TMC Hospitality — part of real estate holding company TMC Group — is planting its first physical stake in Orange County with next month’s opening of Maleza at The CAMP in Costa Mesa.
The Irvine-based hospitality company has two hotel brands, Drift and Bode, and six food and beverage concepts Kitchen + Mezcal Bar, Dawn, Dusk, Sidebar, The Sun Room and Maleza. All the restaurants operate inside its hotels.
The Irvine-based hospitality group first launched the Mexican restaurant concept Maleza at its Drift Palm Springs hotel in 2023. TMC’s portfolio of properties is also located in Santa Barbara, Nashville and in Mexico.
The Maleza at The CAMP will be the firm’s first standalone location. It is also TMC’s first project in Orange County, a “homecoming” of sorts, TMC said. It took TMC two years to find the right location in Orange County to open Maleza, according to Chief Executive Philip Bates.
Many visitors to the Palm Springs location came from Los Angeles and Orange County and frequently asked TMC to open a restaurant closer to home, he said.
“The real estate had to make the most sense. It was really about choosing a location that already has a strong hospitality identity,” Bates told the Business Journal.
TMC signed the lease last November.
Maleza will open in an approximately 1,627-square-foot space at The CAMP retail center, built by Shaheen Sadeghi’s LAB Holding LLC. The space was previously occupied by Native Foods for over a decade, then most recently by The Plot.
The Costa Mesa restaurant will be led by General Manager Andrew Parrish.
The menu will have shareable plates featuring unexpected ingredients like miso and shoyu and signature dishes such as grilled maitake mushrooms alongside a mezcal-focused cocktail program.
Managing $200M+ of Hospitality Projects
TMC Hospitality was launched in 2016, led by Bates after he spotted a shift in the industry.
“At that time, a lot of emerging trends were occurring – Airbnb – a lot of different trends in the boutique and lifestyle hotel space,” he said.
Before he created the hospitality arm of TMC, Bates worked at the real estate company’s private equity unit TMC America. He was vice president of investments for two years where he led seven equity investments into development projects.
Prior to TMC, Bates worked at Barker Pacific Group as an acquisitions analyst and at Colony as a senior analyst.
In 2018, Bates launched TMC’s first hotel brand Bode and later added Drift in 2021 to go after the growth of the millennial traveler.
Bates said that he was surrounded by lot of “heavy travelers” with real estate and operating experience at TMC Group when he decided to launch the firm.
Since then, it has managed over $200 million in hospitality projects.
“I think I’ve always been a little bit of an entrepreneur since I was young,” Bates said.
Room rates for Drift average in the low $200s to mid-$300s per night; Bode’s daily rates range from $160 to $1,100 for the month of June.
Out of the six hotels that TMC has opened—Bode Chattanooga was sold last year—two were built from the ground up, while the other four were major conversions of former office and apartment buildings. Bates said the group is still cautious about acquisitions.
When looking at where to open hotels in the beginning, TMC Hospitality followed a data-driven process that led the firm to only open hotels outside of Orange County since there were existing “big players” in the market.
In 2017, Nashville’s tourism was still on the rise and “hotel keys were not keeping up with the traffic,” Bates said. He added that Palm Springs had a similar opportunity with the region’s off-season market.
However, the goal to operate a hotel in OC still exists, Bates said.
