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Hotel Cuisine & Menus
Special Edition: July 2009 Click here to subscribe» |
 Higher Prices, Happy GuestsWith higher prices and little marketing, the Pfister increases afternoon tea revenue. By Beth Rogers When Troy Clarke became F&B director at Milwaukee’s four-diamond historic landmark Pfister Hotel in early 2008, one of the first things he did was revamp the hotel’s afternoon tea service. At the time, tea was served in the lobby, where the bustle of guests checking in, cold drafts from the nearby main entrance, and the lobby bar crowd could be significant distractions. “Tea is all about conversation,” observes Clarke, so he changed the location to Blu, the hotel’s 23rd floor nighttime cocktail lounge, quiet in the afternoons and featuring panoramic views of Lake Michigan and downtown Milwaukee. In addition to the location change, Clarke introduced several tea menus, ranging from the All Grown Up children’s tea at $11 to the all-inclusive Victorian tea, formerly $18. This year, Clarke raised the price of the Victorian tea to $30. The Pfister did 422 Victorian teas last year; this year it dipped to 400, but, thanks to the increased fee, revenues have risen 20 percent, which, notes Clarke, is a real triumph considering the economy.  After changing the venue and pricing, Clarke did little to promote tea during his first year, but that is about to change. He is adding information about tea service to the Pfister’s new web site and Facebook page, and he is considering promoting it on Twitter. Clarke also plans to start a tea club that will have seminars led by tea experts. “We’re going to be pushing hard this year for tea as a way of doing business,” Clarke says in regard to creating an attractive meeting place for businesspeople. "Tea is big in Asia and a way they do business. Tea makes business guests sit down and learn how to socialize with clients in a different way. It’s an event that takes two to two and a half hours, so you get to know a business client on a more personal level. We’re really trying to capture a different market that no one else is going after.” Clarke set out to make the Pfister’s tea program unique, and he is achieving that through an emphasis on education. “One thing I've noticed that no one else does is education at the table—talking about what they’re serving and where it’s from,” he says. So Clarke created the position of “tea butler” that has been filled by Juan Rodriguez, a long-time manager of the hotel. For each tea service, Rodriguez rolls out a gueridon with an assortment of teas (from Chicago-based Liif Tea) in little glass jars, talks about the teas, and passes the jars around so people can experience their aromas. Something else the Pfister does to make its tea service unique, says Clarke, is to offer tableside blending with fresh ingredients, such as mint, ginger, and other items that can be infused, including dried mango, hibiscus, and cinnamon. The Pfister offers only five or six base teas, but limitless flavor opportunities exist with the fresh ingredients they provide. As part of the tea butler’s educational presentation, Rodriguez teaches guests that certain combinations can enhance flavor profiles, much like wines pair with certain foods. A favorite combination among guests is green tea infused with mango and ginger. “People are wowed by that,” notes Clarke. “People just love the ability to pick and choose how they drink their tea. They get to explore the culinary aspect of learning how to mix and match flavors.” The Pfister currently serves tea Fridays through Sundays from 3 to 5 p.m. throughout the year, except during the summer months. The hotel accepts private bookings in the summer upon request, especially for bridal showers. Clarke is committed to growing the tea service and hopes that it will become a daily event. “We have people come here who have been to the Four Seasons or the Ritz in Boston, the Drake in Chicago, who have had tea in London, and they tell us that nowhere have they had tea service like ours.” Burgers at the Spa? Harbor Beach Marriott responds fast when a healthy menu bombs. By Rick Hynum Green tea cream puffs, frozen ginger soufflé, full-bodied gazpacho—it all seemed like a good idea at the time. But when David Cronin, F&B director for the Harbor Beach Marriott Resort & Spa in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, rolled out a new “healthy” menu for his spa café, food sales dipped faster than you can say, “Noodle salad, anyone?” “I thought it was a great menu, but it was not a hit,” says Cronin. “I was surprised by the reaction.” The 20,000-square-foot upscale spa boasts a fully equipped fitness center, pool and jacuzzi, and separate spa facilities for men and women. Guests can bask in the steamy repose of a sauna, enjoy a Swedish massage or a deep-cleansing facial, and burn a few hundred calories on the Stairmaster. After a couple of hours, guests are sure to give off a healthy glow—and work up an appetite to match. Cronin assumed spa guests would crave equally healthy fare. Along with the aforementioned dessert items and gazpacho, the new menu, introduced to the breakfast and lunch crowd in late 2007, featured waistline-friendly salads, fruit plates, and wraps. It seemed like a no-brainer for guests coming in fresh from a yoga class or an hour of shiatsu. “What many of them really wanted,” Cronin learned, “was a burger and fries. We came to realize that, yes, this is a spa, where they’re getting a massage or facial and want to hang out in their bathrobes and enjoy the experience, but afterwards they also want to treat themselves, to indulge a bit. Our healthy menu just wasn’t selling.” When the cash registers stopped ringing, Cronin, a 20-year F&B veteran who first signed on with Marriott International in 1995, didn’t hesitate to summon his team of chefs and managers back to the drawing board. “We said, ‘Let’s not let our culinary egos get in the way,’” Cronin says. “We’d developed a fantastic menu, but customers thought it was too ‘out there.’ Clearly, we had to give on some of the healthy items and throw out anything that wasn’t selling, even if we personally liked it.” Strategy sessions quickly yielded new ideas. “We’d lock ourselves away in a room for hours sometimes. We’d put things out there, tweak, and tweak again.”  The Harbor Beach Marriott Spa menu now appeals more to indulgence. As the revamped menu began to coalesce, Cronin consulted another set of experts—the staff members who’d be selling it. “We invited all the employees to a meeting room, held tastings, and solicited their feedback,” he says. “Involving them was crucial. Get them excited about it, and they become ambassadors for your products.” The new menu’s rollout in late 2008 coincided with renovations to the spa. Marriott closed the hotel’s 45-seat café while upgrading the one-person kitchen to accommodate a lunch-only schedule. Customers dined poolside or in the Relaxation Room, and, healthy or not, the new cuisine was just what the doctor ordered. Cold soups and noodle salads gave way to panini, smoothies, granola parfaits, and honey vanilla cheesecake. “We tried to find a middle ground,” Cronin says. “We still didn’t offer burgers and went with panini instead, although if you come in and ask for a burger, you’ll get one,” Cronin says. Before long, sales not only increased, they roughly doubled (after factoring in the loss of seating due to renovations and the shift to a lunch-only service), and Cronin gleaned some hard lessons from the experience. “It’s all trial and error,” he says. “I may not like something, but if the customers love it, it’s staying on the menu. You have to listen to them, pay attention to what’s selling and not selling, then make modifications quickly.”
Click here to view the Harbor Beach Spa menu (before) [PDF].
Click here to view Harbor Beach Spa menu (after) [PDF]. 
Retaining Revenue Davidson activates lounge space to capture the about-to-leave crowd. By Tad Wilkes  At many hotels, the lobby lounge is little more than a state of limbo, where guests can have a glass or two of their favorite beverage while waiting for the rest of their party, and the hotel can make a few bucks from guests who are on their way out the door to spend more money at restaurants and bars outside the hotel. This, until recently, was the case at properties managed by Davidson Hotel Company, says Corporate F&B Director Stephen Kilroy. Based in Memphis, Davidson’s portfolio includes 36 hotels with more than 10,000 rooms. “Five years ago, our lounges looked pretty. We had the liquor displayed nicely and a nice bartender, but we weren’t proactively selling—and we didn’t really have the product to sell,” Kilroy says. That changed with Davidson’s new, more driven focus in its food and beverage approach in lounges. Kilroy and company tapped the insights of several Davidson chefs and team members to produce a unique package, initiating it in D.C.-area hotel lounges. To date, more than 30 spaces are in motion with the program. Retaining and Attracting “Our focus is to generate revenue right off the bat,” Kilroy says. “There are three parts to this. First, there is the scenario of the two folks who come and have their first glass of wine at the end of the day, but before they go out, one of them has to go back up to the room to change while the other is waiting for them. Rather than just offer a glass of wine to the waiting guest, we offer a small plate option. The menu is on the table; it stands straight up, and we use a bright color so it jumps out at you. Our goal is to convert those folks to dinner guests so they don’t feel they need to go out because they’ve had some tasty and interesting food.  “Second is providing a great dining option for single guests so they don’t have to default to eating in the room or from a greasy bar menu. We offer a range of entrées and small plates to meet their needs,” Kilroy says.
Small plates certainly aren’t new or unique; Davidson’s point of difference is in quality. “We’re creating items essentially from scratch,” Kilroy adds. “We do have a buffalo wing, but it’s presented in an Asian bowl with a hot sauce that we’ve created that’s a little different from everyday hot sauce. We’re also doing a veggie empanada and a lamb slider.” The third prong of the plan? Locals are intrigued, too, by the buzz and energy. A Better Share At the Radisson Los Angeles Westside Culver City, California, which Kilroy cites as the first complete remodel and rebranding to go with the new food and beverage focus, “We just finished converting a lobby restaurant that had been a kind of a dark hole,” Kilroy says. “Right across from the front desk, we redesigned it to have five seating scenarios, including banquettes, circular booths, and some great bar seating. We put in an Enomatic wine system, so guests walk in and see 32 bottles (offered by the glass) in a gorgeous half-circle display.” The restaurant, now called Share, is the most successful lounge retooling in the Davidson portfolio, Kilroy says. “Our capture is unbelievable [there],” he says. “We’re up 35 to 40 percent in the last year. Our occupancy is down, but the restaurant is tearing it up. Instead of having a dark restaurant and separate lounge area, our design combines them. It’s a casual wine-and-small-plates bistro, not a high-energy bar.”  Share restaurant and lounge at Radisson Los Angeles Westside in Culver City, California, is the most successful lounge retooling in the Davidson portfolio, generating a 35 to 40 percent increase in the last year. Price is an important factor in helping cement a guest’s decision to stay rather than venture out—and also in luring locals. “The menu is priced very smartly; we’re not doing the hotel gouge,” Kilroy says. “We’re not giving food away, but we’re doing well-crafted foods, served in clean, smart presentations, and we’re pricing them right.” Wine pours, all priced below $12 and offered in two-, four-, and six-ounce pours, give guests and locals alike what they’re looking for: options. Similar concepts will be going into more Davidson properties with restaurant and lobby-adjacent areas slated for renovation, including one in Iowa City, Iowa. Most Lucrative Catch Dover Downs buoys slow nights with "Deadliest Catch" promotion. By Denny Lewis In 2008, when Fred Bohn, director of culinary operations at Dover Downs Hotel & Casino in Dover, Delaware, wanted a great promotion to invigorate his Tuesday and Wednesday slow hours, he began his search more than 4,000 miles away in the icy Bering Sea. As a fan of The Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch,” a show chronicling the dangerous Alaskan king crab haul, and a resident of the DelMarVa Peninsula—arguably the epicenter of everything crabby on the East Coast—Bohn saw the similarities between the show’s heroes and the local crab-fishing culture and imagined the synergies a “Deadliest Catch” promotion might create for the hotel and his 140-seat white tablecloth venue, Michele’s. Bohn’s existing business relationship with Rob George, owner of The Crab Broker based in the arid clime of Las Vegas, proved to be the only connection he needed. George’s brokerage buys directly from the “Deadliest Catch” boats in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and ships crab worldwide from that site. George arranged to sell and fly crab caught by Time Bandit, a ship highlighted on the show, directly to Michele’s in Delaware. The price was very good, Bohn says—typically a market-appropriate $12 to $15 per pound—for the crab, which the broker shipped to him weekly on Tuesdays. Michele’s then offered a $35 five-course prix fixe menu on Tuesdays and Wednesdays featuring the freshly-caught crab from a ship that guests may have seen on the TV show.  Michele's Wine and Cheese Room As a bonus, crews of two of the ships—Captain Jonathan and his brother Captain Andy of Time Bandit and Captain Phil Harris and his sons of the Cornelia Marie—were in town to watch a NASCAR race, so they visited Michele’s to rub elbows with their fans and other casino clientele. As the main attraction of the “Deadliest Catch” promotion, Executive Chef Mike Daniels, Chef Jonathan Boggs, and Bohn prepared a menu centered on Bristol Bay king crab and other Alaskan seafood delicacies. Weathervane scallops, Alaskan halibut, clams casino, oysters Rockefeller, cream of crab soup in a bread bowl, crab bisque, and a pound of crab legs with lobster risotto cakes were all available to represent the fruits of the far-northern Pacific. The chefs rounded out the prix fixe menu with a limoncello Caesar salad favored by Captain Jonathan and a Tuaca cheesecake recommended by Captain Andy. Bohn also paired the crab promo with a half-price wine bottle special. The promotion ran throughout the summer, and the Tuesday and Wednesday night dinner slots welcomed a 15 percent jump in covers. Bohn estimates that half of those diners ordered the prix fixe meal or á la carte items off that menu.  Chef Fred with the crew of the Time Bandit. Each year in August, Dover Downs Hotel & Casino hosts a crab fest of crab dishes from all over the world. The “Deadliest Catch” promotion was an obvious step for Bohn to extend the already-prominent association of the hotel with the crab experience. With only minimal expenditures for advertising in local print media, in-house promotion, and publicity on the hotel web site, Bohn was able to drive business in historically slow periods and create a high-profile relationship with a multiple-market, high-value entity in “Deadliest Catch.” The partnership with Time Bandit and the television show was successful enough for Bohn to repeat the promotion this summer at last year’s price. “This is not the time to be raising prices,” he says. Tired Restaurant Awakens Wave restaurant at Danfords Hotel becomes a destination, led by its Asian-influenced, small-plate seafood menu. By Denny Lewis Since the 1980s, Danfords Hotel & Marina in picturesque Port Jefferson, New York, had ridden the popularity of its restaurant 25 East, with its panoramic dining room view of Port Jefferson Harbor, nautical embellishments, and al fresco Admiral’s Deck. But when sales began lagging outside the summer and holiday peaks, Director of F&B Roy Feicco looked at the less-than-optimal performance of the space and decided a restaurant renovation, of the menu as well as the décor, should be included in the planned revitalization of the rest of the Danfords property. “Business had become more seasonal,” Feicco says. “We weren’t established as a destination, so we lost a lot of revenue—and left revenue on the table.” In the summer, 25 East was “busy morning, noon, and night,” with tourists, guests, and locals hungry for a water view, but in winter, Feicco had to “nurture every little thing” to get by on the business of ferry riders and mostly older locals. His idea was to transform 25 East into a destination restaurant—Wave Restaurant & Lounge—that would please old devotees and attract new clientele.  Feicco’s transformation of the establishment was both physical and conceptual. Physically, the antiquated nautical theme (alluding to Port Jeff’s shipbuilding and whaling past), dark wood, and poor flow of 25 East became a bright, contemporary space with more subtle nautical notes and a lounge to invite a vibrant social scene. Conceptually, food and beverage offerings became more modern and adventurous, with elements to bring in a younger demographic.
Wave’s food sales this year are double 25 East’s last year sales. The lounge has doubled bar sales, and the beverage-to-food ratio has increased by 10 percent (with a 17 percent rise in wine bottle sales, largely from suggested wine pairings on the menu).  The addition of the Wave lounge area in particular has been a hit. A younger crowd gathers for pre-dinner drinks and late-night cocktails in the space featuring sofa seating, a white baby grand piano, and wall-mounted plasma screen TVs. Feicco says cocktail sales are up, largely due to the lounge’s appeal. Guests enter the restaurant through the lounge; a glass wall divider lessens noise while allowing a separate-but-same feeling. A new tapas menu has also been successful in the lounge, with some guests opting to eat their entire meals there.
The tapas menu is just one of the restaurant’s culinary updates. Chef Paul Govin devised an innovative dinner menu of seaside favorites, Asian-tinged offerings, and à la carte items to modernize Wave. The menu is seafood-heavy, with the “massive sellers”—Gorgonzola and Pine Nut-Crusted Chilean Sea Bass, Mango-Chili Tuna, Crab Cakes with Corn Salsa and Chipotle Remoulade, and Pan-Seared Salmon—returning, but with a fresh presentation.  Govin follows Asian influence with Black Cod Char Sui and Organic Soha-Wakame Salad, along with bento boxes featuring a variety of sushi and rolls, including Tuna Nigiri, Spicy Tuna Maki, and the Wave Roll with lobster, crab, avocado, sesame, cucumber, tobiko, and ponzu sauce. While surf is the focus, turf items such as Herb-Rubbed New York Shell Steak and Pulled Pork Sliders are also available. Wave has become a marketing tool for Danfords banquet and catering services, enhanced by the hotel’s overall facelift. Feicco says the restaurant’s reformulation has boosted event sales. “Some people never see one of our guestrooms, but everyone sees the restaurant,” he says, estimating that 85 percent of his current customers are destination diners. “We have identity now,” Feicco continues. “People know us as ‘Wave,’ rather than just ‘the restaurant at Danfords.’” |
In this issue: Tired Restaurant Awakens Wave restaurant at Danfords Hotel becomes a destination, led by its Asian-influenced, small-plate seafood menu. Most Lucrative Catch Dover Downs buoys slow nights with "Deadliest Catch" promotion. Retaining Revenue Davidson activates lounge space to capture the about-to-leave crowd. Burgers at the Spa? Harbor Beach Marriott responds fast when a healthy menu bombs. Higher Prices, Happy Guests With higher prices and little marketing, the Pfister increases afternoon tea revenue. Advertising Opportunities
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