There’s being resourceful and there’s being resourceful. Husband and wife team Andrew Tarlow and Kate Huling, restaurateur and leather goods specialist respectively, require for their separate practises a common ingredient - cattle - so they use the same cows.

Huling has just opened a pop-up store selling her range of Marlow Goods in the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, the same hotel which houses Reynard, her husband’s restaurant. This means you can buy a leather handbag and a grass-fed burger made from the same cow, in the same hotel. All the produce comes from a slaughterhouse within three hours of New York City, creating a hyper-local, fully transparent framework for both businesses. With a foot in the door at the Wythe, Huling is also curating other artisans that are local to the borough.

By employing local artisans, hotels are taking away the "I could be anywhere" blandness that makes up a huge proportion of the hotel world. In the next Protein Journal we’ll be focusing on travel, with a look at how hotels are utilising local businesses; from serving breakfast with coffee made by the local barista to curating local art exhibitions, hotels are seeking home-grown authenticity.