At Hyatt Hotels, Steve Enselein sees big changes in the wind. When McDonalds has five gourmet salads on its menu, he says, it’s clear that consumers have upped the ante. They want fresh ingredients. They want a higher level of service. And they want to choose their own entrées.

“They feel they are entitled to be able to pick their food,” says Enselein, VP of catering and convention services. “Consumers have far higher expectations, and you have to be able to meet those expectations or you’ll be left behind.”

In an effort to meet those expectations, Hyatt last fall launched “Personal Preference.” The program is based on a four-course meal in which meeting planners select the appetizer and salad in advance, while diners select their own entrées from a menu of four possible choices. Dessert comes on a sampler platter.

This ambitious new approach to the preparation and delivery of banquet main courses has been drawing positive feedback from the field. “The customer is just bowled over by it,” says Susan Terry, senior executive chef at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. “They feel like they have a true choice in what they are eating.”

Nor are diners the only audience here.

Enselein says the program is targeted equally at those who book the events. “We see it every single day, how meeting planners struggle when they pick their menus, because they are so nervous about picking food for 400 people,” he says. If diners can choose their own entrées, a huge weight is lifted off the planners’ shoulders.

GETTING THE TIMING RIGHT
One might expect a logistics nightmare, with the kitchen hastily assembling dinner for 400 on a piece-by-piece basis. But with some careful planning and a little flexibility, chefs say, it is possible to give diners this degree of choice without running the kitchen ragged.

Success here lies all in the timing. “The key to the thing is having two courses prior to the entrée. That’s what gives us the time we need,” says Fritz Doss, executive chef at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.

As soon as servers hit the floor they start taking entrée orders, which are gathered by a kitchen expediter who tallies the selections. Thus, all orders are in to the kitchen before the appetizers are served.

“With the four courses, you have built in enough time for the chef to cook the food. As the appetizer is being served, they are already beginning to prepare the entrées,” Enselein says.

The more time you can buy, the easier it is to make it run, Terry says. “When you start getting into 400 or 500 people it takes time for the kitchen just to put the food on the plate,” she says. “So it’s important that it’s a four-course meal, and if we can build in a course with a palate cleanser, we’ll do that too,” she says.

To draw out the clock, Terry does not preset the first course, preferring instead to bring out the goods once people are seated. And she takes orders even before that happens, to give the kitchen as much time as possible.

Doss’ success is a pretty good indicator of just how smoothly the logistics can run, even with diners placing individual orders. His hotel takes up an entire city block, the kitchen may be two floors away from a banquet room, and yet he routinely works the Personal Preference plan.

“It’s all about communication between the front of the house and the back of the house,” Doss says. He uses cell phones and two-way radios to enhance communications, while banquet chefs and captains meet prior to each event to ensure information is moving smoothly.

MANAGING INVENTORY
When it comes to headcount and the appropriate levels of inventory, chefs using Personal Preference say they mostly play the odds. While it might seem a risky proposition, they say there are ways to make the numbers work.

“We know how many people will eat beef and what are the most popular salads,” says Pat Hooker, executive chef at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis. “But you really have to keep good notes. A group of business executives that would be predominantly men, predominantly from the middle of the United States, will be totally different from an international group from a number of different countries and different ages.”

The trick here is to hedge your bets, to build a menu out of items commonly found in your pantry. “It should be product that you pretty much have in stock on a regular basis,” Terry says. “You don’t want to create a menu with product that is so unique that if you are left with excess it becomes a problem for you.”

Underlying all these issues is the fundamental and perennial challenge of asking people to do something new. “The biggest challenge was just getting everyone's mindset around it,” Enselein says.

Enselein first introduced the program to food & beverage directors, chefs, and directors of catering. All these trained on the system and then began a gradual implementation, trying it first at employee functions, then with smaller banquet groups. Email blasts shared best practices. The Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress on Orlando beta tested the program for six months, sharing its findings with the rest of the chain.

In Minneapolis, Hooker offered a full day of training to his staff, and then looked for just the right groups with which to start. He wanted clients who could pay the extra 10 percent for Personal Preference, and who were looking to give their groups something new. “We handpicked a few clients that we thought this would work for,” he says. Nor is it right for everyone.

If a group is in a hurry, or if there’s a program that interrupts the flow of the meal too severely, Personal Preference may not be the right fit. “I don’t ever see this replacing completely the typical served dinner where a meeting planner orders everything for everyone,” says Enselein, who notes that the program now accounts for about 15 percent of Hyatt banquet dinners served nationally.

Where the fit is right, though, Personal Preference seems a powerful mechanism for helping a hotel stand out in the banquet business. “We want Hyatt food & beverage to be a key component of our brand,” Enselein says. “We believe this can be a brand differentiator, someplace where we can really stand out.”