Standing before the signature rotisseries at the FireLake Grill House & Cocktail Bar, Radisson Plaza Hotel Motel, Minneapolis, are: (L–R) Steve Hedberg,VP Operations & Implementation, Managed Hotels & Resorts, Carlson Hotels Worldwide; Paul Lynch, Executive Chef, FireLake Grill House & Cocktail Bar and Radisson Plaza Hotel Minneapolis; and Tim Blaschke, Director of Operations, Managed Hotels & Resorts, Carlson Hotels Worldwide.




The FireLake Grill House & Cocktail Bar at the Radisson Plaza Hotel shown here features a huge exhibition kitchen, where diners watch a rotisserie (above) slowly roast pork, lamb, steak, chicken, and fish. Chef Paul Lynch uses several different wood types in the rotisserie to infuse the meats with a variety of flavors. For example, apple and pecan wood is used for smoking pork racks and for back bacon on the breakfast menu; cherry for the Garlic & Rosemary Lamb Tenderloin; hickory for the Balsamic Glazed Chicken; mesquite for the Flat Iron Steak with Prawns; and alderwood (a wood that lends a touch of sweetness) for the Maple Candy Salmon.


Tavern 17, due to open in April 2007 at the Radisson Plaza-Warwick, Philadelphia.


Three Rivers Lodge at the La Crosse Wisconsin Radisson.



Visit www.hfbexecutive.com and click on Extras & Galleries to view five months of seasonal menus and promotions at FireLake.


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Menu Design Showcase

Consider the hotel restaurant. It’s come a long way from being a royal pain, if it existed at all. The latter is the path of least resistance budget hotels took long ago, having decided it was far better to eliminate the restaurant. The argument? If you’re a budget brand, what sort of restaurant could you build to serve a product matching the perceived value of your rooms? Better to step outside and visit one of several midscale or fast food restaurants that offered predictable fare—everything from hamburgers and fried chicken to the more palatable Mexican, Italian, Chinese … take your pick.

The “royal pain” part was harder to justify. At the high end, it became an expensive, yet expected, convenience for guests paying big bucks for their rooms, an amenity like luxurious shampoos and soaps in the bathrooms. Thus, the restaurant experience for most of these guests? Breakfast.

Then we had the replacement cop-out, best exemplified by many mid- or upscale hotels that, having washed their hands of managing restaurants, decided to lease those spaces and the challenge of running them to a well-known chain or a celebrity chef or brand. What once was nothing was now something: a “destination kind of restaurant,” externally financed, owned, and operated.

Not so fast. At about 20 company owned and managed properties, Radisson Hotels & Resorts (435 locations in 61 countries), a division of privately owned Carlson Hotels Worldwide, recently launched an initiative to convert lifeless and uninteresting restaurants to destination restaurants. These restaurants were designed to appeal to everybody, while impressing the media and worrying the competition. This was not—as might appear at first blush—a radical, albeit risky, departure from the norm. It was a return to what, 40 to 50 years ago, a hotel restaurant symbolized: one of the few places in the city a guest could get a good meal.

Here’s the argument. Let’s assume your hotel has an obligation to provide restaurant service for guests. To use it only once in a while would appear to be a colossal waste of time, money, and space.

Tim Blaschke is Carlson’s director of operations, managed hotels & resorts. He couldn’t agree more. Given the state of restaurant business in hotels, he’s confident Radisson’s choice to do something about it is not just an initiative but a savvy strategy, as he puts it, “to break down those barriers for both internal and external customers, convincing them a hotel restaurant can, once again, be an established venue for a nice meal. We feel our hotel restaurants can be both a destination and competitive.” In the face of what independents and some chains have mounted to take over nearly all of the serious dining-out market, that makes good marketing sense. “We’re just trying to steal back some of our piece of the pie. This is a huge undertaking for us.”

So far, this F&B strategy has exceeded Radisson’s expectations and has positioned the hotel restaurant at three of its hotels, not only as a destination for guests and locals and as one of the restaurants of choice in the community, but as a powerful magnet to attract banquet and catering business.

Paul Lynch has been with Radisson for eight years. Lynch was the creative stimulus behind the crafting of FireLake Grill House and Cocktail Bar, the destination (read “independent”) restaurant at the Radisson Plaza Hotel (Minneapolis), where he is its executive chef. It is one of two conversions already up and running (the other, Three Rivers Lodge at the La Crosse Wisconsin Radisson). A third, Tavern 17, is due to open in April 2007 at the Radisson Plaza-Warwick, Philadelphia. More are planned at company owned and operated hotels.

According to Steve Hedberg, VP of operations for Carlson Hotels U.S., “This is a long-range strategy. We’re not going to do conversions in every hotel. We analyze the market and the location.”

If the market can competitively support one more “independent” restaurant, then the conversion moves forward. Hedberg insists on one additional caveat: The hotel where the conversion takes place “must be of a caliber equal to the quality of the conversion.”

SUCCESS FACTORS

“The success of the conversion means the restaurant must have its own identity, its own entrance, and must not be recognized as being part of the hotel. It has to have the feel and viability of an independent freestanding restaurant.” To that point, Hedberg says that once the appropriate products (food, design, service, etc.) are lined up and projected to function properly, it’s essential to hire an experienced independent restaurant manager to run the place. After that, the goal is that customers, either guests or locals, embrace it and return often.

To noodle the concept, operations (Hedberg, Blaschke, et al) performs the preliminary studies together with the company’s product and development departments. They examine various parameters and issues: will the restaurant work, does it make sense to create a conversion if what you end up with is no better than what you’re replacing, what about the buildout cost (FireLake cost $1.35 million), the ROI, will the market support yet one more “independent” restaurant, what’s the competition like, what sort of restaurant will work best, does the conversion make sense?

Answers to these questions and other findings are given to third-party restaurant consultants who share the results of their market surveys. “We compare their recommendations with our findings and move forward based on a combination of the intelligence we collect,” Blaschke says.

Says Robert Nyman, president, the Nyman Group (Phoenix), specialists in restaurant management, and one of the consultants Radisson worked with, “It’s a given that the conversion— the restaurant—be profitable. Steve Hedberg is right. It has to stand on its own, have a dedicated chef and manager just like every other freestanding independent. It must operate separately and not be held to the same standards of the hotel.”

“Restaurant employees are part of the hotel staff,” says Blaschke, “but we give them more intense training on customer service than what we might give the typical hotel employee. We do not expose them to traditional hotel training.” Implication? The employees are not befuddled about their loyalties and never have to ask themselves “What am I: a hotel employee or a restaurant employee?”

Nyman offers this as a piece of cautionary advice to hotel F&B execs who feel the Radisson approach to conversions might be worth a shot: “Certain hotels shouldn’t have restaurants, per se. They should have minimal operations—coffee and a croissant or muffin for a grab-and-go experience in the morning, and, perhaps, a bar set-up for guests returning to the hotel at the end of the day.”

To better understand how FireLake came to be and why guests and media alike rank it among the best in downtown Minneapolis, listen to Executive Chef Lynch explain why hotel restaurants, for the most part, fail to deliver what they’re supposed to and why FireLake not only delivers but has dazzled everyone from guests to residents to the media.

Says Lynch, “Go back 40 years. Hotel restaurants were the only places you could get a decent meal. They had clout, culinary muscle, grand banquets, grand dining rooms, the best china and crystal, and fancy napery. They offered the ambiance and experience people who could afford to eat out demanded. However, once the hotel became surrounded by independent restaurants, that lured guests from the hotel. The shift from hotel foodservice began: food away from home became more readily available, and the guest had more dining options.

“The next move for hotels was simply to provide a service, at which point they stopped delivering quality food & beverage. Their menus were all alike, predictable, and poorly executed. What sort of incentive to excel was there if you knew you’d see the hotel guest, if you were lucky, only at breakfast?

At most mid-level hotels, guests could not get a good meal. Sure, you could get something if you were starving, but you could not get anything that presumed quality. Coincidentally, many hotels began leasing space to those chains. Let’s just farm it out. We’ve got space, so let’s give it to somebody else and have them deal with the headache.

“However, if it were true that the potential existed for every three dollars earned by a hotel, one was earned from F&B, why would you leave one-third of your revenue stream unmanaged or undeveloped or unfocused when that potential was there?”

“Sure, you can lease that space,” says Hedberg. “The only risk is if the operator doesn’t make any money. However, if they are successful (and it is the right location), why couldn’t you have done it in the first place?”

“We are absolutely opposed to outsourcing food & beverage,” says Blaschke. “From the start, as operations people, if we are given the latitude and financial and intellectual support, we can make any restaurant work.”

So, Radisson decided to revamp and renovate, not only to attract guests and locals to the restaurant, but to hype sales in banquet and catering. The entire restaurant experience at every meal occasion became the focus. Food wasn't necessarily secondary, but every other element of the experience became just as important: the communion among guests at table, the design, the welcome, the service. Everything coalesced to make the experience memorable. It was about food, of course, but it was more than that. The layout and design, from bar to dining room, encouraged interactivity.

“What we decided to do with our restaurant concepts— ‘destination’ restaurants, as it were— was not to develop one model to roll out mindlessly across the country,” says Lynch. “The mistake many F&B execs make? They feel they can clone the food they do in one place, and it will be acceptable everywhere. That’s not true. The reason one restaurant is acceptable in one place (and not in any other) is that it belongs there. Walleye belongs in FireLake, not in L.A. That’s what our restaurants and the future of Radisson restaurants are all about. It’s not about finding one piece that fits all. It’s about creating a concept that fits into that community and that community only. It becomes the community’s restaurant— an ‘independent’ restaurant that just happens to be in a hotel. That’s important.

“If our promotions were to say, ‘Come to FireLake at the Radisson Plaza,’ we would have 50 percent less acceptance. We never in our advertising or collateral pieces ever refer to FireLake as a Radisson restaurant. Being a restaurant at the Radisson does not add value.” It’s difficult to think of the 120-seat FireLake as a hotel restaurant. Radisson runs it like a restaurant that just happens to be in a hotel. That practice extends to room service. There is no special Radisson room service menu. It’s the FireLake menu. Result? Room service, or in-room dining, revenues far exceed the corporate average. “We do a lot more in room service because it’s real food,” says Lynch. “It’s what you want to eat, or ‘food you know and love better than you thought it could be.’” Room service aside, on any given day FireLake averages 350 covers for the three-meal period.

Ask Hedberg if he runs into any pitfalls along the way, and he’ll tell you that when he’s involved in the initial planning for a restaurant, potential developers and architects often insist on placing it on a floor above street level. And when he asks them why they do that, it’s as if their brains suddenly are contaminated with the same ideas that contaminate the brains of many hoteliers: “Well, let’s see, the restaurant is window dressing, the restaurant is an amenity. If dining in a hotel remains a stigma to most guests, let’s hide it someplace where no one will ever find it, and the third floor or higher is as good a place as any.”

“They defend that point of view,” says Hedberg, “by telling you the street level ought to be reserved for retail. That’s where the developer’s mind is. They can make more money leasing retail space. I tell them to look at what local restaurants are leasing space for and compare that against what retailers are paying. Our pro formas prove that the restaurant on the street level does far better than one that’s tucked away on the third floor.”

Which is where two outlets were (one, a three-meal café; the other, a fine-dining restaurant) in the Minneapolis Radisson before they were converted to meeting spaces. And that’s why and how FireLake wound up on the street level to occupy most of the main floor (Radisson re-engineered the lobby). “We even took over a portion of the port cochere to give it a streetlevel presence,” Hedberg says.

Result?
“We’ve taken what once was an amenity for hotel guests and turned it into a very profitable enterprise. Our competition’s sales directors are nervous. Not only do they have to sell against our rooms, they have to sell against our restaurant. Our customer base is growing as a result.”

So, now that FireLake is a genuine destination restaurant, can Hedberg define what a destination restaurant is?

“It’s got to have differentiators; got to have those subtle nuances that separate it from the predictable, that tell you almost instantly that you’re in for something special; got to have a freestanding attitude: a street level location, entrance, and visibility.”

Got to have good food, good service? “That’s a given.”



Stephen Michaelides, president of Cleveland-based Words Ink, is a frequent contributor to HOTEL F&B.