Know what happens when you play hot potato with a hotel chain? The potatoes get cold. Pretty soon the hotels’ reputation for culinary excellence cools too, until the dining room no longer is a destination.
That’s what happened to the West Coast chain Red Lion as a series of corporate hand-offs slowly eroded the core food offerings that once were the mainstay of the hotel's reputation.
“Red Lion's roots were based in food & beverage. We always had great restaurants and great food, but through all the different transitions, some of that focus was lost,” says VP of Hotel Operations Matt Engels. Now things are on the upswing thanks to Engels’ aggressive reorganization of the food operation throughout the entire chain. What once had been autonomous kitchens now work off the same playbook, delivering a consistent dining experience at all the hotel properties.
Founded in 1959 in Vancouver, Washington, Red Lion’s success eventually caught the eye of investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., which bought the chain and sold it to Doubletree. Two more buy-outs landed Red Lion in the Hilton family. West Coast Hospitality Corp. then bought it up and, in the latest move, rebranded the chain as Red Lion Hotels Corp., headquartered in Spokane, Washington.
The growth of the company, combined with the many hand-offs, did a lot to dilute the effectiveness of the food service operation. “As you become part of a bigger company, you are busy in a lot of different directions,” says Engels. As a result, “we had an inconsistent delivery dependingon where you went because there wasn’t a narrowly focused plan.”
Today the count stands at over three dozen properties owned and a total of 72 either managed or franchised. Everything is getting a dusting down right now: New granite countertops, tile floors, and so on. The kitchen too has undergone a serious refurbishment, and that's where we come in.
Making the Menu
The first and most dramatic step in the culinary overhaul began two years ago with an effort to standardize the offerings across Red Lion properties. “We started by asking: ‘How do we go forward and create some consistency?’” Engels says.
The decision was made to create a single Signature Menu, that would be the standard in all Red Lion hotels with three-meal-a-day restaurants.
“We hired one of our old corporate chefs, George Goodrich, and together he and I selected a group of seven chefs throughout our company to develop the presentations, to develop the working menus,” Engels recalls.
Selection was done through a contest, with chefs from throughout the organization developing recipes that were evaluated back at the corporate office. The winning chefs worked in teams to create different elements of the menu: appetizers, salads, entrées, desserts. Then they all met in the Napa wine country for a three-day meeting to share their results. The end product of this meeting formed the core of the new menu.
The driving theme behind the menu is consistency. “We have some big hotels, some small hotels, some in major markets, and some in tertiary markets,” says Engels. “We want something we can consistently do a great job with at all of our locations.”
In practice this means a menu creative enough to seem fresh, but traditional enough to be easily achieved. Lunch options include a cob salad, classic clubhouse, lobster and shrimp melt sandwich, and an Asian hibachi beef salad.
The dinner side of the menu includes grilled bleu cheese rib steak, bronzed pork chops with fire roasted apples, Hawaiian pineapple macadamia nut chicken, and a flame-grilled Portobello mushroom sandwich.
Finding the Savings
The new menu hit the streets a year ago, bringing with it not just a heightened sense of uniformity but also the opportunity for cost savings in several quarters.
Engels points to the potential for gains on the labor column of the ledger. “There are certain items that take more preparation, items where you have to do a lot more prep work. So by developing the working menus—here’s how you do it, here’s how it is going to look—you can take a lot of the guesswork out of these equations and get faster and faster in how you do these things."
Implementation of the core menu also has drawn the cooperation from the purchasing department, which has negotiated advantageous pricing from vendors while at the same time ensuring to F&B managers that the needed ingredients will always be on hand. Engels says this effort to standardize supply has brought down food costs by three points, and hotel chefs say they appreciate the streamlining.
“It takes an enormous amount of work away from us: the costing, the sourcing, the paperwork, all the things that we don’t like to do. It puts us back in the kitchen, which is were we want to be,” says Steve Merritt, executive chef at the Red Lion River Inn in Spokane. “It really frees us up to do some other things.”
To ensure things stay simple and maximize efficiencies, the corporate team deploys recipes to the field using Cheftech software, which makes it easy to send recipes, instructions, and even digital photographs. “It’s easy to work with,” says George Goodrich, Red Lion's corporate director of food and beverage. “It gives detailed descriptions of how each item comes together, so you get real value in terms of the consistency of the end product.”
Keeping It Local
Introducing a uniform menu across a chain like Red Lion brings with it certain inherent risks. The local hotels all had been highly autonomous in their food service, after all, and a move like this could spark resistance among the ranks.
“I was a little hesitant because part of my job is to read my market and to try to provide what I think my market is looking for,” says Merritt."I never was one to think that one size fits all.”
To quell fears, Engels kept up a steady flow of information as the project took shape, keeping F&B executives in the know as to what they should be expecting. Even more important, he says, was the effort to make sure all the little details were locked down by the time the program rolled out. ‘You overcome resistance by showing them it works, which means you make sure they have all the components in place and are executing according to the plan,” he says
Next step: Give people a voice. “You want to give them input into the process. If they are seeing things they want to change or tweak, let them know that yes, we can do that.”
Perhaps, most importantly, Engels has found a way to give chefs local autonomy while still keeping things harmonious overall. This comes in the form of daily specials, including a mandatory daily lunch special, which asks each chef to put something local and interesting on the menu.
“We want to keep the properties engaged by giving them the freedom to take advantage of their local markets and local specialties," says Engels. “When you start doing standardized menus, you still want to keep your local culinary talent engaged in the process.”
At Red Lion Hotel at the Quay, in Vancouver, Washington, Chef Bob Wagner gives the system high marks. Thanks to the daily specials, “we are always coming up with new items and specialty items,” even while sticking to the universal menu, he says.
Keeping It Fresh
If the daily special offers variety in the short term, it is the seasonal special that gives the menu long-term staying power.
The corporate office coordinates the quarterly specials, preparing a tabletop piece, lobby poster, in-room promo, and a menu insert to promote the current special. These might be items such as potsticker miso soup or a spring shrimp-and-fruit salad. “It's a little more eclectic” than the main line, Engels says.
In addition to giving the kitchen some variety, the season special adds some spice to travelers’ lives. “As our customers travel from hotel to hotel they are not going to get tired of the menu offerings. All of a sudden there will be something new there,” Engels says.
Often these specials are paired with a beverage deal coordinated by Patrick Henry Creative Promotions. “They help us form partnerships with our vendor and beverage partners. They do all the promotional materials and [the beverage partners] underwrite the cost of the actual promotions because we feature their products,” Engels says.
Patrick Henry also has helped Red Lion assemble a promotion book. Chefs can pick and choose from a range of promos to suit any setting, whether it’s a martini-bar hotel or more of a Monday night football crowd. “Rather than saying everybody is going to do this or that promotion, the hotels are able to pick and choose what they would like to do,” Engels says.
So where are we now?
Red Lion took the plunge and rolled out a universal menu among its properties, and a year later the plan has reshaped the chain’s F&B situation. The system not only saves money and simplifies chefs’ daily work, it also balances the need for consistency with the desire for local autonomy.
More to the point, the universal menu has transformed the customer’s dining experience, which today delivers an attractive degree of familiarity for guests looking for a meal they can count on.
“It's important to have a high-quality food and beverage experience,” says Engels. “And it is just as important that the customer knows what to expect.”
Adam Stone is a frequent contributor to Hotel F&B Executive.
