Exec chefs reveal their strategies for F&B success

Five-star executive chefs are using every tool at their disposal. From L-R: Christophe Prud?homme, Joe Vock, Sarah Briegel, Jean-Luc Morcellet, Anston

Executive chefs at the region’s five-star hotels reveal their strategies for F&B success.

Beneath the chef’s hats of the region’s five-star hotel executive chefs are cool and calculating business minds. Responsible for numerous outlets offering a variety of cuisines, they have an intriguing juggling act to perform: to provide eye-catching and consistently high quality F&B, while keeping a cautious eye on that bottom line; to nurture the creative exuberance of their staff, while also keeping it in check.

With ancillary revenue from F&B in tighter focus than ever for hotels following the economic downturn, the Middle East’s executive chefs need to use every strategic tool at their disposal to ensure that they whip up healthy profits and maintain a sharp competitive edge.

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Caterer Middle East selected five of Dubai’s best hotel executive chefs and brought them together at The Palace – The Old Town hotel to chew over these issues. Joining chef Jean-Luc Morcellet from the host hotel was Sarah Briegal, executive sous chef at Raffles Dubai, Anston Fivaz of Ibn Battuta Gate, Christophe Prud’homme of the Al Bustan Rotana Dubai and Joe Vock, of the Taj Hotel.

What is your approach to shaping the menus of your different outlets and how do you balance creativity with budgetary constraints?

Anston Fivaz: My approach is to provide a taste journey for our guests, ensuring the menus of all the hotel outlets will compliment each other.

Chef de cuisines and sous chefs are hired to be creative, but the budgets are set down by the executive team and head office. It’s up to us as executive chefs to make sure that targets are reached; that the chefs maintain their creativity while remaining within budget.

Christophe Prud’homme: Despite the wider scope that comes with working in a big hotel environment with multiple outlets, it creates its own challenges.

When crafting the menus there is no point in doing something other than Thai food in the Thai restaurant for example. You can fine-tune dishes and you can be creative with the presentation of course, but you still need to focus on the main message.

You also need to make sure there is a balance of high-end products and lower priced offerings, to give a fair average price so that the guests do not feel trapped.

Joe Vock: We find that some element of menu consistency is valued by our guests; it’s part of what keeps them coming back. We put in specials for some variation, but to keep changing menu options can come up against opposition, so we stay fairly consistent.

We also try to be to everybody’s taste in terms of pricing, providing a mixture of upmarket and more mid-range products.

Jean-Luc Morcellet: A lot of our menu change is driven by the feedback we get. We keep a basic level of certain dishes on the menu and then we listen to the comments from the guests, from the chefs and from the other employees. I agree that all in all you don’t want to change too much.

There are so many restaurants in Dubai already so why change what you have already just to try to copy someone else? We do keep a constant eye on the profit-potential of our menus though; if a particular dish isn’t moving then we change it. To control costs we try to keep the ingredients very similar across all of the outlets.

Sarah Briegel: Balancing menu creativity with the budget requires using ingredients cleverly across all of the outlets in your hotel — buying the best quality you can, but using it in a way that means the chef is being creative while also producing less wastage; maybe using other parts of a meat cut for another restaurant in the hotel for instance.