Nearly everyone in hotel food and beverage operations must in some context address today’s tough economic circumstances. F&B programs have been forced to reevaluate their formats, menus, and service to adjust to the shrinking budgets of guests and corporations, as well as the changing expectations of diners. Even Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, a name synonymous with luxury, is transforming its restaurants to meet the means and tastes of guests. The difference is that Four Seasons began this transformation several years ago.

When Guy Rigby, Four Seasons VP of F&B for the Americas, took the helm as GM of the Four Seasons Vancouver in 2005, he inherited Chartwell, a fine dining restaurant of great acclaim and heritage, but, by then, past its prime. The stately venue’s nights of being completely booked had ebbed to only weekends, and lunch was discontinued due to lack of business. Chartwell’s days as the place for a power lunch or an opulent night out in Vancouver were over. But in Rigby’s mind, renovating and retooling were not the answers.

“Whether it was sustainable or not wasn’t the question; [Chartwell] wasn’t relevant,” says Rigby, who saw that it was not the restaurant itself but the style of restaurant that didn’t resonate with his guests and potential Vancouver clientele. Rigby acknowledged the charm of the venerable establishment but knew customers balked at the price and stuffiness of a fine dining atmosphere.

“I believed people were no longer going out to these fancy [fine dining restaurants] with complicated food, expensive entrées, and the ambiance of library rooms, with the gentle clinking of glasses,” Rigby says. He envisioned a more contemporary restaurant with the simple flavors, more affordable prices, and dramatic atmosphere that his target clientele wanted.

Rigby contracted EDG, an interior architecture and design firm from the San Francisco area, to create the drama he says was lacking for the restaurant’s rebirth as the more casual Yew. EDG gave Yew an open, twostory space with wood and stone of the Pacific Northwest and modern touches of metal and glass, including an etched-glass-enclosed private dining room for 10 with a grand glass sculpture suspended from the ceiling. The design also opened up the kitchen, added a raw bar and a dessert station visible to the dining room, and absorbed the bar and the Garden Terrace area that previously stood separate from the restaurant. Rigby says the EDG design gives Yew a sense of place and sets guest expectations for an exciting dining experience.

To help meet those expectations, the Yew menu needed to excite the palate with vibrant flavors and dramatic presentations in order to match the thrill of the room’s design. Rather than being pigeonholed as a seafood restaurant, steakhouse, or the like, Rigby wanted a menu to uphold Four Seasons standards and to appeal to a wide spectrum of diners. He also wanted Yew “to be associated with the great food restaurants of the West Coast,” and he knew where to find the inspiration he needed.

Rigby took his executive chef and F&B director to Vegas. “We ate at 10 of the most popular restaurants in Las Vegas,” he recalls. “We wanted to understand how to create drama on the plate. We wanted to appeal to all the senses.”

The team returned to Vancouver and solidified Yew’s menu. The result was “Urban West Coast Cuisine.” Today, Executive Chef Oliver Beckert uses his classical training and global experience to continue taking the menu out of the ordinary, to satisfy today’s desire for dishes with far-flung cultural influences created with as many local and fresh ingredients as possible. Beckert—who took on his position and composed his first menus earlier this year to succeed the menu handed down from Yew’s first executive chef, Rafael Gonzalez—offers a fennel and potato seafood bisque with Spanish saffron and roasted garlic aioli for $11 (CAN). A braised beef short rib rigatoni is served simply with wilted arugula, pine nuts, and pecorino cheese for $22. Chef Beckert retained the black truffle mac & cheese from Gonzalez’s menu “for fear of an uprising.” And the raw bar presents a sampler selection of saffron and chili marinated octopus, jalapeño scallop ceviche, spicy ahi tuna tartar, and a lobster/mango roll, each for $25.

The new menus maintain their pan-cultural breadth while celebrating the agricultural diversity and bounty of British Columbia’s land and sea, but with a twist. Beckert took the reins during a down economy, so he trimmed menu items to their essential flavors and limits any frivolous embellishments.

“We stayed away from high-end cuts and other expensive ingredients,” Chef Beckert says, “and we have reduced prices 10 to 20 percent since I arrived. People today are looking for value—even bargains—and uncomplicated food, and a lot of restaurants are looking at us and trying to copy what we’re doing.”

The trends appear to be global as well, with international guests “positively surprised” by Yew’s food, service, and atmosphere. Regarding the move past “classic” fine dining, Beckert says, “The business levels show that they did the right thing.”

The man overseeing those business levels, current Four Seasons Vancouver General Manager Simon Pettigrew, observes that the change to a more casual, affordable venue has given him a revitalized lunch scene and a dinner crowd that shows up all week. “Lunch is almost exclusively local, perhaps 85 percent,” he says, “and dinner might be 50-50 local and hotel guests.”

Pettigrew credits Yew’s “No Passport Required” promotion with stimulating a good deal of buzz locally, as well as among frequent guests. Four Seasons Vancouver partners with sister Four Seasons properties to offer a $35 three-course meal that recreates the regional flavors of each property. A new region or nation is highlighted every month, among others. Guests can also opt to pair courses with wines and spirits of the featured region.

Yew’s wine program is comprehensive and covers a “huge variety of price points and varietals,” but the real beauty for wine lovers is that Pettigrew offers all of Yew’s nearly 250 wines by the glass. The stipulation is that you must buy two glasses to open the bottle. Then Yew’s Le Verre de Vin system is stocked with opened bottles of gorgeous wines that guests might luck upon on any night at by-the-glass prices. The wine list is devised to hit the “sweet spot,” with a predominance of bottles that guests desire and can afford, and features a good number of bottles from British Columbia’s Okanagan wine region.

Rigby’s prescience in emphasizing a new dining paradigm for the Four Seasons in the Americas may give the brand’s many properties a head start in sailing out of the economic doldrums. As well as the Yew transformation that happened under his watch as that property’s GM, Rigby points to successes for the brand with more casual dining and star chefs at many other properties throughout the United States. The Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles has been revitalized by CUT by Wolfgang Puck and power lunch hotspot Boulevard. Michael Mina has brought his Bourbon Steak to the Four Seasons Washington, and the brand brought Kerry Sear to the Four Seasons Seattle to open its contemporary restaurant Art. Four Seasons now insists on using specialty restaurant designers to design all restaurants in new properties worldwide.

Yew is remarkable, however, in that it has achieved acclaim and popularity as a Four Seasons-operated, casual dining restaurant without star chef power. Even in the slow-moving economy, it has more than doubled the revenues that might have been expected from the restaurant, bar, and lounge it replaced. Yew enjoyed $7 million in sales last year—its first year of service—and that is with an average check of only $35.

Pettigrew says that resort hotels with a somewhat captive audience, such as the Four Seasons brand had for fine dining, have historically had much more latitude to take risks and experiment with new concepts than those situated in bustling urban centers full of competitors. With Yew’s proven profitability in urban Vancouver, the brand has begun forming a respectable reputation for a wider variety of dining experiences, and more casual restaurants wholly operated by Four Seasons may start opening at other properties in a variety of markets.

Perhaps one of the strengths of the Four Seasons plan for Yew is that it defies formula. Yew is not a restaurant that could be replicated successfully just anywhere. While it is an answer for many guests on tight budgets, its appeal goes beyond economics. And—while it fits perfectly into the trend of a society looking for “simpler” food—well-prepared, high-quality, uncomplicated food never goes out of style.

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