When guests check into the Hotel Emma, they can sip on a complimentary margarita and spend a morning lingering over a complimentary slow pour coffee from San Antonio-based Merit Roasters and Local Coffee. And just before going to sleep, they can nibble on a macaron from Bakery Lorraine that’s on a pillow instead of a chocolate mint.

These details are more than lovely touches. They’re part of the culinary emphasis that drives the hotel, which opens Thursday.

With nightly rates ranging from $350 for a room to $10,000 for the Emma Koehler Suite, this new hotel seeks to position itself as the gateway for high-end culinary tourism in San Antonio, which to date is better known as a destination for families on a budget.

In the one-time brew house of the former Pearl Brewery, the 146-room Hotel Emma offers an Ice Box in each room rather than a standard minibar. The Ice Box is a small refrigerator artfully stocked with locally produced items — and enough room to hold meats cured at the hotel, or products from the weekend Pearl Farmers Market.

Guests also can consult with the hotel’s “culinary concierge,” who can help guests obtain whatever food-related experience they seek, whether that means scoring a table at a hot restaurant, organizing private chef dinners in a hotel suite, directing guests to little-known pop-up dinners or helping guests find the perfect crispy dog or puffy taco.

And then there’s the dining at the hotel, which will have an upscale restaurant and grill serving breakfast, lunch and dinner; a small takeaway market and grocery with prepared food, staples and sandwiches; and a craft cocktail bar with style to burn.

“I think we’re going to get a different traveler,” said chef John Brand, the hotel’s culinary director. “It’s somebody looking for a new place to discover. I think that customer is out there.”

The culinary focus has driven the entire Pearl complex since the earliest vision of billionaire Christopher “Kit” Goldsbury, whose company Silver Ventures redeveloped the former Pearl Brewery campus. He and his team envisioned a space that would change the culinary landscape of the city and be a home for a Culinary Institute of America campus. Now, with 10 independent restaurants (not including the hotel’s), a weekend farmers market and the CIA - San Antonio campus, The Pearl has been credited with helping to kick-start development along the Midtown Broadway corridor and the culinary scene across the city.

The Pearl’s restaurants offer a variety of cuisines, from regional Italian dishes at Osteria Il Sogno, upscale barbecue at The Granary ’Cue & Brew, exquisite pastries at Bakery Lorraine, vegetarian comfort food, and a modern take on Texas Gulf Coast favorites at Southerleigh. But what’s common in all of them is a focus on items made in-house and from local and organic ingredients.

The rest of the city has caught on to the local, artisanal food trend, with the most buzzed-about restaurants such as The Cookhouse and Rebelle offering house-crafted, fresh and local ingredients as well.

Brand worked to design menus at the Hotel Emma that didn’t overlap with what was already there. He referred to it as playing nice with everybody else. But they certainly fit in with the trends in S.A. dining.

At Supper, the hotel’s flagship restaurant, items include lemon and dill risotto with pecorino; caramel apple and kale salad with comte, quince and marcona almonds; duck confit with Meyer lemon and seven herb salad; and bronzino with crispy potato salad and poppyseed crema.

“The hotel is elegant, but this is not fine dining,” Brand said. “This is not fine dining in the sense that the food is coming from behind a mystery door and there’s lots of yelling and tweezers, but it’s approachable, it’s comfortable.”

Larder is the hotel’s in-house market and cafe, which also will serve pressed sandwiches, house-cured meats to go, beers, wines and some condiments. Perhaps the best comparison is a compact Dean & DeLuca. As the only market serving residents of The Pearl and other nearby apartments and condos in Midtown, it’s likely to get a large crowd quickly.

Sternewirth is its bar, an expansive space that seats about 100 and named after the original Sternewirth at The Pearl, which was the place brewery workers could go and drink during their shifts. But this incarnation of Sternewirth includes a 25-foot ceiling, repurposed cast-iron fermentation tanks that now serve as lounge seating and a repurposed bottle labeler made into a chandelier. Instead of creating a concept, Sternewirth’s manager, Michael McKinney spoke of selecting a wide variety of liquor that can appeal to a discriminating clientele.

“Our whole idea behind the program is it’s about the guest,” McKinney said. “In the bar scene in the past few years, it’s become more about the bartender and we want to get it centered it back to the guest to make sure we’re meeting their needs.” Hillary Woodhouse, formerly of The Brooklynite, is heading the bar.

Sternewirth’s signature cocktail, the Three Emmas — with gin, apricot brandy and absinthe — is named after Emma Koehler, the wife of Pearl Brewery founder Otto Koehler, and the two nurses also named Emma who took care of her while she was recuperating from a car crash. Otto Koehler had affairs with both Emmas and one of them shot him. Emma Koehler took over the brewery after Otto died and saw it successfully through Prohibition.

Of course, this design, service and attention to detail elevate the room rate higher than San Antonio has seen before. That doesn’t faze the hotel’s general manager, Mark Yanke.

“I think it’s a value at the prices we’re charging,” Yanke said. “It may be high for San Antonio, but not for the people who travel. In New York, you have properties with $1,000 average rates. I think this property can compete with any of them.”

It is a new concept, according to Beth Ticku Smith, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing. “We are the only luxury hotel near a Culinary Institute, and we created the positions of culinary concierge and culinary director specifically to enhance our guest culinary experience while staying at Hotel Emma. We want our guests to be treated like friends and family and experience our city the same way a local experiences San Antonio,” she said.

But in a way, Hotel Emma continues a San Antonio tradition of fine hotels that extends to the mid-1800s, when the Menger Hotel was known as the finest hotel west of the Mississippi River.

This most recent wave of higher-end hotels began in 2003, with Hotel Valencia and continued that year with the Watermark Hotel & Spa, now Mokara. The renovation of the Hotel Havana in 2010 into a boutique property and the opening of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort that same year brought new travelers and buzz. The Éilan Hotel & Spa, which opened in 2012, and the recently renovated properties at La Cantera Resort, Hyatt Hill Country Resort, and St. Anthony Hotel are all going for well-traveled visitors who expect great service and amenities.

But the rates at Hotel Emma outshine anything in San Antonio. A quick web search found a regular room at the JW Marriott going for $219, a room at Mokara for $279, $219 at the St. Anthony and $199 at the La Cantera Resort.

These properties, like Hotel Emma, are drawing a different leisure traveler than those who stay in budget properties, said Casandra Matej, executive director of the San Antonio Convention and Visitors Bureau. And that trend is only going to continue, especially now that the city’s Spanish-era missions received designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“With the announcement of the World Heritage (designation), that’s going to draw a lot of international visitors. And a lot of times, international visitors are going to want to stay in that type of property, because it’s unique for that region, it’s unique to San Antonio, and it tells a story,” she said. “There is a market, the cultural traveler, the international traveler, and even a certain part of the millennial traveler who will be drawn to the Hotel Emma.”

But is San Antonio enough of a culinary destination to make the Hotel Emma idea work?

The city is enough of a destination that Eater.com, a high-profile national food and restaurant website, sent restaurant critic Bill Addison last week to check out the city’s dining scene. He found some aspects of the city’s culinary landscape worth touting and others still in progress. His piece on San Antonio is coming out soon.

“It was easy to see that the food scene has hit a growth spurt, and the Pearl Brewery complex struck me as being the nerve center of city’s new wave of culinary ambition,” Addison said.

One item to remember is that a great food scene doesn’t only mean upscale culinary temples.

“Sometimes when people talk about the foodies of the world want a five-star experience,” Matej said. “There are a lot of foodies who want to know where’s the best burger in the city, where’s the best hot dog, what are the best dives — they want all of it, because that provides a different experience.”

etijerina@express-news.net

Twitter: @etij