To paraphrase a certain car maker: This is not your father's lunch buffet. At Merritt Hospitality, F&B executives are rethinking the banquet hall, moving away from traditional hotel menus and setups to embrace a more contemporary, restaurant-like approach. The concept, known as “Beyond Banquets,” is still in its infancy, but planners already say it is working.
Food and labor costs are down, presentation has reached new heights and, perhaps most importantly, customers are back in the driver's seat. “This really is a way to put the customer or the meeting planner in charge, rather than the chef or the director of catering” says Karim Lakhani, senior VP of F&B for Merritt Hospitality.
The new model is defined by small, individual servings, rather than banquet-style delivery. Market style or restaurant style presentation includes the display of single-serving portions with simple labels. Food is shown in lines or circles. Freshness is emphasized. Butcher paper replaces linens.
Menus reflect the concept. They are clean, streamlined, and contemporary. No more fussy italicized descriptions. Maybe a photo or two, a simple item name, and not much else. Think sushi menu. “We think our customers don’t know that rolls come with butter, but they do know that, and we don’t always have to tell them,” says Abby Murtagh, VP of F&B at Merritt.
The traditional banquet plan relied on “fluff,” Murtagh explains. “Now we are coming back to reality. We don’t over-garnish the plate, don’t over-decorate the table. The food speaks, rather than the ambiance.”
The visuals tell the story best. On this side, a glass bowl brimming with a bunch of different fruits, melon touching strawberries touching pineapple. New plan? Lines of little white cups, each with its own fruit. It's clean, simple, and, most of all, personalized. Want pineapple? That's all you need to take.
Beyond conception comes implementation, and the executives here are open about the challenges they have met in rolling out their new concept in a test phase to five hotels.
First up, staff issues. This scheme asks people to do things in a new way, and that takes training. With each new test hotel the executives have come in for a two-day visit. They talk a lot about the philosophy of the new style, the look and feel of it, before going on to the specifics of what goes where. “Initially, it can be a hard sell for a banquet staff because it is so different, but once they get it down it is so easy,” Murtagh says.
Equipment is another issue. Faced with new presentation, Lakhani says, banquet staff automatically assume they need new tools.
Dee Cody certainly was concerned about this. As director of catering at the Sheraton Detroit Novi, she rolled out Beyond Banquets in the spring of 2005. She worried at first that she wouldn't be able to afford all the new presentation vessels or display stands, such as Chinese food containers used to serve up side dishes. She sure didn't have those lying around. “To purchase all of it at once obviously would not fit into your monthly budget,” she says.
Rather than do that, she launched the new concept in phases, easing into executive lunches before tackling continental breakfasts. “Each month we basically focused on one area. We trained the staff in that area and rolled it out. Then we moved on to the next phase.”
So far, Merritt has developed numerous Beyond Banquets concepts, including a sandwich shop, a “chop shop” make-your-own salad station, café-style breakfast, a mini-burger buffet, and a seasonal holiday menu.
Simple vs. Complex
On the face of it, chefs and banquet directors might well fear an idea like Beyond Banquets.
What’s the premise here? Make things individual, catering to personal tastes, and displaying a gazillion small portions rather than one big platter. It certainly sounds like the kind of thing that would make life vastly more complicated for those doing the preparing and serving, even if it does make life better for the customer.
But maybe it doesn’t work quite like that. Look at the old lunch menu, a seven-page manifesto of menu options. Customers picked the meal they desired and that’s what the kitchen made. The new menu on the other hand is just a single page, but it is offered a la carte style, letting customers pick and choose.
Sounds like a lot of work for the kitchen, but looks can be deceiving. At the end of the day the scene back stage is the same: There’s turkey and ham, chips, salads and cookies. Putting them together individually is really no harder than assembling them in a heap. And it has the added bonus of creating tighter controls in the kitchen.
“Because it is more personalized, because you don’t have everything bunched together, you don’t waste as much food as you would with, say, the regular continental breakfast,” Cody says.
“It cuts down on waste,” agrees Nick Calias, chef at the Westin Stamford in Connecticut.
“It decreases food costs and increases revenue ecause you can get a premium on this, with that element of showmanship."
Beyond Banquets also offers a kind of simplicity for F&B managers in that it can be thought of as a series of discrete components. While the sandwich show is the heart of a lunch serving, it is relatively easy to add on an ancillary french-fry making station or a root beer float station.
How to know which pieces will sell? Cody went straight to the customer before implementing even a single piece of the new concept.
“I went out to a lot of our repeat clientele and did a PowerPoint presentation to show them what we were rolling out, and people were very receptive,” she says. “They liked to see a setup where you didn’t have foods overlapping onto other foods. Also they liked that lines would move quicker. Individual portions mean you just pick it up and are gone.”
To validate these initial opinions Cody invited some repeat customers to try the new system for free. She also brought lunch to the offices of former customers to show off the new presentation.
Further 'Beyond'
While Merritt’s basic overhaul of its banquet concept applies generally to menus and presentation, Lakhani says it is easy to extend the concept to encompass themed special events.
Recently, Lakhani helped orchestrate a “South Beach” event, in a tropical room complete with lounge seating, palm trees, white curtains, snappy- looking waiters, and a lounge-style bar. Looking ahead he says he would like to codify that look in the same way he has codified the sandwich shop.
“Then we can easily say, here is a reception menu and here are the reception themes that can go with it, the South Beach theme, the Asian theme, and so on,” says Lakhani. It’s the same basic concept: Keep it simple, offer choices. The payoff? It speaks to the sensibilities of the emerging 30-something market, “and that’s where the big money is.”
He envisions a visual styling that mirrors Merritt’s evolving notions of simplicity in menu design and food presentation. Get it right, and you could tap into a whole generation that is not turned on by the conventional hotel banquet. “You can really take them away and make them feel like they are not at a hotel. It is a way to take your typical mix-and-mingle reception and make it feel like something different.”
Guests loved the South Beach event, and having done it once the banquet staff is certain it can pull off the party again. Perhaps the most interesting payoff, though, came from an unexpected quarter. Lakhani says the sleek new approach yields a return in employee satisfaction.
“We had some young people working part time as servers [at the South Beach event], says Lakhani. “They loved the way they got to dress, they liked the idea of a presentation that was new and cool and hip.” Suddenly the job became fun.
Looking ahead, Lakhani and Murtagh hope to keep the fun rolling. They have budgeted to implement Beyond Banquets in nine more hotels in the coming year.
Why is Beyond Banquets off to such a strong start? Because, Murtagh says,” it is an approach very tuned in to who the customer is and what the customer wants.”
Adam Stone is a frequent contributor to Hotel F&B Executive.
PARTNERS
Merritt Hospitality wants to thank the following partners for helping them achieve their Beyond Banquets concept of clean and simple with freshness:
- Artex International
- Avendra LLC
- Cardinal International
- Cleveland Menu Printing, Inc.
- Fast Signs
- Fortessa
- Guest Supply
- Hormel Hubert
- Island Oasis
- Lions Head Industries
- Oneida
- Otis Spunkmeyer
- Presentation Services
- Royal Cup
- Spring USA
- Steelite
- U.S. Foodservice
- UVM Inc.
- Wasserstrom
