Luxury Hotel Group Ditches Meat for a Year 

Luxury group Ovolo Hotels recently dropped meat from menus at its restaurants, bars, and food services at its eight properties in Hong Kong and Australia. Dubbed Ovolo’s “Year of the Veg,” the initiative will bring a variety of vegetarian dishes to the group’s menus, made with locally sourced ingredients where possible. “We want to be conscious about what we’re consuming and practice sustainability as much as we can because we believe this can have an enormous impact on the environment and humanity at large,” Ovolo Hotels founder and CEO Girish Jhunjhnuwala told South China Morning Post. 

In 2018, the Ovolo Woolloomooloo in Sydney, Australia opened Alibi Bar & Kitchen—a vegan restaurant developed in partnership with chef Matthew Kenney—on its ground floor, making the hotel the first in Australia to operate a fully plant-based restaurant on its premises. Due to the success of Alibi, Jhunjhnuwala—who is vegetarian—decided to remove meat from the menu at other Ovolo properties. “We’re going to do it for 365 days and hope that it continues,” Jhunjhnuwala said. “We’ll see how it goes.”