Club designer urges hotels to prioritise nightlife

There is a gap in the UAE hospitality and F&B markets for more nightclubs and later entertainment, according to former nightclub operator turned designer Aidan Keane.

Speaking yesterday at the Caterer Middle East Bars and Nightlife Forum in Dubai on a panel entitled Designing Concepts that Deliver Bottom Line Results, the founder of Keane brands said: “I see that a return is going to come to purer nightlife, where people don’t open until 10pm and go until midday the next day. They’ll sell when licensing allows perhaps. But I think there will be a movement when people break away from this kind of catch-all bar-club-restaurant and into a nightlife-focused concept”.

Keane explained: “Look at the big cities, the interesting people don’t go out until 11pm. That’s an international trend that is gathering pace hugely but people are saying I’m going to only open Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I’m going to open 10pm-7am, until midday whatever, and operate on that.

“I think there’s possibly a really good and exciting market for much later entertainment,” he added.

Jumeirah Beach Hotel assistant food and beverage manager Andrea Zampolini, who has recently relaunched the 360 bar, questioned whether it was realistic to design a venue that would only open for three days.

“If you have a venue which looks great, which you invest lots of money in, I don’t think that your plan would be to operate three days a week only. You can’t afford it. Even if you say you keep it closed for four days and just open Thursday, Friday, Saturday – it’s impossible to run. Opening three days I don’t think it’s possible or affordable for most people in the industry,” asserted Zampolini.

In response, Keane asked whether this came from a “hotel mentality” prevalent in a market which until very recently, relied upon hotels for all its F&B.

“We seem to have kind of tied ourselves to this ‘let’s be open seven days a week for breakfast lunch dinner...” Keane observed.

“As a nightclub operator I’m going to go ‘there’s half a million dollars, get me a funky sound system that makes my ears bleed, let me sell something out of hole in the wall and let me only open for three hours, three nights a week. Perfect.

“It’s just trying to break down the moulds — we’ve got into a pub mentality, this is bars and nightlife but the night doesn’t seem to go on long enough for me in a lot of respects,” said Keane.

Media One Hotel Dubai director of operations Luke James acknowledged that sometimes hotels were “too safe” when it came to F&B.

“We all think too much as hoteliers, traditional hotel mentality. I’m guilty of it,” he admitted.

The panel session followed the opening debate at the Bars and Nightlife Forum which discussed the evolution of the UAE’s nightlife and addressed the differences between hotel, restaurant and club operations.

Here, moderator Greg Dufton, co-founder of Think ME, the event management company hired by Atlantis to run Sandance, said: “To be honest there’s not a lot of hotel people who really get nightlife”.

Independent operators Markus Thesleff, co-founder of Okku Dubai, and Richard Haddon, club operations manager at Movida Dubai, agreed, saying they operated their venues in completely different ways to hotels.

“If you look around you’ll see everyone is chasing to put a nightclub in their hotel because they think it’s easy revenue,” said Thesleff. “A lot of hotels look at us as being easy revenue and it’s not, we cross both boundaries, we’re mainly a restaurant but we do some late nights, at the end of the day it’s probably the hardest segment to cater for. It’s two hours, I don’t care whether you’re a restaurant or a late night venue, pretty much you have two hours to make your money from a customer, after that they go somewhere else.”

This was the challenge for Movida, a tenant at Radisson Royal Hotel Dubai, said Haddon, which opens only on three nights of the week, for four hours a night — the type of club model advocated by Keane.

Haddon revealed: “We’re a venue that’s open three nights a week which comes to 12 hours, but out of those 12 hours we’re only busy six of those, so in six hours a week we need to turn over in the region anywhere between 750,000 and a million dirhams in six hours a week, so the pressure that we have during those six hours is monumental”.

In comparison, he said a hotel was a “living breathing thing”, operating continuously.

“Sometimes f&b departments don’t operate in the same way nightclubs do so there has to be a kind of understanding between us and the f&b department of the hotel to make sure everybody kind of gets what we’re all working towards, which is the same goal at the end of the day —making money basically,” concluded Haddon.