When hungry business travelers blow into town, they often crave a good dinner in the limited time their delayed flights and harried schedules have allowed. Even reducing their quest to something fast can narrow the options to a nearby fast-food joint or a pizza-delivery place, if they’re fortunate enough to find ones that are still open. Hyatt Place hotels are striving to provide a more attractive choice - 'round the clock - with cooking equipment that prepares chef-caliber selections in a fraction of the time needed with conventional equipment.
Officials of the chain say their new kitchens also help the bottom line by reducing food and labor costs, with a footprint small enough to meet the size limitations of a limited-service, reasonably priced hotel.
The secret is a trio of equipment pieces with advanced cooking capabilities, combined with single-serve, ready-to-cook frozen sous vide foods and ready-to-retherm frozen soups. The workhorse is a compact oven touted as capable of cooking up to 15 times faster than conventional ovens. It cooks with a combination of convection heat, pressurized air and up to 1,500 watts of microwave power. There’s also a pressurized hot-air oven useful for rapid cooking of frittatas, pizza and hot sandwiches. The third piece is a water-bath rethermalizer for quickly bringing frozen chili and soup to service temperature. All three fit inside a kitchen equivalent in size to a hotel guest room.
Asecond speed-cooking oven is situated behind the counter of the hotel’s cafe for light fare and late-night orders.
“We’ve had a phenomenally positive response to this,” said John Vogelmeier, director of food and beverage operations for Select Hotels Group LLC, a division of Chicago-based Global Hyatt Corp. The company plans to have more than 120 Hyatt Place properties open in 30 states this year.
“One of the really neat things about our concept is that we can go right from the freezer to the oven to the customer in an almost seamless transaction using sous vide,” Vogelmeier said. Sous vide foods have been portioned and packaged in vacuum-sealed pouches to retain flavor and moisture during preparation. Hyatt Place works with suppliers to develop such items with desired flavor profiles.
Speed cooking makes a dramatic difference. “In a typical full-service hotel, baking muffins at 350 degrees in a conventional oven takes 25 to 30 minutes,” said Vogelmeier. “We finish ours in eight minutes. That allows us to replenish fresh product more often.” Chicken breasts and salmon fillets go from frozen to perfectly browned and ready to serve in a lightning-quick four minutes.
The menu includes Gardener’s Frittata with Basil Pesto, Tomato and Asiago Cheese ($5.50), Kickin' Crab and Sweet Corn Chowder, El Burrito with Buttery Scrambled Eggs and Cheddar Cheese ($5.50), Barbequed Short Rib Sandwich with Vidalia onion relish ($7.50) and Grilled Salmon on Garden Greens with Mandarin Oranges and Sesame Ginger Dressing ($6.50).
Such offerings are not intended to make Hyatt Place competitive with restaurants on the street, but to provide good, quick choices for guests who wish to eat inside the hotel. “If you’re like me, traveling a lot and dealing with flight delays, the last thing you want to do is hunt for food in a strange town at 10 p.m.,” says Vogelmeier. For convenience, guests order from a touch-screen menu kiosk and pay with a swipe of a room key card or credit card.
Predictability is a major boon. “If there’s a restaurant row in front of our hotel and we’re not sure how many lunches or dinners we will serve, we can take a salmon fillet, short rib, chicken breast or barbecue sandwich and prepare it to order very rapidly,” said Vogelmeier. “That spares the franchisee from being concerned about food waste.”
Equipping a Hyatt Place with speed-cooking equipment costs much less than building a full-service hotel kitchen, according to the company. The total outlay for the all-electric equipment and ventilation system is about $112,000, Vogelmeier said. “If you were putting in a full Class A ventilation hood, that would raise the cost 1.5 times or even double,” he explained. “But by having a Class B hood and avoiding the ductwork and systems, we’ve saved a significant amount. And due to the ease of the equipment and the packaging of the food, we’ve reduced labor significantly.”
- James Scarpa