Overheard in Austin at 11:21 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, during Formula 1 weekend: “If everyone has a police escort, does a police escort even matter?” The obvious answer was yes, of course it does.
Overheard in Austin at 3:07 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 25: “I’ve never seen so many escorts.” An immediate and unexpected reply from a stranger: “Hey, I’m not an escort! We’re just having a good time.”
This wasn’t just the weekend of Formula 1’s Austin Grand Prix. It was billed as the “biggest sports weekend” in Austin history, with a Friday night Spurs-Rockets game and a Saturday night Texas-Ole Miss football game before Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli raced past Charles LeClerc, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton to claim the top prize at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday.
And it felt like another big winner at the Austin Grand Prix was Guest House at Turn 20, a new exclusive trackside restaurant/lounge presented by inKind and RDM Hospitality, where guests ate caviar cones, shrimp cocktail, spicy rigatoni, lobster tails and caviar-topped chicken tenders while fueling themselves with potent espresso martinis and properly spicy bloody Marys.
Created by a team led by inKind CEO Johann Moonesinghe and RDM Hospitality CEO Raj Kumar, Guest House at Turn 20 is an extension of Austin’s Guest House restaurant, which has expanded to Las Vegas and Scottsdale and will soon open in Dallas and Aspen. Cedric Gervais, who DJed at Turn 20 and then at Sunday night’s inKind/Guest House afterparty, is a partner at Guest House in Aspen.
RDM Hospitality, with its presence at the track and also in downtown Austin, shifted into overdrive all weekend. A-list athletes, including Chuck Liddell, Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith, came by for dinner. Actress Emma Roberts and America’s Next Top Model winner Nicole Fox were part of the stylish crowd that packed the restaurant on Saturday and Sunday. Guest House sommelier John-Clement Johnson convinced VIPs to linger late-night by pouring 1982 Château Margaux and 2004 Oddero Barolo DOCG while Bipolar Sunshine played his hit single “Stay.” And just like that, everyone at Guest House realized that there was nowhere else they needed to be.
McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown had dinner at RDM Hospitality’s Ember on Friday night. And on Sunday night, the private inKind dinner/afterparty at Guest House welcomed guests including Red Bull driver Isack Hadjar and Alpine driver Pierre Gasly.
There was plenty of pop-up nightlife and dining during this stacked sports weekend, with everyone from David Grutman’s LIV (which had a pop-up at Mayfair) to Phillip Frankland Lee’s Scratch Restaurants (which cooked at an exclusive Clarins event and had an omakase counter inside Guest House at Turn 20). Other prominent hospitality operators, such as Austin’s Tavel Bristol-Joseph, L.A.’s Mario Guddemi and Denver’s Juan Padro, watched the race from Turn 20.
By the end of the weekend, several VIPs, fueled by 2017 Dom Pérignon, were buzzing about how Moonesinghe was the new “mayor of F1.” For Moonesinghe and inKind, all this revelry is work, of course. Many of inKind’s backers and partners, including Roger Hochschild, Peter Pham and Vasanth Williams, were in Austin to check in with the company that has raised more than $1.2 billion and funded more than 10,000 restaurants.
Meanwhile, Guest House will open in Dallas in early November and in Aspen on New Year’s Eve. Then the expansion will continue with a Houston Guest House that’s slated to debut in the first quarter of 2027. New locations will be announced in the coming months.
“We started inKind to change the way restaurants are funded,” Moonesinghe tells Observer. “We started RDM to show our employees at inKind what it’s like to operate restaurants. We’ve been having a little bit of fun along the way.”