A portion of alumna Melissa Sims’ childhood was spent visiting her paternal grandparents in the fishing community of Grand Isle, Louisiana and her maternal grandparents in a rural, deer hunting community near Jackson, Mississippi.
She cultivated a love for cooking by keeping company with her grandmothers and as a youngster aspired to become an executive chef, Sims said.
On Grand Isle, she recalled going fishing in the mornings and cooking the seafood catch in the afternoons and in Mississippi, there was the staple of deer, fried chicken, collard greens and corn bread.
“So, I had Cajun and what I call ‘low-country’ kind of a banquet to choose from growing up,” said Sims, who grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but now lives in Beverly Hills, California.
Her chef dreams manifested into a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts from Nicholls State University. However, her career path diverged after she took a job at a New Orleans hotel as the executive assistant for three department heads.
“You start to see that there’s a bigger world than you thought, particularly in a hotel when you see there are so many departments and so many different areas to dip your toe in,” Sims said.
Her interest in the hotel industry led her to enroll at the AV where she earned a master’s degree in hotel, restaurant and tourism administration in 2004.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is perfect. Not only can I get more education about my industry, I can also look at it from a different lens in my current job because I went from working in the kitchen to being made executive administrative assistant to the hotel manager, the director of food and beverages, and the director of rooms,’” Sims said. “To see the world through their eyes was, along with the education I was getting, incredibly eye-opening.
“It forced me to look bigger and beyond what I thought was going to be the end of the road.”
Sims is now the hotel manager for the iconic Beverly Wilshire, a Four Seasons Hotel that opened in 1928 and served as the backdrop for the 1990 blockbuster movie “Pretty Woman” starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. The hotel has hosted many of Hollywood’s rich and famous, including Warren Beatty, Elvis Presley and the Beatles.
“The history of this hotel is pretty magnificent and it continues to redefine itself,” said Sims. “The $45 million renovation that we’re in the middle of right now, we’re not even calling it a renovation, we’re calling it a ‘refresh’ and calling it a ‘facelift’ for sales and marketing purposes.”
And while in Hollywood terms the hotel has gotten “a little work done,” it still pays tribute to its “Pretty Woman” fame. There’s a named cocktail in the bar and a special guest experience called “Pretty Woman for A Day” that includes a behind-the-scenes tour of Rodeo Drive fashion houses with a personal stylist.
“We do get quite a few guests who are still enamored with the whole phenomenon that was ‘Pretty Woman,’” Sims said. “This hotel obviously has changed since then, but it’s fun to see how much fanfare is around it and how people want to come and experience that moment.”
Sims has been employed with Four Seasons since 2005 and arrived in Beverly Hills about six months ago from a New York property.
She compares her hotel manager’s role to the duties of a chief operating officer.
“I’m responsible for all things operational, spa, rooms division, inclusive of housekeeping, the food/beverage divisions … all of the services that we provide to our guests comes through me,” Sims said.
The five-star luxury hotel has 395 rooms, includes two restaurants, and “tons” of banquet space with ballrooms capable of hosting 800 people, she said.
“It is fun, no two days are alike,” Sims said. “We do a lot of group business. We do a lot of leisure travel, so you have people coming from all over the world.”
Sims started with Four Seasons as an assistant restaurant manager in New York and over the course of nearly a decade worked her way onto the general manager’s track.
“What I tell people—the hundreds that I’ve done orientation for at the Four Seasons so far—is to just follow your heart and trust your gut because my path has not been traditional by any stretch of the imagination,” Sims said. “I started out in culinary, did front of the house, did learning and development, did people and culture, administration then back to operations.
“I’ve just been all over the place, but in every job that I’ve taken it was something very interesting to me and my heart was saying ‘go for it.’”
In addition to New York, Sims has managed properties in Chicago and San Diego; she has traveled around the globe as one of the organization’s six senior learning and development managers, held a post as human resources director, and in 2016 supervised the construction and opening of a Four Seasons hotel in downtown in New York.
“I always joke that’s my first child,” Sims said. “It was truly building something from the ground up. It was a new build, near the 9-11 Memorial and it opened to such fanfare and wonderful accolades. It’s just an amazing property.”
Sims jokingly compares the difficulty of being hired by Four Seasons to getting accepted into an Ivy League school. She recalled a time when the company had nearly 15,000 applicants for 200 advertised positions.
She attributes her employment success to her UNO degree.
“The ratio of people who want to be hired to the ones we hire is very slim,” Sims said. “So, I think it absolutely afforded me the opportunity to have my resume go a little higher on top. Because I had the master’s degree and it showed that I wanted and cared enough to learn more about the industry. It definitely set me apart.”
