Dining destination
A perfect service delivery from butlers specifically trained to meet guests’ needs is one thing, but at St. Regis, this needs to be a standard across the entire hotel.
Considering another of the property’s highlights is its eclectic food and beverage offer — which includes four third-party restaurants — I was curious about the potential pitfalls these independent restaurants might pose. On this, Derbas is clear: in the rare case of complaints, they go to him.
“Everything comes to me. I ensured this was agreed before anything. St. Regis brand standards are in every outlet,” he asserts, although acknowledging that with 10 outlets and a range of leisure activities, the challenge is “bringing everything together under one umbrella”.
The third-party outlets include Gordon Ramsay — Doha’s first fine dining restaurant — Opal by Gordon Ramsay, Hakkasan and Al Sultan Brahim, and they operate under slightly different partnerships as executive assistant manager i/c food & beverage Dejan Popadic explains.
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“Starwood operates with three different systems — one is licences, one is management or lease and the third is franchise. Franchise would not be attractive in this market, particularly because everything has to always be owned by local representation.
With managed or leased — basically we have a third-party operator come in. He pays you a fee for the land he is leasing from you. He manages it exclusively by himself, either with or without your help. In our case, we only have one management contract, which is Hakkasan,” says Popadic.
“Hakkasan doesn’t leave anything up to chance. If you would call it brand arrogance, that would be a very good word, with all the success they have built in the past they have the right to say ‘we know what we’re doing, we’re doing it well and anywhere we go, we’re doing it right’. And they won’t allow a third party, no matter how big or strong that brand is, to come and have the chisel on that concept.”
Working with Gordon Ramsay Holdings is completely different, however, with the two concepts being agreed upon mutually.
“Gordon Ramsay is very diversified in his operations, so he leaves a lot up to the operator. It is a collaboration. We pay them a fee for their expertise and for their brand name — of course, it has value itself and is driving covers into the seats.
And at the end of the day, the brand standards that this restaurant is operating with are a merging between St. Regis and Gordon Ramsay Holdings, but mutually approved,” says Popadic.
“With the exception of Hakkasan, all the other three third-party operators are purely operated by us and we get input from them in order to generate more revenues, as it is in both our interests, so they are feeding with a percentage on the top line, and we are taking the top line and converting it into bottom line, and there is also an incentive for them on the bottom line,” he explains.
Where the approach to all four restaurants is the same, however, is with regard to complaints handling, affirms Popadic.
“So when it comes to complaints or negative feedback or constructive feedback for that manner in any of our third-party operated partnerships, we would be the one addressing it, handling it as if it was our own. Then we would feed back to our third- party operator.
The same is with Hakkasan. If a guest comments about Hakkasan, we are going to treat him as our guest. He is on our premises, afterwards we will address it with the third-party operators.”
Gordon Ramsay and Hakkasan may well be the automatic draws for guests at St. Regis Doha, but once inside the vast property, there are also a host of in-house brands expected to be hugely successful. The one Popadic is most proud of is Astor Grill, which combines French and New York cuisine and offers table theatre and an open kitchen.
He says St. Regis avoided a typical steak house “for the simple fact that there are plenty of those already in the city and as we know, in the Gulf, everything comes from supplier A, B and C and you can only go and jump left and right, so the steak being put on the table in hotel X is the same steak being put on the table in hotel Y.
The only difference is that the chef might have more creative views or better cooking techniques.
“The plate or service style might be a little different, but at the end of the day, it would be very hard to justify charging a premium over anyone else,” comments Popadic. “So the idea was to go into having a more predominantly meat-based restaurant, hence the name Astor Grill. However, we were also looking at the name Astor, with its founding legacy.
“Astor Grill is definitely a brainchild that came purely out of the background work that we as a team here locally on the ground have achieved. And I think if we realise it exactly as much as we visualise it and it works how we want it to work, this can be a fantastic concept that might even have potential to be further developed in other St. Regis properties,” Popadic reveals.
Excited as he is about Astor Grill, what is really important to Popadic, however, is the F&B director’s “bread and butter” — the banqueting function, including an 1850m² ballroom expected to attract huge weddings business.
“Restaurants are for show, banqueting is where the money lies and where the profit is. We have an extraordinary product — the second largest ballroom in the city…and for social functions, this is the ballroom in the city and it will remain the ballroom for a long time to come,” he says.
In St. Regis fashion, the approach to catering huge events is different, not only because of the “very, very limited buffet options”, but because Popadic plans to offer a menu guests can actually order from on the night.
“We’re just taking tradition to the next level of being able to deliver what the guest would like on the plate rather than in chafing dishes. And in giving them a choice of main course for any occasion in the ballroom that seats 1200 guests, where on the night you feel like salmon versus beef, and we make it happen for you – that is St. Regis,” says Popadic.
No pre-ordering for a main course at a 1200-person event would be a nightmare, though surely? Maybe at first, responds Popadic, but “somebody, someday will have to do it”.
“We have pushed the bar with so many of these things – [with our wine list] we have not taken ‘no’ for an answer and now we have the largest and most unique wine list in the country, where 70% of the labels are exclusive imports for our hotel, with two sommeliers in our system, where no other hotel has a sommelier.
“And this is what St. Regis has to stand for; what we believe in. The most important thing is to show persistency when times are tough and to pull through and not to start chiselling on the concept we decided upon in the beginning. It’s the same with the banqueting.
But at the end of the day, it crystallises itself pretty quickly when you are offering a hammour and a beef and you have 1000 people in a ballroom and you know who your target audience is, you are always going to be able to do a 70-30 or 80-20 calculation and those 50 extra portions going left or right are worth it to represent the branding,” explains Popadic.
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