Abu Dhabi National Hotels (ADNH), the hotel, catering, retail and transport company based in the UAE capital, has launched a new restaurant division to “lure” new F&B brands to the city.
In an exclusive interview, ADNH CEO Richard Riley told Caterer: “We’re looking at master franchise agreements and developing our own stable that we can then generate; we have many locations where we can work with branded restaurants.
“Some of these will probably be master franchises, some of them we’re encouraging to come to the UAE for the first time. I‘d like to try and get as many new entities as possible,” said Riley.
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The new division will operate eight restaurants at the upcoming Venetian Village in Abu Dhabi, part of the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi Grand Canal site being developed by ADNH.
“The Ritz-Carlton itself has six restaurants and then there are restaurants at the Venetian Village; these are all branded and there are eight,” revealed Riley.
“This part of it is run by ADNH, by my team, so what we’re doing is we’re in the negotiation stage of the tenanting for the brands that will go and join us there and we’ll have some big names — that’s a big facility, there will be about 16 restaurants between the hotel itself and the Venetian Village.”
Riley said that it was important for Abu Dhabi to offer more globally recognised food and beverage brands as part of its wider tourism strategy.
“Clearly, Abu Dhabi is growing and Dubai has done a remarkable job and look at all the opportunities as residents that we have here [in Dubai], those need to be created in Abu Dhabi.
“We’re already a large presence in Abu Dhabi so we owe it to the city to make this happen and we’ll do so,” said Riley.
“The Venetian Village has its own entrance next to the hotel. It also has its own parking undercover for up to about 500 cars so it can be its own destination and it will be marketed as the Venetian Village and it will be next to the Ritz-Carlton — it’s kind of cool, it’s a great young people’s area. There will be restaurants, clubs and retail areas,” he added.
The Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi, an AED 1.5 billion investment for ADNH, is due to open by the end of 2011, said Riley.
“I will be pushing very hard to get it open before the end of the year, that’s what we’re doing, I’m not going to nail it down but the bottom line is we feel we’re very, very close and we just hope if everything will stay on schedule that we’ll be able to pull it off.”
The F&B outlets will include an Asian restaurant, steak and seafood restaurant, gelato café and a Lebanese restaurant.
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