Just as “change” has become the mantra of presidential candidates vying for their party’s nomination, hotel operators are striving to transform stereotypical images of hotel restaurants as predictable, old-style places to eat.
Several major lodging chains in the full-service and luxury categories are evolving away from traditional, formal dining rooms to bistros, cafes and lobby foodservice. Some hotels continue to snag big-name chefs to attract hotel guests, local residents and businesspeople to their restaurants instead of losing them to outside eateries.
Two brands that are pushing foodservice into their multiuse lobbies are Marriott Hotels and Embassy Suites. Others include Sheraton and Hilton, although details of their plans have been unavailable.
Some hotels that have converted their lobbies to mixed-use food and beverage outlets have boosted foodservice sales between 30 percent and 40 percent, said Carl Boger, associate dean of the Conrad Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management at the University of Houston.
“I think this will be a trend for the full-service brands,” because today’s guests like lobbies’ homey feeling and conduciveness to socializing, he said.
Memphis, Tenn.-based Embassy Suites just unveiled three design options for its new fast-casual Flying Spoons concept that will be located adjacent to the hotels’ atriums and will continue to offer complimentary buffet breakfasts and cocktail-hour manager’s receptions, said Alicia Rainbolt, a spokeswoman for the chain.
“Flying Spoons is a new solution to a different generation of travelers who are more social and informal,” she said.
The all-day concept, modeled after European-style coffeehouses and cafes, will have somewhat limited menus, with entrées averaging about $11, espresso bars and limited service. The first is expected to open this fall in Jackson, Miss.
Designed as part of the latest Embassy Suites prototype hotel, Flying Spoons also will be available to operators of its 178 U.S. hotels who want to remake their restaurants.
Marriott Hotels expects to revamp the lobbies of 100 of its full-service domestic hotels to provide everything from snacks to entrées that can be served in five, 10 or 20 minutes. Lobby layouts will be redesigned to provide various seating options, explained Matthew Von Ertfelda, vice president for restaurants and bars at the Bethesda, Md.-based company.
“It’s a philosophy that allows us to better meet guests’ needs,” he said, noting that Marriott’s lobby foodservice is intended to complement that of the hotels’ full-service restaurants. Lobby bars also are getting makeovers that allow them to switch focus from daytime non-alcoholic beverages to newly upgraded signature cocktails, wines and beers by night.
Among the five-minute menu choices are soup, hummus, a cheese plate, an antipasto plate and a fruit plate. Ten-minute items range from shrimp cocktail to Thai chicken skewers to “mighty mo and fries,” which harkens back to the company’s Marriott Hot Shoppes origins and their featured triple-decker cheeseburger of the wartime 1940s, named for the battleship Missouri. Today’s version also comes as four miniature “sliders.”
Food and beverage departments of the chain’s hotels have the option of varying the menus to suit regional tastes, Von Ertfelda said. Servers will bring food and beverage orders to the guests at their lobby seats.
While most Marriott hotels, with some exceptions, continue to operate their own food and beverage service, other chains, including Westin and Sheraton, both owned by White Plains, N.Y.-based Starwood Hotels, more frequently are turning to outside chefs and operators to create excitement and make their restaurants destinations. Even the staid Ritz-Carlton luxury chain, based in McLean, Va., is outsourcing some of its restaurants and closing others.
“We have definitely been moving away from classic, traditional dining rooms,” said Vivian Deuschl, a Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman. “They were not popular, were expensive to operate and not profitable.”
In their place, the company has either closed such dining rooms and replaced them with less-formal dining environments or hired celebrity chef-owners to bring their brands to the hotels. A few successful formal exceptions remain, Deuschl said, such as the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead in Atlanta.
Some of the restaurants to open most recently under the auspices of big-name chef-partners are Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, in the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch at the Beaver Creek ski resort in Colorado; West-end Bistro by Eric Ripert in Ritz-Carlton’s Washington, D.C., hotel; and BLT Market with Laurent Tourondel in the New York City property. Former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway and partner Tim Schmidt just opened their second Elway’s, a steakhouse, in the new Ritz-Carlton Denver.
All of those restaurants have opened to big audiences of both hotel guests and locals, Deuschl said.
“They’re less formal, have less of a dress code and are less expensive,” she said.
Westend Bistro by Eric Ripert, a semicasual concept from the noted chef-partner of New York’s Le Bernardin, replaced The Grill, a self-operated white-tablecloth restaurant. The bistro has been packed ever since it opened last November, Deuschl said.
Westin Hotels & Resorts also draws more on the star power of local big-name restaurateurs in its newest properties. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the months-old Westin Lombard Yorktown Center partnered with Chicago’s well-known Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group for both that Italian steakhouse and a new seafood concept, Holy Mackerel.
In the suburb of Wheeling, the Westin Chicago North Shore features restaurants from Chicago celebrity chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand. The duo will be opening and operating restaurants this year in other hotel brands in Chicago suburbs. A Tramonto’s Steak & Seafood and an RT Sushi Bar & Lounge are set to open this summer in the Hyatt Woodfield in Schaumburg, and an Osteria di Tramonto is scheduled for a new InterContinental Hotel in Rose-mont this fall.
Some hotel brands are partnering with coffee chains to provide lobby kiosks as alternatives to their full-service restaurants and room service. Red Lion Hotels of Spokane, Wash., is monitoring results so far of Tully’s Coffee kiosks operating in two of its 50 locations.
“They’re helpful in capturing guests who would otherwise go out the door,” said George Goodrich, Red Lion director of food & beverage. “We’ll continue to look at it.”
The InterContinental Chicago recently opened a Starbucks, of which it is the franchisee, in a lucrative street-level restaurant space fronting Michigan Avenue, replacing Zest, a three-daypart restaurant that moved to the historic hotel’s mezzanine. Although Zest now brings in a bit less revenue than it did on street level, Tamas Vago, director of food & beverage, said Starbucks has proven to be “an amazing revenue generator for the hotel.”