The Vida Deluxe Room, where natural light is emphasised and the Simmons and Muldorfer bed is a brand standard.
Hotelier’s top five features
1. The multi-skilled front of house “dream makers”, responsible for the entire lobby area from check-in to F&B service.
2. The neutral, calming tones of white, beige, cream and grey, which make the hotel a perfect fit for male and female guests alike.
3. The simplicity of the menu at 3 in 1, where a good quality, familiar meal is guaranteed.
4. The ability to order room service from the poolside, thanks to the tie-up with Innspire.
5. The plan for the DJ in the lobby by day and poolside by night, which brings the areas together and offers guests an experience.
F&B FOCUS:
Californian executive chef Spencer Lee Black, who previously opened Buddha Bar for Grosvenor House in Dubai, is a big fan of Vida Downtown Dubai’s “homey” feel, something he has been keen to extend to the F&B offer from the outset.
“A lot of the food has been stripped down to a very simple, homey type of cuisine. They asked me what the concept was and I said ‘rustic chic’ – in my head, it all made sense,” he recalls.
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“I was in Dubai when we went extravagant and we were told to put things on the menu just to raise the price, adding things that were not needed, so now what I’ve done is I have stripped that away.”
Main courses will feature a protein, a potato and/or vegetables, such as grain fed chicken, broccolini and parsnip mash. The focus is on sourcing the best quality ingredients from the right people for the right price.
Black also wants to keep his menus a little healthier than the norm, with quinoa and lentils forming the base for some dishes, and pizzas made from buckwheat or wholemeal “so it’s not over processed”.
He has also come up with a range of 3 in 1 concepts, such as three shawarma in one, and mezze selections that can be ordered by the metre or by half a metre.
He says: “99% of everything we do in house; we try to make everything fresh, even to the
French fries and the ice cream.”
“It tastes better and it’s cheaper to do in house,” asserts Black. “It takes more manpower but that’s the thing with restaurants, food should be made fresh and it should be made in house. Hotels have a tendency to make everything from outside, when you’re a smaller property, boutique, we should be making it all fresh — I’ve forced everybody into it as much as possible.”
He’s sure that once the cooler months come and the restaurants open up onto the terrace, poolside and boulevard, they will be “busy every night”. And he’s confident that as long as they keep their offer distinct, third party outlet La Serre — expected to replicate the success and style of La Petite Maison — will complement the hotel outlets.
“If he works I should work, if I work he should work,” says Black. “It’s like with the opening of Grosvenor House... the minute we opened Buddha Bar everything got busy because all that foot traffic came,” he says.
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