Recess Hotel & Club Savannah opened in mid-September with 221 guest rooms and several new food-and-beverage outlets, anchored in the 114-year-old Beaux Arts-style Manger Building in the city's Historic District.

New York City-based development and hospitality firm Left Lane reimagined the property, which first opened as the Hotel Savannah in 1912. Recess is Left Lane's second Savannah hotel after Hotel Bardo, which debuted in 2024, and continues the firm's model of restoring historically significant buildings, here with designer Atelier Pond.

The F&B program spans four distinct formats:

• Le Flâneur, the flagship French brasserie led by executive chef Zach Chancey, serving French food through a local lens across dayparts — house-made pastries, avocado tartine and crêpes at breakfast; Niçoise salad and moules frites at lunch; leeks vinaigrette, steak frites with au poivre sauce, seabass Meunière and a cheeseburger a l'Americain at dinner.
• Kilter Rooftop Bar, twelve floors up, featuring Savannah's tallest rooftop pool and Asian-inspired small plates — hamachi crudo, gochujang wings, sushi rolls and wagyu skewers — alongside original cocktails such as the Confluence, a gin Southside with shiso, and the Pensacola, a Hurricane variation built on guanábana, tequila and sotol.
• A 10-seat lobby bar with an adjoining living room lounge.
• The Servery, a Japanese automat-inspired takeout window open for breakfast and lunch, selling juices, smoothies, pastries, sandwiches and salads.

Why no room service?

Recess deliberately skips traditional room service — a cost-heavy hotel F&B line — to push guests into the ground-floor outlets and the rooftop bar, reinforcing what Left Lane calls a clubhouse-like feel.

"Recess is inspired by the creative undercurrent of Savannah, so it was important to us that its restaurants equally reflect this energy," said Vanessa Tilley, vice president of brand and marketing at Left Lane. She described Le Flâneur as a social gathering space built for all-day lingering and said Kilter was designed to let visitors sit above the tree line in famously horizontal Savannah.

What's next for Left Lane?

Left Lane is expanding the model nationally. A Recess is headed to Phoenix, and Hotel Bardo is planned for Pittsburgh, Providence, Rhode Island, and Bozeman, Montana — again in landmark structures such as the 1930s Art Deco Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh and the mid-century Punchcard Building in Phoenix.

"We're excited to bring Le Flâneur to a number of these properties, as well as wholly new dining concepts," Tilley said — a signal that the brasserie format is positioned to become a repeatable F&B asset across the portfolio rather than a one-off restaurant.