Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group has opened restaurants in some unexpected places. The New York-based group has branches in a baseball stadium, a museum and a 6-acre park in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. Curiously, though, the much-imitated restaurant operator has managed to steer clear of installing a restaurant in a hotel—until now, that is.
This month Meyer’s USHG will join a growing number of restaurateurs with hotel alliances as it teams up with Ian Schrager to open its newest operation, Maialino, in the hip hotelier’s hightoned Gramercy Park property in New York.
While the pairing of hotel companies and restaurateurs certainly does not present a new development in the foodservice business—just try to count the number of celebrity chef monikers attached to Las Vegas restaurants—the attraction between the two camps has grown stronger as both look for opportunities that can help strengthen each other’s position in a highly competitive and difficult market.
Hotel foodservice operations continue to generate good returns, too. According to the National Restaurant Association, sales at hotel restaurants have grown from about $23.5 billion in 2005 to a projected $27.5 billion in 2009.
Clearly, the cachet that comes with having a name-brand chef or restaurateur affiliated with a property often can present a promotional windfall for a hotel operator looking to stand out in the local marketplace, experts say.
“Many of these chefs are celebrities in their own right and have a following,” says Bill Fisher, the Darden Eminent Scholar for the Rosen School of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla. “They have books; some are on TV. They’re viewed as authorities. So people tend to feel more assured that they’ll be getting a special meal at a restaurant associated with a well-known chef.”
On the flip side, restaurateurs benefit from the hotel’s built-in customer base. “Hotel customers are traveling for business or they’re on vacation, so they want something different,” says Dave McCelvey, vice president of operations and culinary for celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants, several of which operate in large Las Vegas casino-hotels. “And we can offer that to them. Also, you can’t go wrong having 400 rooms over your restaurant.”
A hotel also might lure a desirable restaurateur or chef with the promise of expensive build-outs for the space. Hotel companies “might incentivize restaurateurs through tenant improvements that can be significant,” says chef Norman Van Aken, who operates Norman’s in the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Fla., and will soon open Norman’s 180 in the Westin Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables. “It can save you from spending half a million dollars of your own money and beginning a debt structure that can be perilous.”
At the same time, top restaurateurs and chefs view the hotel connection as an opportunity to expand their brand outside of their wheelhouse or even diversify their portfolio. For example, Daniel Boulud, Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali are all planning to open restaurants in Singapore at the Marina Bay Sands in the first quarter of 2010. In addition to housing several high-end destination restaurants, the extensive complex will include a casino, 2,500 suites and guest rooms, a mall, a museum, two theaters and a “sky park” at the top of three towers that will be 55-stories high.
A handful of ambitious restaurateurs have even branched out into hotel operations themselves. Stephen Hanson, president of New York-based B.R. Guest Restaurants and co-creator of the luxury James Hotel concept, recently announced the opening of Postcard Inn on The Beach in St. Pete Beach, Fla. Meanwhile, top toque Thomas Keller has plans to open an inn in Yountville, Calif., across from his award-winning French Laundry.
Of course, not every hotel-restaurant marriage is arranged in heaven. Recently, the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers severed its relationship with Todd English’s Bonfire and opened a new “small plates” concept in October that’s not affiliated with an outside operator. Also, Boulud said on his blog that he plans to shutter his restaurant, Daniel Boulud Brasserie, in the Wynn Las Vegas Resort and Country Club when the lease expires next spring. And the list of business break-ups goes on.
But while experts advise restaurateurs and hoteliers to take their due diligence seriously prior to taking their vows, they generally agree the business model can be a beneficial one for both parties.
Richard Coraine, president of the USHG’s new business division, says the group had been approached several times by Schrager to team up, “but each time we didn’t have the capacity internally to do it.”
However, Coraine continues, once USHG executives took a look at the proposed restaurant space in Schrager’s new Gramercy Park Hotel, they saw the light. “If there was a level higher than A-plus, that would be it,” Coraine said. “It’s on the ground floor of the hotel and has floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on Gramercy Park. It’s a world-class space.”
And if pairing off with hotelier Schrager was a first for USHG, so was the concept the group devised for his property. Meyer and company had been interested in developing an operation that could present their interpretation of an authentic Roman trattoria, and this space lent itself perfectly to the concept, Coraine says.
Called Maialino—Italian for roast baby or suckling pig—the 140-plus-seat restaurant will be open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and feature the kind of food diners might find at a neighborhood trattoria in Rome. While executive chef Nick Anderer—formerly the executive sous chef at Gramercy Tavern—is still polishing the menu, several dishes from the Roman culinary canon already have made the cut. Antipasti will include Trippa alla Trasterverina, or spicy stewed trip with pecorino and mint, and Stracciatella Romana, or hearty chicken broth with egg ribbons and turnip greens.
Ravioli di Ricotta al Uovo, or ricotta ravioli with runny egg yolk, will be offered as a primi course, while Maialino al Forno, or slow roasted suckling pig with rosemary and potatoes, will be featured as a secondi course.
Pricing is expected to be similar to that of Union Square Café, with per-person dinner checks running between $50 and $60.
The restaurant, which will serve breakfast, also will house a cafe called Bar Maialino that will feature coffees in the morning and then morph into a wine bar with small plates after 11 a.m. The restaurant will offer a private dining room with seating for 18 and a menu featuring family-style platters.
In addition to catering to customers at the 100-room hotel, Maialino will be positioned as a neighborhood restaurant with its own street level entrance, Coraine says, adding, “We want to make it feel like a second home to guests.”
Seth Greenberg, whose Sterling Group Management company operates Mistral in Boston and Espace and Capitale in New York, also is expanding into the hospitality business with the opening of Woodward, a contemporary tavern in the 113-room Ames Hotel in Boston this month. The former nightclub impresario is partnering with Morgans Hotel Group, which operates such properties as the Royalton and Morgans in New York, St. Martin’s Lane in London, and Mondrian in Los Angeles.
Located in what is considered to be Boston’s first skyscraper in the city’s Financial District, the boutique hotel has been designed to be “very respectful of the architectural integrity” of the building while conveying “a youthful sense”—“call it ‘Benjamin Franklin meets a supermodel,’” Greenberg says.
Playing off that image, Woodward has been designed as “a modern tavern,” which Greenberg says will be “affordable and comfortable.” With 160 seats spread over two levels, Woodward will offer breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as room service and private catering.
Executive chef Mark Goldberg, a veteran of Greenberg’s 13-year-old Mistral, has crafted menus driven by local ingredients and the cuisine of the region. “Plates have been designed for sharing,” Greenberg says. “For example, a native cod served over preserved lemon is cut and presented in four pieces. It will be part of the experience.”
Other menu selections include short rib pot roast with parsnip and carrot, sliced skirt steak with mustard butter, and roasted chicken served in a copper pot.
Goldberg also has developed a signature pickling program, for which vegetables like green and yellow beans, cauliflower, beets and peppers will be pickled in a signature brine and offered to guests as complimentary items at lunch and dinner.
While Woodward also includes a selection of moderately priced wines, it also will feature a signature ale, brewed in conjunction with Smuttynose Brewing Co. and served in oversized glasses.
Greenberg says tabs have been designed to be moderate, with appetizers priced from $10 to $15 and entrées in the $25 to $30 range.
In addition to co-developing the Ames Hotel, Greenberg is consulting for the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, Fla., where he is modernizing the property’s steakhouse.
Boston also saw the return this month of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who opened Market in the W Hotel. The Alsatian-born Vongerichten—who, with partner Phil Suarez, operates a group of celebrated high-end restaurants around the globe—began his career in the United States as executive chef at the Lafayette restaurant there.
Market will feature a menu consisting of French, Asian and Italian dishes made from locally sourced food items.
Over the past several years, Vongerichten and Suarez have been aggressively opening restaurants in hotel properties. To help accomplish that, the pair formed a partnership in 2006 called Culinary Concepts with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., parent of the W Hotel brand, and Catterton Partners, a private-equity firm, enabling them to pursue restaurant growth in hotels. Today, Vongerichten and Suarez operate some 30 restaurants, of which hotel operations generate about 40 percent of sales.
Vongerichten has established himself as one of the foremost chef-restaurateurs in the world, but his background in hotel food-service contributed to the growth of his company’s hotel’s business. “Jean-Georges’ background is with hotels,” Suarez says. “He was the executive chef at the Mandarin Oriental in Bangkok at 22 years old. After the Lafayette in Boston, he was at the Drake Hotel in New York [where he earned four stars from The New York Times]. He has a lot of hotel experience. It’s always been part of this company’s pedigree.”
While acknowledging the growth potential, Suarez advises restaurateurs to not undertake “the hotel game until you know what its about. It’s a different animal than operating a freestanding restaurant.”
Fisher agrees, saying: “The hotel side of things is very different than the [hotel] food and beverage side. If an independent restaurateur or chef was going to [partner with a hotelier], he should either co-partner or hire someone with skill in the hotel side of the business.”
In addition to planning additional openings in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Las Vegas, London and Paris, Culinary Concepts has plans to open a restaurant in New York’s Mark Hotel before Christmas called Mark Jean-Georges. It will serve meals across all dayparts as well as room service.
Emeril Lagasse is another easily recognizable chef who has long experience with hotel foodservice. While Lagasse spent his formative years at independent restaurants in New Orleans, he branched out in the early 1990s into the resort and casino markets in Las Vegas, Gulfport, Miss., and Miami Beach.
While Lagasse is known for his upscale take on Cajun and Creole food, he has plans to diversify his portfolio with more casual operations. He will open his first burger restaurant this month at the Bethlehem, Pa.-based Sands Casino Resort. The as-yet-unnamed hamburger restaurant, which follows the opening of Emeril’s Chop House in the Bethlehem Sands, will feature a menu of gourmet burgers made from several types of beef and other proteins. It will include appetizers, milk shakes and ice cream desserts, and carry an average tab of $20, McCelvey says.
And later this year, Lagasse plans to open his 12th restaurant when he launches Lagasse’s Stadium, a 24,000-square-foot sports bar and entertainment venue in The Palazzo Resort-Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas.
McCelvey notes that “deals [with hoteliers] come across the desk all the time. But you want to make sure the partnership will be dynamic; you want both parties to bring something to the table. For example, we don’t want the landlord competing with us for food and beverage.”
He says the Lagasse restaurants don’t get involved in room service or breakfast. “We stick to the lunch and dinner models; it’s what we do well,” he says. “I wouldn’t rule out doing those things, but I think you should leave room service and breakfast to the experts.”
Norman Van Aken, who has operated his top-rated fine-dining restaurant, Norman’s, in the Ritz-Carlton, Grande Lakes, in Orlando, Fla., for more than six years, plans to expand his portfolio early in 2010 with the opening of Norman’s 180, a more casual prototype located in the Westin Colonnade Hotel in Coral Gables.
Van Aken says he hopes to further broaden his hotel alliances through the cloning of both Norman’s and Norman’s 180. “We’re planning on expanding both concepts,” he says, “We’re engineering both for replication, and we like hotels and are looking for partners.”
The 180-seat Norman’s 180 will not focus so strictly on New World Cuisine—a fusion of Latin, Caribbean, Asian, African and American influences—for which Van Aken is famous. Rather, menus would be customized to accommodate the area the hotel and restaurant are located in.
The lunch and dinner menus will be divided into sections, including small plates, salads, pizzas, bowls, main plates and sides. The lunch menu will include sandwiches while the dinner menu will offer platters. Norman’s 180 also will offer breakfast.
Check averages are expected to be lower than at Van Aken’s upscale operation, however—in the $20s at lunch and the $40s at dinner, he says.
But while Van Aken acknowledges the upside of partnering, he also cautions operators to conduct their own investigation if a hotel suitor comes calling.
“If you end up in the wrong location, there are a lot of downsides,” he says. “A hotel company may throw money at a restaurateur because they understand the location could be problematic. Just because they’re spending a couple of hundred thousand on you might not be reason enough to take the deal.”
After the economy forced Louis Osteen to close his two freestanding Las Vegas restaurants—Louis’s Las Vegas and Louis’s Fish Camp—the legendary southern chef headed back east to take a job as executive chef at they tiny Lake Rabun Hotel in Lakemont, Ga.
With eight rooms and five more planned, the rustic resort is being groomed by its new owner, Gwen North, together with Osteen and his wife, Marlene, as a destination in the Northern Georgia mountains. About an hour outside of Atlanta, the 87-year-old hotel includes a 40-seat restaurant that will showcase Osteen’s interpretation of Southern cuisine—for which he was recognized by the James Beard Foundation as “Best Chef Southeast.”
“We are looking to make it into a culinary destination,” says Osteen, who joined the boutique hotel in June. “We’re also talking about starting a cooking school up here during the off-season, patterned after the Greenbriar school.”
In the meantime, Osteen is presiding over the hotel’s kitchen, which offers lunch on Saturday and Sunday, and dinner Wednesday through Sunday. “If we have two people in the hotel, I get up at 7 a.m. and serve breakfast,” he says.
Osteen is putting his stamp on the menu, which he says utilizes produce from local farms and “pays attention to Appalachian tradition. We go to a farm everyday that has all kinds of great local fruits and vegetables, like squash, heirloom tomatoes, corn.”
The current dinner menu includes such selections as grilled pork loin topped with Vidalia onion jam, and pecan-crusted mountain trout with caper herb butter and creamy grits.
“We change the menus every week,” he says. “We’re still transitioning the restaurant.”— [email protected]
