Jean Michel Offe clocked up 19 years working with Hong Kong-based operator Shangri-la, during which time he oversaw the launch of 200 restaurants.
Fairmont vice president of food and beverage Jean Michel Offe has a bold plan to plug a gap in the global hotel restaurant business. He wants his chefs to be entrepreneurs, his F&B directors to be strategists and his restaurants to buck the trends
There are not many hoteliers who would freely admit that restaurants in hotels are too expensive. And there are fewer still that would be as bold as to claim there is a vacuum in the industry when it comes to F&B leadership — and that it’s their goal to fill the gap.
But there are likely to be even less hoteliers that have run the Gobi Desert March, a 250km ultra-marathon in China, and have the mission to run three more, including one in Antarctica. Immediately, I get the feeling that Jean Michel Offe, vice president, food and beverage, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts is a little different from your average hotelier.
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It’s easy to warm to Offe, a veteran hotelier who stacked up 19 years opening 200 restaurants with Hong-Kong-based Shangri-La before moving to Canadian chain Fairmont in November 2011.
A chef since his school years, with InterContinental Muscat in Oman providing his first posting as executive chef in the 1980s, Offe retains much of the passionate, candid nature of his trade, tempered perhaps by his subsequent experience as an F&B director and hotel manager — moves he attributes to timing and opportunity rather than deliberate career growth.
Frank and sincere, Offe recalls his climb up the career ladder fondly, crediting his grandmother and uncle, a chef on a cruise liner, as his inspirations for seeking out work in restaurant kitchens in Brittany, France at the tender age of 10.
As a teenager he decided to leave school rather than continue his studies and got a job at a restaurant in the Loire Valley.
“I don’t know if you call it a vocation but this is always something that I wanted to do,” reflects Offe.
Inevitably, he moved to Paris and then emigrated to Canada, thus beginning his career in the international world of hotels. Dubai beckoned, with Offe heading up The Rotisserie at InterContinental, now Radisson Blu, on the Creek, before transferring to Oman.
“That’s something that’s an achievement, that’s never something that I thought would happen to me, coming from a small restaurant in France, particularly in a country where I never had any idea where it was at the time, Oman,” he recalls.
IHG then took Offe to Asia, a continent he was always fascinated by, explaining why he has never left, with Hong Kong now his home. Here, Offe met the person who would inspire his career from this moment on, following a move to Shangri-La to open the company’s hotel in Jakarta.
Offe explains: “I really wanted to do an opening, for some reason I got connected with the right people because I always believe it’s a question of opportunity and being there at the right time, so I got the job and opened the hotel as executive chef.
My general manager at that time, John Segreti, became vice president, so then he asked me if I wanted to become director of F&B, which I never wanted to be. I was very happy as a chef, I was king of my castle.
He said ‘by tomorrow morning you have to give me an answer’. I went home, gave it some thought, talked to my wife, and the following day said ‘if you think I can do it and become a general manager one day, then I’ll take the job. Otherwise I better stay as a chef’. He said ‘why don’t you buy a suit’ and that was it”.
The pair later transferred to Singapore and then Offe became hotel manager of the 1000-room Shangri-La in Bangkok. It was here that another opportunity arose, meaning another decision again forced by Segreti — this time between Offe being general manager for the first time, or moving to corporate office.
Choosing the latter, with his brief being to reposition the company from an F&B standpoint, meant Offe opened 40 hotels with Shangri-La, being heavily involved in each project thanks to the family-owned nature of the chain.
But after 19 years, with “everything aligned”, he accepted an approach from Fairmont and now, has a clear ambition for what he wants to achieve with the chain.
“I believe today in food and beverage there is a vacuum when it comes to leadership in the hotel industry,” says Offe. “There are quite a few brands that have done a very good job in the past and they are not as focused as they used to be,” he says, partly because some are opening less hotels while others are opening such large properties that they are “becoming more of a machine”.
“I don’t think anybody does a great job...we’re coping, but it’s difficult, it’s hard to find people, the investment, it’s about money. If I asked you today who is the leader in F&B worldwide, you may say ‘Four Seasons is very good in this area, or Ritz-Carlton or Shangri-La or Hyatt’, but we cannot say there is one brand which comes to mind as the best in Middle East, in Europe, in Asia. So I think there is an opportunity for Fairmont to take that leadership,” he asserts.
The gap has arisen in part due to competition from standalone outlets on the rise says Offe, although he is keen to point out that hotels must address the reason why this growth is an issue — cost.
“The problem that we all have is everybody will tell you restaurants in hotels are too expensive. Some standalones are very expensive but for different reasons. The way we run the hotels with the structure that we have, we become too expensive.
And I think you cannot today say to the customer ‘oh because we are a hotel we are going to charge 40% more than somebody else who is very successful in the market’ – you can’t do that and there is no rationale for that so I think we have reached a stage today where we really need to think how we do business because otherwise people will go to a free-standing restaurant,” worries Offe.
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