Flex Menus Fine dining at Noble House Hotels adopts new menu plans that keep cover counts and revenues up. By Margaret Rose Caro
Restaurants at Noble House Hotels are now offering three-course prix fixe meals for less than $30 per person, and concierges are given incentives for referring guests to in-house restaurants.
Flexible menus appealing to current dining habits have resulted in food and beverage revenues that are the same as last year or better, says Noble House VP of FB Thomas Haas. Shown above are Noble House restaurants Six Seven at the Edgewater Hotel, Seattle (above), and Circa 59 at the Riviera Resort & Spa in Palm Springs (below).
At Noble House restaurants, including One Bellevue in Newport, Rhode Island’s Hotel Viking, “check averages have gone backwards, but cover counts are up in all areas,” says Thomas Haas, Noble House VP of F&B.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but survival, in both good and bad times, requires the ability to continuously seek and institute change. For Thomas Haas, VP of F&B at Seattle-based Noble House Hotels and Resorts, this attitude seems to come naturally.
Haas identified changing dining trends shortly before the economic downturn began in late 2008. Consequently, he had already begun developing programs and menus that fit today’s economic reality and that are designed to retain once the economy cycles back. As a result of instituting flexible menus that appeal to both the pocketbook and current dining habits, the company’s “food and beverage revenues are the same as last year or better,” Haas says.
“Check averages have gone backwards, but cover counts are up in all areas,” says Haas. “The lounge business has grown. Our Guest Satisfaction Survey scores have gone up. It’s simple—it’s all about ‘perceived value.’ People don’t want to pay full sticker price.”
VALUE-BASED ENGINEERING
“The need for value-based engineering is important, whether for retail, car, home, or hotel food and beverage sales,” Haas says. ”When food prices started rising, we had to tack that on to maintain a 28 percent margin. A $30 entrée became $40, and higher-priced steaks became $50.” By the end of the fourth quarter, a sudden drop in covers lead Haas’s team to search for solutions.
“Looking first at what was going on with local restaurants, we saw more prix fixe offerings,” Haas says. “So we figured out how we could offer three-course meals for $25 to $29 each. A couple can now enjoy dinner and a glass of wine for about $50. Anyone on almost any budget can eat at most of our restaurants, and we didn’t discount so much that drastic price increases will be necessary when the economy rebounds.”
TWO-PART APPROACH
A two-fold scenario broadens the appeal. An expanded lounge menu focusing on shareables and sides was rolled out, combined with half-portion dinner entrées. ”Our restaurants and lounges tend to flow together,” Hass says, “making it easier to apply this approach across the board, including during the lunch meal period.”
Half-portions, he points out, are not true half portions, and they don’t look skimpy. Half of 6 ounces may really be 3.5 or 4 ounces. And the garnish is exactly the same. “Many moons ago, we got away from the petite portion, the French-style entrée that looks like an appetizer,” Haas says.
The best half-portion sellers, priced between $15 and $19, include halibut, lobster pot pie, sea bass, tuna, filet of beef, and hanger steak. Shareable sides include lobster mac & cheese, lobster mashed potatoes, and truffle fries. “Using high-quality protein is expensive,” Haas says, “and can bring a lunch salad up to $18. But for a half-portion, we can charge $10.”
LOUNGE FOCUS
Getting away from the typical fried calamari or chicken sate, dinner menu items were tweaked and sized down for the bar, structuring the items into small plates. Lobster pot pie in the lounge, for example, costs $20 instead of $40 in the dining room. Shareables are especially popular. “A group of four can enjoy a single $17 seafood salad,” Haas says.
IMPLEMENTATION
Labor costs have not been negatively affected by this program, Haas reports. “It took some training and discipline, but we actually reduced labor overall (both front and back of house) to compensate for the lack of group catering revenues these days.”
Food costs have not had a significant negative effect either, which Haas attributes to using good tools to ensure margins don’t slip. Among the tools in use by Noble House are Adaco Services software for procurement and AccuBar’s bar inventory management system.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
“The new Noble House dining programs are here to stay,” Haas says, but getting the word out is the biggest challenge. “Since we are fully competing with street vendors in terms of pricing, guests need to be made aware of the in-house dining options. We plead with our bell captains and concierges not to recommend outside restaurants before extolling ours and even offer them $1 per person to refer guests to an in-house venue.”
Noble House employs comprehensive grassroots marketing to ensure that additional cover growth offsets check average reduction. The new value-priced menus are promoted through weekly e-blasts, guest welcome letters, check stuffers, hand-out pieces, concierge programs and relationships, condo managers, and ads in local papers. Special promotions, offered nearly every day, are bringing people in, especially locals.
“There is definite growth in local capture, which is now 60/40 in most of our locations. Before, it was 25/75,” says Haas. “Marketing, marketing, marketing is the key.”
