The chef and model Roze Traore has checked the big-name boxes in New York City that lead to prominence in his dual professions.

Mr. Traore’s résumé includes stints at Eleven Madison Park and the restaurant at the NoMad Hotel. He’s worked as a private chef for high-profile clients, including the Soho House, a private club in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, and last year he catered the Guggenheim International Gala. His modeling career has landed him gigs with Cole Haan and Louis Vuitton.

Now, he’s headed to the West African nation of Ivory Coast, where he’s opened a boutique hotel and restaurant in a palm-tree-lined beach resort area called Grand-Bassam.

Celebrity chef and model Rōze Traore has spent the past two days careening around Grand Bassam, attempting to source artist’s canvases. Failing to find any in the popular coastal resort town—or indeed, the whole of Côte d’Ivoire—his assistant eventually hopped on a flight to neighboring Ghana, where the goods were finally located.“I have never been so happy to see a blank canvas,” says Traore, when we speak via Zoom in March. His backdrop is an inviting, sapphire-blue swimming pool, the jewel in the crown of his eponymous hotel, La Fourchette de Rōze. Launched in January, it’s ground zero for a brand new, all-inclusive artist residency, which welcomed its first three painters this month.

Traore opened La Fourchette de Rōze in January, with the mission of bringing something new to his ­parents’ native culinary culture. When he decided to open his own restaurant, he knew it would be in Grand Bassam, the beach town outside Abidjan where his grand­parents had taken him on vacations when he was a child.

The popular tourist destination was impacted by a 2016 terrorist attack, which left the community reeling and led to a decline in visitors, but since then, the arts and culture scene has helped the town flourish.

The buzz from La Fourchette de Rōze’s opening is also boosting tourist interest. “I wanted to pick a place that was special and meaningful [so] when I did open, it had a true identity of who I was,” Traore says. “These are my roots. This is where my family came from.”

Rōze Traore was in a rut. The 32-year-old chef was hard at work developing his first ever hotel, La Fourchette de Rōze, in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire. But creatively, he was running on empty. That’s when he found art.

His obsession has made its way into the boutique hotel, which opened in January, where an artist-in-residence program unique to the region is taking root. (The latest round of creators on deck: Lucas Cristino, Franck Ezan, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, and Cédric Tchinan.) Inspired by his friend Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock residency in Senegal, Traore hopes to provide time and space for African artists to work and develop rich connections to one another.