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Alumni Spotlight:
ROB MCKEOWN '99
Rob McKeown works across the hospitality, design, and travel industries as a creative consultant. He’s regularly called on by celebrity designers like Adam Tihany and Andre Fu, celebrity chefs and owners like Patricia Yeo of Sa Pa, Neil Perry of Rockpool, E. Michael Reidt of Sevilla, Zak Pelaccio of Fatty Crab and 230 5th, Jean- Georges Vongerichten, and publishers like Tim and Nina Zagat for his expertise. He has worked with global hotel groups like Shangri-La and Banyan Tree, American Express, venture capitalists, and owners of billion-dollar conglomerates in Europe and North America to advise on a range of issues including real estate development, hotels, spas, market strategy, media planning, trends, and restaurants. In 2006 he was invited to curate a global summit called “Beyond Design” for the government of Singapore. The corresponding program of industry elite includes XinTianDi and Chicago’s Soldier Field master planner Ben Wood, Shanghai Tang designer Joanne Ooi, and Villa Moda owner Majed al-Sabah, among many others.
For years McKeown served as
the first-ever greater Asia editor for foreign publications such as Gourmet
(US), Travel+Leisure (US), and Gourmet Traveller (Australia).
In the design world, he was one of the lead forces in style magazine
Wallpaper*’s ever-expanding coverage of the East and, as editor-at-large,
has also been instrumental in the rise of the regional publication,
DestinAsian.
Rob has won awards for his research and work from Pacific Asia Travel Association and North American Travel Journalists Association for travel and lifestyle journalism, The James Beard Foundation for scholarship, and was one of only five people nominated worldwide as World’s Best Food Journalist at Melbourne’s prestigious World Food Media Awards. During 2005, he produced television documentaries about the tsunami disaster for NBC and CBS and served as a consultant for the Gemini Award-nominated production, China Rises, a four-hour series recently released by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The New York Times. A “60 Minutes” segment he created won two Emmy Awards in the 2006.
McKeown’s ability to connect industry gaps and rising trends to business opportunities is helped by the intelligence foundation he developed. His experience has spanned art direction, fine foods, and 5-star line of chef stints from Boston and New York to Hong Kong and Bangkok. He maintains an unrivaled global, Middle, and Far Eastern database of local-language data and international reports that is updated daily and culled from Ivy League professors, on-the-ground correspondents, and key groups of consumers alike. It is from this varied base of scholarly, hospitality, and media-based research that his consultancy, Mangkut, works to unify concepts from creation through to design, front and back of the house development, to media planning, SOP, and business models.
On the cultural and scholarship front, McKeown is regularly invited as a symposiast and lecturer to universities such as Oxford in the United Kingdom and Tufts University in the United States. Conversational in Thai and Mandarin, he travels on average to five–seven countries a month and visits thousands of hotels, restaurants, and hospitality concepts a year to keep current on trends. In all, he has worked in over 50 countries and traveled to many more during his career. McKeown works with Winkreative, the European-based creative media firm owned by Wallpaper* founder Tyler Brule as its Asia consultant. He works independently through his own company, Mangkut, which works with clients on four continents across dozens of industries.
Roberta and Bill Dowling recently met up with Rob in Hong Kong. Look for his recent articles in the December Food & Wine column “Where to go next: Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei;” and upcoming in the Boston Globe travel section.