Hospitality Consulting
Pre-opening to full operation
Pre-opening operations, team culture, member experience design, and front-to-back service infrastructure for premium venues and members clubs.
Issue 01 — New York
Marva Babel
Hospitality Consultant. Event Producer. Culture Builder.
“After ten years of building hospitality businesses in New York City, I understand what it takes to make people feel something. The human connection will always be undefeated.”
— Marva Babel, Brooklyn NY
A Profile
Who is Marva Babel?
Marva Babel has spent over a decade founding and operating culture-forward venues, spirits brands, and events in New York City. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, Vogue, the Financial Times, and Eater — not because she hired publicists, but because the spaces she built made people feel something worth writing about.
Today she works with premium hospitality brands, members clubs, and founders who are building something worth protecting. Her practice sits at the intersection of operations, culture, and experience design. She uses AI as an operational layer so the clients she works with can move faster with less overhead.
Featured In
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Section II
What does Marva do?
Four practices, one through-line: building places and brands that make people feel something.
Event Production
Babel Social
Babel Social produces elevated events for founders and women-led businesses, from concept through execution, rooted in hospitality.
Spirits
Babel Spirits
Babel Spirits is an independent spirits brand inspired by cultural exchange and the ritual of gathering. Currently in development.
Cultural Strategy
Advisory for founders
Strategic advisory for founders and emerging brands building community, cultural equity, and belonging into their business model.
Perspective — № 01
Why is hospitality the most underrated business discipline?
Operations as choreography. Service as authorship. A note on the discipline of making people feel known.
By Marva Babel
Every hospitality business is a small theatre. The reservation is the ticket. The doorway is the curtain. What happens after is the show — and it has to be rehearsed and felt at the same time.
Software companies study retention. Restaurants study return. The discipline is older, the metrics are softer, and the leverage is hiding in plain sight.
Continue reading →Section IV
How do we work together?
Marva takes a small number of consulting engagements each year with hospitality brands, members clubs, cultural venues, and founders at pivotal moments. Work ranges from embedded pre-opening operations to event production to strategic advisory.
- 01Pre-Opening Operations
- 02Member Experience Design
- 03Event Production
- 04Brand and Cultural Strategy
- 05Founder Advisory
Philosophy
What does the Babel practice stand for?
Culture is the inheritance we choose to leave in a room. Connection is the moment a guest stops performing and feels safe enough to be authentic. Curiosity is the discipline that keeps a brand honest.
And gathering, gathering is the OG. The oldest, most underrated technology. Better than that, it's analog. The thing that can't be captured. It can only be experienced.
— A Manifesto, Marva Babel
Section VI
Let's work together
marva@odetobabel.com
For consulting inquiries, partnerships, and press.