(L-R) Robert Stokes, IMG Worlds of Adventure's head of culinary, and Naveed Dowlatshahi, MG Worlds of Adventure's vice president of food and beverage.
Stretching across 1.5 million ft2, IMG Worlds of Adventure is set to become the world’s largest multi-themed indoor theme park.
Ready to welcome more than 20,000 visitors a day to its four zones (Cartoon Network, Marvel, IMG Boulevard, and Lost Valley — Dinosaur Adventure zone), IMG Worlds of Adventure is also gearing up to cater to 2,129 people per hour — and this is just seated; if you factor in food stalls and takeaways, it will push that figure even higher.
Feeding this many people is clearly not an easy task, although not particularly unusual for a theme park or attraction of this kind. What is out of the ordinary, however, is the fact every diner at IMG will be experience something new, as a total of 28 new F&B outlets will open within the park.
The park’s vice president of food and beverage, Naveed Dowlatshahi, tells Caterer Middle East he was “wasn’t interested in doing the regular food court, QSR, typical theme park offering, and neither was Robbie,” referring to IMG Worlds of Adventure head of culinary Robbie Stokes.
“We really wanted to do something different and special, and set the benchmark as far as the F&B experience in a theme park environment. People usually walk away from the experience and talk about the rides, but we want people to also walk away and say they had a great meal. We generally talk about customer service in F&B but a theme park is very different as it’s actually about the whole guest experience. It’s critical that we keep guests happy,” he explains.
The culinary team’s reasons for wanting to be different make complete sense but it’s not hard to imagine the initital challenges with getting everyone on board with creating 28 new concepts.
| Advertisement |
“Originally we had the finance guys say ‘let’s lease out the space’ because that means guaranteed income and although we understand the commercial argument, we wanted to look beyond that,” Dowlatshahi reveals, adding that if they were not going to go down the QSR route then the second option would have been to franchise existing, well-known brands.
“We didn’t like that because, as with any franchised brand, you’ve got to do what they tell you to do. You are restricted and you don’t necessarily have control over quality,” he continues.
“Also, if you bring in a franchised concept, it wouldn’t complement the theme; one of the USPs is that our F&B outlets are heavily themed to the environment they are in. So, even though ‘off the shelf’ was the easy option, we went against it,” he adds.
And so the team went for the third — and most challenging — option by creating everything from scratch, from the design and branding to the uniform, crockery and glassware, multiplied 28 times.
Dowlatshahi concedes: “It’s hard enough trying to do one concept, but it’s worth it. It was all about the end goal of doing something different and adding to the overall guest experience.”
Article continues on next page...
Search our database of more than 2,700 industry companies
