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Hotel Cuisine & Menus
Special Edition: December 2009 Click here to subscribe» |
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Sunday Night Spike Hotel Durant animates a dead night with $10 chicken supper. By Tad Wilkes Most restaurants today would be thrilled just to get their formerly hopping “busy” days and nights back up to full speed. Henry’s, a gastropub in the Hotel Durant in Berkeley, California, attacked lagging sales through a different portal: deftly retooling its slow nights.  Henry's, a gastropub in the Hotel Durant in Berkeley, California, has increased Sunday night revenue by approximately 30 percent.Without diluting the integrity of its upscale gastropub concept, the management of Henry’s paid close attention to the lives of potential guests in its market, keying in on the opportunity to craft an offer that hungry UC Berkeley students, without the option of dining room fare on Sunday nights, can’t refuse. The Sunday Supper promo, begun in January 2009, also attracts older locals and hotel guests. The draw is simple: a specially priced fried chicken dinner, with choice of soup or salad and dessert, by Henry’s star gastropub specialist Chef Eddie Blyden. “The only time we’d get any business on Sundays [previously], was during football season,” recalls Morgan Plant, VP of F&B of Hotel Durant's San Francisco–based management company Joie de Vivre Hospitality. “Sunday nights were so slow, there was at one point some discussion whether we should even be open for business." Now, GM Joseph White cites a 30 to 35 percent increase in Sunday revenue. Creating Broad Appeal The comfortable dynamic of premium food served in casual surroundings helps make the Sunday Supper promotion successful, filling the house with guests, 40 percent of whom are students, without slumming to the level of a cheap college pig–out. This balance helps prevent scaring off the other 60 percent of the night’s clientele. The Sunday evening value is the fried chicken dinner that is well above the quality of dining hall or fast–food fare. Originally, Henry’s offered a $39 fried chicken dinner for four, from 5 to 9 p.m., conceived to draw groups of students, but later changed it to $10 per person.  “We average about 2.5 guests per check, so it makes more sense to offer per person,” Stuhl says. “One marketing lesson we learned is that you don’t want to alienate the guests you already have by promoting something most guests can’t order unless they change their behavior.” “What’s interesting is that our hotel guests and corporate travelers are enjoying it, too,” Plant says. “We’re not doing 250 covers a night, but we’re doing enough business that it’s not only worthwhile to be open, but it's also profitable. The students love it, and we have some locals who dine here on Sunday nights for the fried chicken.” Low Overhead, Lasting Impact “We have seen an increase on Sundays directly due to this promotion, but the amount of repeat business on other days has been great,” Stuhl says. “Students will come in with their parents or on a date on a different night after joining us for the Sunday Supper.” And the added revenue isn’t mitigated significantly with added costs, GM Joseph White adds. “Because we’ve chosen to do family–style Sunday Suppers, we’ve found that we have actually been able to cut back on staffing,” he says. “As more and more guests are ordering the supper, we have fewer customers ordering off of the á la carte menu.” “If you think about what a plated fried chicken dinner is in terms of production, a lot of it is prepped ahead of time and just fried to order,” Plant notes. “It’s very cost–effective.” For nearly a decade, Tad Wilkes, managing editor of HOTEL F&B, has written about on–premise hospitality. He is based in Oxford, Mississippi.
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Vacation Story Guests choose fresh catch at casual-chic beach space. By Chelsie Butler When guests think of Four Seasons, it’s easy to imagine formal restaurants, but the brand is succeeding with a more casual space at its Punta Mita, Mexico, location. The open–air Bahía restaurant is a sensory and interactive experience where fresh seafood tops the menu, while guests dine right on the beach in shorts and T–shirts with their toes in the sand, if they so desire.  Three days a week, local fishermen visit Bahía restaurant at the Four Seasons Punta Mita Resort, where they prepare fresh fish guests have selected for themselves.“For many years, our hotels focused on the formal, fine–dining restaurant, as not only was it the window through which our guests viewed the quality and style of the hotel, but it was where business deals were made and special occasions celebrated,” says Guy Rigby, VP of F&B for Four Seasons, Americas. “The focus is now on creating restaurants that are a little less formal, more upbeat, and more in tune with the tastes and lifestyles of our guests.” Sure, it’s casual, but Bahía is also known for its chic, contemporary design, as well as artfully presented, high–quality, fresh seafood prepared on an open, wood–fired grill that customers can see from any vantage point. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, local fishermen come to the resort to allow guests to choose from a variety of fish right off the boat in the widely popular Catch–of–the–Day program. The chef gives details about all of the fish brought in that day — where they came from and how they will taste — and then creatively prepares the guests’ orders for lunch or dinner. The event is well received, with at least 30 people in attendance each time. The average check, depending on the season, ranges from $45 to $48 per person, a price point that GM Alper Oztok says is very reasonable for the value. Bahía offers a main dining area, separate al fresco seating, and a bar area for guests to kick back and enjoy a Martini or Margarita while watching the sun set from Las Cuevas Beach. Seasonal vegetables and other side items complement the grilled entrées. In addition to the interactive Catch–of–the–Day promotion, Bahía also hosts innovative cooking classes each Saturday in which guests learn step–by–step how to prepare a fresh seafood dish for lunch. Guests also see exactly how the food is prepared by watching the chefs cook at the open grill, which is the only one of its kind at the resort, and each chef constantly visits tables and interacts with diners, explaining everything on the menu and making sure the food quality is meeting guest expectations. Chelsie Butler is a freelance writer and editor based in the Atlanta area.
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Chefs Play, Diners Stay Best-selling favorites mandated, but chefs retain creativity. By Howard Riell Loews Hotels is generating strong results from American Classics, an "all–star" menu it has added to three–meal and roomservice offerings across its system.  Corporate Creative Director of F&B Ellen Burke Van Slyke says executives “looked at the dishes that our guests ordered most and wondered, ‘What if we make them the same at every hotel? And what if the balance of the menu is made up of things that are uniquely local?’” The program has worked well, Van Slyke reports. “We’re having a great capture ratio and great guest satisfaction.” In fact, Loews American Classics represent “almost 50 percent of our menu sales for lunch and dinner in our restaurants and room service, and roughly 12 percent of total sales. In many cases, [they] represent the best sellers on our menus.”
Loews American Classics Menu
Loews’ management, she explains, “looked at contemporary dining, the recession, and a way for us to establish ourselves as an F&B brand.” What they created was a template with six basic categories: Things We Share, based on observations that guests are eating smaller portions and, in general, less food; Appetizers such as soup that are not as easy to share; From the Garden, which supports Loews’ Adopt–a–Farmer initiative to purchase produce from local growers; The Main Course; Sides; and Desserts. The successful program got its start in November 2007 and has undergone gradual tweaking. For example, a menu analysis showed that tenderloins were outselling the New York Strip at most properties, so the switch was made. “We think the tenderloin is selling more because it is a healthier cut with less fat,” Van Slyke says. Consistency and Local Creativity Chefs at Loews have traditionally enjoyed a good deal of autonomy, which inherently meant that a degree of consistency from property to property was lacking. At the same time, creating a cookie–cutter program “was a concern,” Van Slyke notes. That’s why management also launched Loews’ Adopt–a–Farmer initiative, “so that the menus would feel very fresh and very local.” The program supports partnerships with area farmers, fishermen, and independent purveyors. This also enabled the company to use its purchasing power to spend a bit more to support local farmers without losing control of costs. Menus are routinely revamped twice a year, says Van Slyke. “That’s when we encourage the chefs to use local, fresh, seasonal ingredients.” Indeed, a goal was to “afford the chefs some creativity, because the last thing you want to do is cramp a chef’s style,” Van Slyke observes. Having only 12 mandated dishes — while menus in this new template carry a minimum of 21—leaves the chef “a lot of room to play with local ingredients, products, and dishes that they love.” Howard Riell is a veteran editor who has written for nearly 140 business and consumer magazines, e–zines, blogs, newspapers, and newsletters. He is based in Las Vegas.
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In this issue: Chefs Play, Diners Stay Best–selling favorites mandated, but chefs retain creativity. Vacation Story Guests choose fresh catch at casual-chic beach space. Sunday Night Spike Hotel Durant animates a dead night with $10 chicken supper. Advertising Opportunities
Vendors, you can showcase your products in Hotel Cuisine & Menus. For information on pricing and options, call Jeanne Bischoff at 847-551-9956 or email jbischoff@hotelfandb.com
Hotel F&B
Corporate Editorial Advisory Board
Michiel Bakker |
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Hotel Cuisine & Menus is edited by Michael Costa and Tad Wilkes and published in affiliation with Hotel F&B Magazine
and Hotel F&B Online (www.hotelfandb.com). To submit story ideas or images, contact Michael at mcosta@hotelfandb.com or upload photos or videos at www.hotelfandb.com/photos.asp.
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