Background

Cesar Ritz was born on February 23, 1850 in Niederwald (nowadays a part of municipality of Goms), Switzerland, to a poor peasant family.

Education

Ritz was educated at the Jesuit college at Sion, which he entered at the age of twelve. But three years later he left the establishment to be apprenticed as a sommelier at a hotel in Brig. After being dismissed as having no future in the hotel business, Cesar returned to the Jesuits as a sacristan. His time with Jesuits was brief as he left to seek his fortune in Paris.

Career

During 1870 - 1871 Ritz held several positions in the hotel business, rising from a waiter and general factotum into a maître d'hôtel, manager, and eventually hotelier, working at the Hotel de la Fidélité, a restaurant on the corner of Rue Royale and Rue Saint-Honore and the high-class Restaurant Voisin.

In 1872, Ritz became floor waiter of most lavish hotels in Europe, the Hôtel Splendide in Paris.

In 1873 he was a waiter in Vienna at the time of the International Exhibition. In the winter of the same year Ritz undertook the direction of the restaurant at the Grand Hôtel in Nice.

From 1877 to 1887, Ritz managed the luxurious Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. At the same time he was also general manager of the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo until 1888.

In 1887 Ritz bought the Hotel de Provence in Cannes and the Restaurant de la Conversation and Minerva Hotel in Baden-Baden. A year later he opened the Conservations Haus restaurant with the great chef Auguste Escoffier in Baden-Baden. In 1889 the two men were invited to London and became the first manager and chef of the Savoy Hotel, until 1897.

By the late 1890s Cesar purchased a mansion in Paris, which in 1898 became the Ritz Hotel. In 1905 the Ritz Hotel was opened in London and in 1906 – in Madrid. By this time, Ritz had a controlling interest in nine other restaurants and hotels including the Carlton in London.

In June 1902, Ritz suffered a nervous collapse. Although he took some part in planning the London Ritz, opened in 1905, he was never able to return to managing the business.

Achievements

• Ritz and his luxurious hotels became legendary, and his name entered the English language as an epitome of high-class cuisine and accommodation. He was the first to mandate that "the customer is always right". Ritz was a pioneer in the development of luxury hoteliering as well as of hygiene and cleanliness in his hotels.

Views

Quotations: "The customer is always right."

Connections

Ritz was married to Marie-Louise Beck Ritz. They had two sons.

Wife:

Marie-Louise

colleague:

Auguste Escoffier

Georges Auguste Escoffier (28 October 1846 – 12 February 1935) was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who popularized and updated traditional French cooking methods.

References

• Cesar Ritz: Host to the world Biography of famous hotelier, written by his wife.
  1938
• Cesar Ritz Life and Work This short biography, which Adalbert Chastonay wrote seventy-five years after the death of Cesar Ritz, is intended for a readership which is litle informed about Cesar Ritz. He was without doubt one of the most important Swiss of the last century.
  1997
• Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class In a tale replete with scandal and opulence, Luke Barr, author of the New York Times bestselling Provence, 1970, transports readers to turn-of-the-century London and Paris to discover how celebrated hotelier César Ritz and famed chef Auguste Escoffier joined forces at the Savoy Hotel to spawn the modern luxury hotel and restaurant, where women and American Jews mingled with British high society, signaling a new social order and the rise of the middle class. In early August 1889, César Ritz, a Swiss hotelier highly regarded for his exquisite taste, found himself at the Savoy Hotel in London. He had come at the request of Richard D'Oyly Carte, the financier of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic operas, who had modernized theater and was now looking to create the world's best hotel. D'Oyly Carte soon seduced Ritz to move to London with his team, which included Auguste Escoffier, the chef de cuisine known for his elevated, original dishes. The result was a hotel and restaurant like no one had ever experienced, run in often mysterious and always extravagant ways--which created quite a scandal once exposed.      Barr deftly re-creates the thrilling Belle Epoque era just before World War I, when British aristocracy was at its peak, women began dining out unaccompanied by men, and American nouveaux riches and gauche industrialists convened in London to show off their wealth. In their collaboration at the still celebrated Savoy Hotel, where they welcomed loyal and sometimes salacious clients, such as Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Escoffier created the modern kitchen brigade and codified French cuisine for the ages in his seminal Le Guide culinaire, which remains in print today, and Ritz, whose name continues to grace the finest hotels across the world, created the world's first luxury hotel. The pair also ruffled more than a few feathers in the process. Fine dining would never be the same--or more intriguing.
  2018