VP INTERVIEW: King of the castle

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.

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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Enabling Entrepreneurs
It’s a fair point, but what’s the solution? “If I have to give you in a very short sentence what is the future – it’s to design the restaurant of tomorrow with the reality of today and the price of yesterday,” Offe asserts.

Part of the “reality of today” is the shift in lifestyles generally and the unique demands of the younger generation.

“Particularly in Asia, what I call the generation Y, in China generation Y is probably 60% of your employees and 60% of your customer. That makes a big difference.

Gen Y want to be involved in every decision process – they ask why and they want to be part of it. You cannot ignore that. And then when they go to a restaurant, they don’t go for breakfast, lunch and dinner, they go at three in the afternoon to have a bowl of noodles, then they come back at 10pm with five friends and they have 10 dishes.

The lifestyle is very different because of the way they work. They spend time in the office until 10 in the evening. Closing the restaurant at 3pm and reopening at six is not applicable anymore. I think there is a shift in people’s lifestyles and I think we need to adapt to that and it is very difficult for hotels,” says Offe.

To tackle these issues, Offe is focusing in 2013 on the structure of hotel F&B teams, redefining roles that over time have lost their focus.

“This year I am going to focus on repositioning the profile of the executive chef,” reveals Offe. He argues that the tightening of belts after the 2008 financial crash has crushed entrepreneurship, with financial pressures constraining innovation.

“The creativity has died because every time you want to create something the answer you get is ‘we don’t have money’,” he laments of the industry generally. “I believe it’s not a question of money – you can create great things. It’s a mind set. And this is something I’ve learned with the Chinese.

They are entrepreneurs. They pick up ideas and they make it work without thinking about money; it’s entrepreneurship and that’s something I want to develop with the executive chefs, the younger generation, to be more entrepreneurial, to take risks,” says Offe.

He also wants to refine the F&B manager’s role, which Offe says has its own unique set of issues.

“Very often in hotels we are asking the F&B director to be the floor manager, to run the day-to-day operation. Why? Because you do not find qualified outlet managers, or you don’t have assistant F&B because they cut the position because of budget.

So the director of F&B is doing the day-to-day operation when he should be the strategist; he should be the one that thinks about tomorrow, how to get new markets.

It’s totally disconnected, the structure we have, we cannot carry on to do business like this. I want F&B to strategise and think ahead because it’s a weak link in the industry today. We need to think otherwise we’re not going to be able to survive”.

His plan to ensure Fairmont is at the forefront of this is in motion, with a programme being developed with the University of Cornell for both professions. Ultimately, this will meet another of Offe’s industry complaints — poor service.

“It’s hard for me to tell you that at any hotel in any location that I have great service. For the bill that I pay, I don’t have a great service,” says Offe. “[Service charge means] it’s a given so there is no effort. It should not be this way but it’s the reality.”

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Future Goals
Offe is prepared to be patient, however, saying he expects it to be another couple of years before Fairmont has the influence on F&B globally that he wants.

Currently, the focus is on developing F&B concepts in-house, using Fairmont talent rather than consultants as has historically been the case.

“We are now doing quite a few [new concepts] particularly in North America – 15 restaurants under renovation, plus new hotels. 2015 is really the date I have set to see the new generation of activities with Fairmont.

It will take 12-18 months to develop the concepts and by the time you have 15-20 new restaurants then you start to make an impact on the market. At the moment it’s not enough to make noise,” he says.

Making this impact forms the focus of Offe’s future ambitions. “The first thing I have to fulfil is to make sure Fairmont is successful — that’s an obligation. I’ve given myself a few years to do that because we have a lot of opportunities and we have the right people.

I’m very happy to see passionate young talent in the hotels – they just need to be guided and inspired. That should be my role I believe. Fairmont has the potential to develop the new generation of leaders and that’s what I want to do.

I will take care of the leaders of today of course because this is critical, but the success will come from tomorrow. And tomorrow we have to put it in place today. If I’m able to do that in the next 18 months then tomorrow will be very successful”.

After that, Offe says he may turn his attention to his own project. “When this is done, my daughter and my son are in the business and they always said ‘why don’t we open our own business, the three of us?’ That’s something which also has the potential in the future for them.

I would love to do something the three of us and that would be most probably in Hong Kong,” he reveals.

As to what this concept will be though, it remains mysterious; for following trends is not something Offe is known for.

“My view is if there is a trend you should do the opposite because if you follow the trend, everybody’s going to do the same,” he laughs.

“It’s like benchmarking — if you all benchmark the same thing, how can you be different?”

Should this project come to fruition, one can’t help but thinking Offe will be king of his castle once again.