Open Season
A more aggressive, competitive attitude toward F&B's role reshapes hotel dining
By Scott Hume, Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, October 15, 2003
The only thing worse than a bland, boring restaurant is an empty, bland, boring restaurant.
Many hotel companies have awakened from the lodging industry’s continued slump, smelled the in-room coffee and confronted the restaurants sitting off their lobbies. The results have been a strategic rethinking of dining’s role and the rapid development of stylish restaurants that are more than guest amenities and that can be destinations for non-guests.
“The days of cookie-cutter hotel restaurant concepts are over,” says Brian Yost, vice president for restaurants and beverages for Washington, D.C.-based Marriott International.
To replace dining rooms and restaurants that are stodgy or simply unappetizingly functional in design, décor and menu, hoteliers are bringing in high-profile chefs, well-known restaurateurs (see “Checking In” on opposite page) or at least fresh ideas to compete with neighborhood restaurants. This has been a well-established strategy at Las Vegas hotel/casinos for a decade, but the economic downturn has forced similar investments in other markets.
“When the economy was strong, it was easy for hotels to consider F&B outlets as loss leaders because hotels were making so much money off the room side. Rates were high, occupancy was high, so a loss from F&B didn’t matter so much,” says Bob Puccini, for many years the chief restaurant designer for Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants and now chairman of San Francisco-based design and operations company Puccini Restaurant Group.
When the travel-and-leisure industry shriveled after Sept. 11, 2001, and some hotel restaurants were down to 20 covers a night, the impetus to change was there. For the first year after the terrorist attack, however, hotel companies still focused attention and capital on reviving occupancy, Puccini says.“It’s only in the last 12 months that I’ve noticed owners and operators start to say: ‘This is not going to get better quick. We’ve got to attack our losses in the restaurants and deal with this,’” he says.
Miami Spice
Restaurants serve varying roles in hotels depending on individual locations. If a dining venue needs to handle a breakfast buffet for guests, cater to business meetings and serve dinner for guests and, ideally, locals, its requirements are tighter than those of an operation merely housed in a hotel. But neither should ever be boring.
Brisa Bistro, opened last month in the new Radisson Miami Hotel, needs to multitask, but Director of Marketing Brian Mulholland says the space was designed not just to be functional for all those needs, but also to be attractive and appealing in all its guises. The restaurant sports Floridian design touches, including art deco décor elements and pastel colors.
What serves as a breakfast and lunch buffet earlier in the day becomes a sushi bar for the evening crowd. In place of the more formal, possibly French, menu a hotel might have designated for its main restaurant, Brisa Bistro’s dinner menu boasts such local flavors as Sautéed Fresh Florida Yellowtail with Tomato-Cucumber Relish, and Grilled Jerk Chicken Breast with Sautéed Peppers, Onions, Penne Pasta and Creole Sauce.
“When you’ve got hotels in cities known for food, such as Miami, New Orleans or San Francisco, you just can’t have a rush to elevators at dinnertime and have the concierge recommending everybody’s place but yours,” says Mulholland. “There’s no reason why a hotel restaurant can’t also be marketed to local people and introduce them to the hotel. If they like the food, you might get meeting business from it or a catering event or just have additional ambassadors out there saying good things about the hotel.”
Marriott’s Yost agrees. “Our goal is to have guests ask the concierge for a recommendation and be told the hottest new restaurant in town is right there in the hotel,” he says.
Carlson Hotels Worldwide, owner-franchiser of the Radisson brand, is rethinking restaurants at other properties, including creating concepts separate from but attached to hotels.
Fire Lake Grill House & Cocktail Bar—featuring meats and fish roasted in a hickory-fired brick oven—opened this fall at the Radisson Plaza Hotel Minneapolis. Three Rivers Lodge at the Radisson Hotel La Crosse (Wis.), also new this fall, features an Upper Midwest menu offering pan-fried walleyed pike, wild-rice soup and other local favorites. Such concepts display the hotel company’s determination to be more aggressive in competing with independent restaurants, says Steve Hedberg, vice president for food and beverage at Plymouth, Minn.-based Carlson Hotels USA.
A Third-Party Platform
Few companies have revised their thinking as dramatically as has The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co. LLC, the Atlanta-based unit of Marriott International.
Long a strict adherent to developing its own restaurants to ensure that they met the high standards of the hotel side, The Ritz-Carlton adopted the celebrity-chef trend full-force this summer when Norman Van Aken opened a branch of his respected Coral Gables, Fla., restaurant, Norman’s, in The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes (a resort property that also includes the JW Marriott Orlando hotel, where Chef Melissa Kelly opened a satellite of her Rockland, Maine, organic-foods restaurant, Primo).
Norman’s is The Ritz-Carlton’s first partnership with an outside restaurateur, but not its last, says Erich Steinboch, corporate vice president for food and beverage. At press time, negotiations continued with a restaurateur partner for The Ritz-Carlton’s property opening in Miami’s South Beach in December, and third-party brands may be brought into two or three existing properties in the near future, he says.
“We are very happy with the synergies between Norman Van Aken and our company,” Steinboch says. However, such an arrangement “doesn’t work everywhere and it shouldn’t,” he adds. “We have some terrific restaurants ourselves and don’t always need to bring in third parties.
“But what third parties bring to us are brands, and we’re looking for brands. We have great talent in our kitchens and dining rooms, and great training programs. But it is the brands from restaurateurs that are interesting to us.”
Yost notes that while Marriott recently opened restaurants developed by high-profile chefs such as Todd English and Bradley Ogden, it also has had success with chains such as Roy’s and Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Its Marriott hotel in Livonia, Mich., houses Sweet Lorraine’s Cafe & Bar, a popular local chain.
The Ritz-Carlton also is retooling some of its own brands’ menus and décor styles. Lighter, less-complicated dishes are moving to the fore. “We’re doing less fusion cooking, maybe more simple preparations than in the past but still done to perfection,” Steinboch says.
Victor’s, the elegant main restaurant in The Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, was closed for two months before reopening in September as Victor’s Grill. Now under the direction of Chef de Cuisine Matthew Murphy (who continues to oversee the hotel’s FQB restaurant), the operation is less formal (jackets no longer are required for men), and the previous multicourse haute-cuisine menu has been replaced with more New Orleans-tinged flavors. Two gumbos grace the appetizer menu daily, and entrée specialties include Blackened Grouper with Mushroom-Spinach Risotto and Lemon-Caper Sauce, and Roasted Rack of Lamb with Grilled Vegetables and Fresh Thyme Jus.
“We found that in New Orleans, even if you are The Ritz-Carlton, it’s not a place to be formal,” Steinboch says of the decision to change the room. “Casual may not be the right word for it now. Others may take casual to mean flip-flops and beachwear. Informal is properly the word.”
Sheldon Crosby, principal at L’ARC Architects in West Hartford, Conn., which has designed several hotel restaurants, says that casual defined as comfortable is a watchword in restaurant design now. “What we try to do is have a comfortable edge, if that makes sense,” he says. “The degree of comfort has to at least equal if not exceed home. If we’re asking folks to leave the comforts of home, we’ve got to do better, push it a little. If a restaurant looks like the diners’ living room, they’re not going to be happy.”
Connections and Disconnects
Kimpton “creates concepts and designs with the local community in mind,” says Niki Leondakis, Kimpton executive vice president (and married to Bob Puccini). “We evaluate the neighborhood and find a niche that is unserved.”
For its Argonaut Hotel, opened in August on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, Kimpton created Blue Mermaid Chowder House & Bar, a very casual concept attuned to tourists’ needs. In New York City, where Kimpton is redeveloping the Doral Park Avenue Hotel, with reopening scheduled for summer of 2004, a very different concept will be crafted.
“Three or four years ago, when the economy was stronger, an haute-cuisine, fine-dining concept would have been the answer to creating a destination restaurant in that location,” Leondakis says of the company’s first foray into New York City. “Currently, that’s a high-risk proposition.”
Other recent Kimpton openings have been solidly within the “comfortably edgy” dynamic. A 3-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling birch tree festooned with flickering copper lanterns sets the mood at 90-seat Firefly at Washington, D.C.’s Hotel Madera.
“Firefly was conceived before the economic downturn. We already were seeing a desire for more-intimate dining experiences and smaller-feeling restaurants,” says Leondakis.
Demographic and psychographic research on likely patrons in the hotel’s immediate neighborhood and in 3- and 5-mile radiuses around it helped shape the restaurant’s design and its American-comfort menu (with entrées such as Amish Chicken with Red-Chilie Gravy, and Grilled Salmon on Olive-Oil Mashed Potatoes and Wild Mushrooms).
“We tried to create an operation that was comfortable and neighborhoody, yet stylish,” she says. “We wanted something that had enough personality that customers could feel emotionally connected with it, and feel comfortable eating there two to three times a week, like a neighborhood restaurant.”
Puccini, whose company designed Firefly, says its name sprang from the design, not the other way around, and he prefers to work that way. He and Leondakis also agree that a restaurant’s design needn’t—perhaps shouldn’t—be too in-sync with an adjoining hotel’s style.
“I think a bit of a disconnect in styles creates a sense of discovery for the hotel guest,” Leondakis says, noting that Kimpton traditionally uses different designers for a hotel and its restaurant to promote contrasts. “When guests walk in the restaurant and it’s got a completely different style, personality and positioning from the hotel, it can work in the restaurant’s favor. It conveys its independent nature. Nobody really wants to go to a ‘hotel restaurant’ that blends in with the style and personality of the hotel.
“I think everyone wants to secretly believe that the chef owns this thing and he’s got his thumb print on every aspect,” she says. “If it looks like the lobby of the hotel, it just looks like another hotel restaurant.”
Another recent Puccini project (which it also operates) is Kuleto’s Los Gatos in Hotel Las Gatos (Calif.). The intent was to connect it to the original Kuleto’s restaurant in San Francisco, operated by Kimpton, but to give the new, smaller (128 seats) operation a distinctive personality, Puccini says.
“Kuleto’s is in an old structure that has beautiful plaster-cast ceilings and great columns. Very Old San Francisco. Los Gatos is much different community. It’s younger and wealthier,” he says, mandating a different design approach for the market. “We took some of the archetypes, like the columns, and did a more modern version. And it’ll probably do $3.8 million this year on a $35 check average for dinner.”
Chefs and Shadows
Creating a “chef-driven” restaurant is good, Puccini says, and the type of menu being developed is a factor in designing space. “But you need to find a chef who resonates with the kind of food and menu you want,” he says, “or you get someone who’s pretending to do it rather than someone who loves to do it.”
Leondakis asserts that there is a big difference between hiring a well-known chef for a restaurant and simply paying for a famous name, a tactic she calls a “head fake.” Personality does not guarantee profitability, she says.
“Consumers are getting wise to hotels throwing money at a restaurant. A lot of companies are hiring well-know chefs or operators and creating personality restaurants. Right now there’s a frenzy to do so,” she says. “There’ll be a shakeout where the consumer becomes more and more critical and asks, ‘Is that chef really here?’
“Just by paying for a chef’s name, you can create considerable top-line revenue, but there has to be profit at the end of the day. There are a lot of hotel restaurants that created the sizzle and created the revenue but have not yet delivered on the profit model.”
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