Mr. Garcelon

Food & Beverage

How Hotels Can Compete and Win with Food & Beverage

By David Garcelon, Director of Culinary, Waldorf Astoria NYC

I often hear hotel chefs and food and beverage managers lament that it is too difficult to compete with the freestanding restaurants near their hotel. They say that the latest “hot” restaurants, celebrity chefs or food media favorites have advantages over the outlets in their hotel. Whether it is higher labor costs or the inability to react quickly to culinary trends, hotel outlets often feel behind the curve compared to their freestanding counterparts. While both freestanding and hotel outlets each have distinct advantages, great opportunities exist for hoteliers and chefs to win big in the culinary game.

One of the most crucial, and perhaps overlooked, strategic components is the understanding trends in the local restaurant scene and more broadly. There needs to be a savvy understanding of which trends will be a flash in the pan and which are long term and appropriate for a hotel.

In addition to having a finger on the pulse of the restaurant world, the following are ten top strategies I believe hotel chefs can employ to compete and win.

Talent

In my opinion, the crucial role of an executive chef is to assemble and lead a great culinary team. An executive chef will never truly be successful without this. If you already have a great team, you must continue to nurture, challenge and develop it. Assembling the team is too critical to success to be left to the HR department. Network, use your contacts and get out there to find the talent you want.

Hotels may not always have a celebrity chef that will attract the young hot shots coming out of culinary school, but they do have many advantages when recruiting. Most hotels offer benefit programs, training programs and lifetime career opportunities for advancement. Most restaurant operations cannot offer their employees opportunities to transfer to other properties within their company. Hotels however, can and do offer these life-changing opportunities to their employees - diversifying and enriching an employee’s future. In addition, hotels are dynamic and exciting places to work, offering a variety of meal periods, banquets, room service, weddings and special events with significantly more diverse workplace exposure than most freestanding operations.

Sunday Brunch Seafood Salad

Ingredients

Even with the best talent, chefs and cooks cannot produce outstanding food without outstanding ingredients. In my experience, hotel kitchens generally have an opportunity to provide a solid business base for food distributors and producers as they have structured purchasing systems and are stable long term customers for food suppliers. Hotel executive chefs should take advantage of this and build solid partnerships with suppliers, ensuring they get the best access to quality products along with new and unique products that others cannot. Look after your suppliers and your suppliers will look after you.

Breakfast

This is the most important meal of the day to any hotel. Not all hotel guests will have lunch or dinner, but most will have breakfast, and therefore the product must be outstanding. One of the things guests truly love about staying in a hotel is being able to wake up and either order room service or simply take an elevator and have a quick, fresh, hot breakfast prepared for them. Hotels own the market for high-end, full-service breakfast, and it is critical that they deliver consistent quality everyday. Breakfast is also usually the most lucrative meal period in most hotels, driving a significant portion of the food and beverage profit. Chefs may feel that breakfast is not as exciting as dinner, but in hotels it is critical. At The Waldorf=Astoria, my team and I make sure we check the quality of our offering everyday: Is the hot food hot, cold food cold? Does the buffet sparkle? Are the bacon rashers crisp, croissants flaky, scrambled eggs seasoned, and coffee fresh hot and flavorful?

Room Service

The Waldorf=Astoria New York was the first hotel in the world to offer room service, so we take a great deal of pride in continuing exceptional execution. When executed properly, room service is a thing of beauty: an attentive waiter carefully delivers outstanding food and beverage and arranges it perfectly for the guest to enjoy in the comfort of their room. Room service is a feature of luxury hotels that guests absolutely love to indulge in during their stay. Ensure you offer everything a guest may want: quick delivery, healthy options, special dietary needs, an elegant dinner for two, decadent desserts, a selection of great wines and champagne, etc. Generally, I find classic dishes are the most popular room service items, including burgers, continental breakfast, clubhouse sandwich and Eggs Benedict. These are dishes that may not always be exciting, but they sell. Offer these items on your menu and ensure perfect execution.

Training

Training can enhance your competitive edge in many ways. Hotel companies often offer corporate training and educational assistance programs that help attract talent by offering a career rather than a job. In addition, the nature of food and beverage in a hotel means that it can offer diverse experiences for chefs in several outlets, banquets, room service, or even in purchasing, accounting and marketing. Encouraging team members to take advantage of training shows them that they are valued and opens windows of opportunity for their future.

World Famous Waldorf Salad

Banquets

In most cases, hotels make the majority of their food and beverage profit with banquets; therefore, they require a great deal of focus. The key factor to staying competitive is focusing on innovation. Challenge your culinary team to adapt restaurant dishes for your banquet operation. As banquet menus are produced electronically now, there is no reason that menus should not continue to evolve and stay relevant.

Weddings

Weddings are the most important events that we, as part of a hotel, are privileged to be involved in. After all, what life event is more important for a couple to share with their family and friends? Weddings at The Waldorf=Astoria are an opportunity to push our teams to execute perfection while raising the bar in innovation and creativity. Weddings are events that require the entire hotel team to work together and ensure that every aspect of the couple’s experience is executed properly. A couple never forgets their wedding day, and The Waldorf=Astoria makes sure that a long term connection to the hotel is developed. In addition, it is an opportunity to showcase outstanding offerings to attendees so that they too will want to hold events at the property in the future.

Pastry

Not every hotel has an in-house pastry shop but if you do, this is a key area that can be leveraged as a competitive asset. Most of the top pastry chefs in the industry work in hotels not only because of the stability it offers, but also because of the variety of work to be done with plated desserts, banquets, French pastries, wedding cakes, buffets, sugar and chocolate work, and amenities. Pastry chefs usually cannot find as much variety working in a restaurant, and therefore hotels can attract stellar pastry talent. Once you have the talent, make sure to show it off and ensure that the pastry talent is focused on desserts that will drive incremental revenue.

Soup

While soup may seem simple, in most hotels it is the number one selling appetizer during lunch and dinner. Hotels generally have larger kitchen facilities and in most cases, steam kettles. A 365 day-a-year operation generally offers soup du jour everyday. Soup should not be an afterthought left to whomever to make with whatever they can find in the fridge. To the contrary, soups should always be made with fresh, in-house made stock, not with frozen or commercial bases. As much as possible, the soup should be made by the same person everyday and tasted before served. Customers are often unfortunately accustomed to canned, frozen or soup made from commercial bases; therefore, you can blow guests away with fresh, creative, quality soup and make a strong margin as well.

Filet Mignon with Blue Cheese Crust

Salad Dressings

This is another area where hotels can leverage their large kitchen facilities and make product from scratch. A variety of top quality, consistently made dressings will differentiate your salads from what the consumer is accustomed to, as commercially prepared dressings are often used at home and served in the majority of restaurants. For example, a century after it was first invented here, the Waldorf Salad is still on every outlet menu and our top selling and most requested salad. Part of the Waldorf Salad’s popularity can be credited to the fact its components are always made fresh from scratch.

Overall, there are multiple strategic opportunities hotels’ can utilize to put themselves ahead and compete confidently with freestanding outlets. The bottom line to any hotel’s culinary strategy is of course quality: quality food, quality talent and quality service. Hotels will be far more successful in competing with consistent quality food and beverage offerings than trying to compete on price or trying to catch the latest trend.

Chef Garcelon, director of culinary at The Waldorf=Astoria, is responsible for the entire kitchen operations of the landmark hotel. A 20-year veteran of executive chef positions around North America, he brings his love of food and passion for using the finest, locally sourced ingredients to the iconic hotel’s distinctive restaurants: the stylish Peacock Alley, the jewel of the hotel’s lobby, renowned for its extravagant brunch and seafood menu; Bull & Bear steakhouse, a Manhattan institution; and Oscar’s American Brasserie, offering casual dining. Mr. Garcelon can be contacted at 212-355-3000 or david_garcelon@hilton.com Extended Bio...

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