My passion for food and its industry is a lifelong affair, says Willi Elsener. My food & beverage journey took me through some of the major hotel operators of the world.
This journey gave me the experience of new hotel developments, restaurant design and concepts, food & beverage audits and consultancy, and this mix has given me the opportunity to see the industry from within and from the outside.
Hotels quite rightly spend a lot of time and effort analysing their room occupancy down to the smallest detail, alongside seeking formulas for retaining regular new business and providing customers with what they want.
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All this is usually based on guest feedback, questionnaires, statistics, anonymous external audits, and market intelligence, etc.
Do hotels apply the same criteria to food & beverage? The way I see it, just a few do. Most underestimate the financial potential of this segment of the industry. They fail to realise that F&B can make a healthy financial contribution to any hospitality establishment.
What is really lacking is the fundamental spirit of operating a restaurant — a strategy for using all the information to hand to improve and make a restaurant business grow and attain additional market share.
I call this the typical hotel food & beverage syndrome. Everybody is talking about empowering people. We hire an executive chef and a restaurant manager with the right credentials and we expect them to provide excellent food with a friendly, attentive service, to build a good reputation, increase the clientele list, attract repeat business and increase financial returns.
This is some task! A task that requires experience, expertise, planning and focus, to name just a few things from a long list. However, very often — and I believe in most hotels — when it comes to F&B everybody suddenly becomes an expert and everybody feels they must have a say.
This means there are too many fingers in the pie and too many layers of opinions, leading to diluted expertise, killing the spirit of the restaurant and its staff, and removing the power from those that were hired as experts.
The way I see it, within a hotel with multiple outlets, each and every restaurant should run like an independent unit.
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