At Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi , GM Pep Lozano has just finalised the landscaping of the resort ahead of September's launch.
Between you, your hotels will be adding a whopping 48 restaurants and bars to the UAE market. How challenging is it for hotels to compete against branded restaurants when it comes to F&B these days?
Mario: The restaurant scene in Dubai is a very competitive environment and over the past years the standalone restaurants have become more successful. I think today people are looking for lifestyle experiences.
For a hotel the key success factor in my opinion is to have a good balance and a variety of food and beverage which covers every kind of interest which makes your hotel an attraction because you can spend an evening there.
The place for me [is somewhere that offers] an aperitif, two, three excellent choices of restaurants of different concepts and cuisines and service styles and why not after dinner have some more options for nightlife — that’s what Conrad is aiming for. It will be a mix of own developed concepts by our company and some branded restaurants.
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Luigi: We recognise that a celebrity chef adds prestige to the restaurant and we would have a couple of those coming in but out of the 11 outlets we have most of them are internally managed.
The spin I took on this is I rather invest money and effort in trying to get a great chef that sits with me 100% of the time rather than a brand, so we ended up recruiting a two Michelin star chef from Barcelona and we’re going to have a Catalan restaurant that is going to be very authentic. With the Indian restaurant we ended up having a very top chef from London that is coming to us from a very acclaimed restaurant. So in a way the investment is more on the person rather than a celebrity name above the door.
Pep: All the restaurants in the hotel will be managed by Ritz-Carlton. We have spent a lot of time in finding the best chef for each one of them including one of our best pastry chefs who is coming on board July 1.
These restaurants will be managed by ourselves however in the Venetian Village you will have signature chefs coming on board that will make it a very special area. The Venetian Village will be second phase so it still will not be open until mid next year. They are looking at international brands for Venetian Village.
We will target guests that come [and dine] regularly with a loyalty card and will give them some added values. Of course we’ll focus on high-end products but we’ll market on a standard price and not be too expensive to make sure our guests come back and create a local base. We’ll play a very big role within our local community with our Lebanese restaurant and we are hiring a lot of Middle East chefs to cater to their needs, which is very important.
Rupprecht: We are going to manage them all but we have some association consulting agreements with a couple of names [the hotel has already signed with Atul Kochhar]. Having lived here now a year and I love to go out, brand is very important in this marketplace.
Having said that, some brands funnily enough are successful and some are not so it’s not simply bringing a brand and here goes the cash register. There’s one thing I caution, a development I see that isn’t really going in the right direction, especially with restaurants coming along in this number, is the discounting here and promotion here I think is going over the top.
The market is flooded with promotions today and that takes away a little bit of the credibility. I understand the mechanics, there’s a lot of expats here, then there’s the corporate spender and the private spender and he is very price sensitive, the corporate spender here is not price sensitive and there are two worlds in between.
There are two million people now living in Dubai, make it 85% expats, the market is huge but I don’t quite understand what’s being thrown at the market now with the ladies nights and the brunches and you see deals that I think are absolutely out of this world, out of this norm and bring this in the wrong direction. I just wish there was a little more integrity in serving and marketing food and beverage in this marketplace.
Martin: We’re not going to be generating marketing through discounting, we just don’t believe in it. It just cannibalises what would normally be a relatively healthy price point or a simply attractive price point.
It’s about creating that loyalty, that loyal fan base, those advocates. We’re not going to have any branded restaurants, all of ours will be home built and just celebrating the chefs we have within the organisation and seeing how you can grow talent. I’m all in favour of branded restaurants as well but my only concern is on the Palm I think there’s already a relatively sufficiently large inventory of branded restaurants and you do need to also have restaurants that are sensitively priced in order to keep that local fan base healthy and happy.
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