Hotelier: How involved do owners get with F&B selection, and has it always been this way?

Adam: Part of it is that they know a great restaurant will help differentiate a hotel. Sometimes you’re left alone, and it’s a professional process. Sometimes you’re not left alone, and it’s still a professional process. And sometimes it’s different to those two! In terms of selecting a partner, no one has yet made a success in terms of outsourcing all the outlets. We’re looking at partners, we have to be clear that we’re not buying the name, we’re buying chemistry and DNA. They have to have experience working outside their home markets and they understand the story behind the product is as important as the quality of the product, the people, and all these things have to be treated equally.

Niki: If you look at someone like Marco Pierre White, then that was very much a commercial opportunity. But the thing is, you need someone hungry for that marketing themselves, who’s very active on social media without which you die in restaurants.

Adam: Driven by a passion for food, for service, for making people happy.

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Niki: And making a restaurant fun.

Adam: And as a by-product make some money.

Niki: And it should be a by-product, that’s the key.

Marc: The challenge as a hotelier is that we have a big opportunity in the in-house guests and we still need to cater to them with a variety of expectations. An independent restaurant is closed at midnight, but we still need to cater at 3am, 24/7. A big part of our business is rooms and we need to make sure we deliver the minimum expectations of a traveller.

Elias: Your hotel becomes associated with brands.

Adam: Yes the Edition in London gets more publicity on the back of Jason Atherton’s restaurant than it does as a hotel itself, and that’s one of our flagships.

Marc: It shows the importance of the F&B associations with any hotel. At the end of the day, F&B total turnover percentage in this region is still massive compared to a lot of other regions in the world. When you’re doing minimum 30-40% F&B turnover in some of your hotels — some of my hotels are doing more on F&B than in rooms — that shows the importance of being associated with good and strong F&B concepts because that allows the hotel to sell rooms and position themselves in the market.

Gianluca: There are certain brand names that definitely fill your lobby. There is an aura that great restaurants bring, and those restaurants [in Four Seasons’ Restaurant Village], the traffic they bring in is phenomenal.

Adam: The other argument is that a restaurant adds to, not just the traffic, but to the perception of the hotel and the room rates. That helps really argue the case for investment. It pushes your RevPAR, and helps to release the capital to go for the right name.

Elias: Hoteliers sometimes look at the problem at the wrong angle. We fundamentally have a problem with managing F&B and we need to fight back. We are being outsourced because we have a weakness, but long-term I don’t think outsourcing is the right way to go.

Adam: I think it is, you need a mix because the owner wants to diversify risk. If you lease out a restaurant, someone else invests in it.

Marc: You’re good at C&E, all day dining… you get so many things to focus on, that it adds a lot of value to bring on a restaurateur who do one thing. Allowing you to focus on the overall operation and having the F&B supporting you, not being a burden or taking your time. The balance is critical. It depends on what you think outsource is. It can be pure rent, a franchise, a joint venture, all of these models are outsourced. It’s very positive to bring expertise that you don’t have in-house. If you have the right mix between franchise, lease, a joint venture with a chef, it’s a balance.

Gianluca: What is really important in this discussion is that at the end of the day we are business managers. And our job as businessmen is to make sure our business is as successful as possible, using whatever method that we have available to us. We need to be totally open to ask: ‘what is the best format to make this successful for the owners?’ Outsourcing, or bringing in a celebrity chef, or doing something ourselves — that’s the choice we need to make as business managers. That’s what we’ve evolved to. We provide a ROI that the owners are looking for.