clientele: the Prince of Wales, Count Nigra, Sarah Bernhardt, the vedettes of the theater and the happy life, because elegant women did not go to restaurants.In 1872, he went to work at the Parisian Splendide, and then, in Vienna, at the restaurant of the Three Provençal Brothers; and from there, to the Grand Hotel de Nice, where he became the manager of the restaurant.In 1874 he was already maître d'hotel at the Righi-Kulm, and he met the Swiss hotelier Pfyffer d'Altishofen, founder of the Grand National Hotel in Lucerne, becoming manager of his establishment.He was the first to install bathrooms in the rooms and established a personalized customer service system in a special way, being the beginning of his meteoric career in the hotel industry, which he totally renewed..

After leaving the National in Lucerne, he went successively to the Roches-Noires de Trouville, the Grand Hotel in Baden-Baden, the Frankfurter-Hof, the Terme di Salsomaggiore, the Villa-Hygeia in Palermo, the August-Victoria in Wiesbaden , to the Iles-Britaniques de Menton and, finally, to the Savoy Hotel in London.

Invited by the owner to run the restaurant, Ritz became director of the hotel in 1889, a position in which he remained until 1898. On his initiative, the Carlton hotels in London and the Ritz in Paris were built with English capital. As the culmination of his extraordinary career, Ritz hotels were built under his direction everywhere, in Madrid, Barcelona, Cairo, Johannesburg.

He traveled to Germany in 1899 and began his hospitality profession.

The importance of the Ritz lies in the introduction of a new hotel concept as full-service and personalized establishments, setting the minimum for correct accommodation in domestic terms: rooms with sufficient space and careful and luxurious decoration curtains, carpets, compacts and dressers provided of a basin and a water tank , he generalized the modern bathroom in each room, used indirect lighting and suppressed the wallpapers to replace them with paint; it introduced direct customer service room service , centralized at the reception.

The importance he gave to the cuisine and the quality of the wines led him to eliminate the former guest dining rooms, which became refined restaurants, with small tables for a few diners his association with the great chef Auguste Escoffier was famous ; established a hierarchical differentiation in the service personnel through uniforms and ranks.