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Going Far Beyond: Room Service

Going Far Beyond: Room Service

Restaurants in boutique hotels have been growing in both number and notice by offering menus tailored to cuisine-savvy guests while employing nimble marketing plans that emphasize personalized service.

Most major cities now boast several boutique-hotel restaurants, and the concept is spreading—from Louisville, Ky., with the 21c Museum Hotel and its Proof on Main restaurant to Houston, with the planned opening of the second Hotel ZaZa and its Monarch restaurant, to Beverly Hills, Calif., where Blue on Blue restaurant anchors the Avalon Hotel.

In a category with such large players as the Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group and the W Hotels of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, several smaller operators are making their own marks.

By positioning themselves not only as hotel foodservice but also as independent and chef-driven destinations, they are gaining prestige and an avid following.

The most recent example is the new Hotel ZaZa, which was set to debut June 1.

The opening by Charles Givens and Jeff Records of Givens Records Properties of Oklahoma City marks an expansion of their edgy Hotel ZaZa concept, whose original property is in Dallas. Givens’ plan was to reopen Houston’s vintage Warwick Hotel as a 315-room ZaZa branch with a new 72-seat Monarch restaurant, whose lounge and terrace expands seating to 245. Monarch was patterned on the same cutting-edge formula employed at the Dallas hotel’s Dragonfly restaurant.

“We look at the ZaZa crowd and tailor our menus in that direction,” says Monarch chef Bradley Manchester. “It’s a hip, swanky hotel and attracts the people who want to see and be seen.”

Manchester, who moved to Houston from Las Vegas, says: “We’re looking to be Texas-based cuisine but to be a little new and different. The restaurant has a Mediterranean-Tuscan feel, so the menu reflects a little bit of that as well.”

While some chefs might be befuddled by hotels’ all-day operations and varying menus,—which in many cases include breakfast, lunch, dinner, room service, catering and banquets—Manchester embraces the challenge.

“I really like to put creativity into breakfast,” he says. “But I also realize some guests like their plain bacon and eggs. What we try to do is put little twists on things, like a fresh malted waffle with chocolate butter and candied almonds. We also do banana-granola pancakes topped with cinnamon-honey butter. We do a really good corned-beef hash with fava beans and grilled asparagus.”

Manchester, who most recently over-saw the noted Envy restaurant at the Renaissance Hotel in Las Vegas, says his move to ZaZa allowed him to work with local farmers.

“The owner has a vision of quality before anything else,” he says. “It’s not corporate-driven. Yes, we’re here to make money. But [Givens Records] cares about service and quality as well as the bottom line.”

Monarch is targeting average per-person checks of $13 for breakfast, $20 for lunch and $50-$55 for dinner, not including beverages.

A boutique hotel, Manchester added, “lets chefs be chefs.”

“A lot of corporate hotels want to dictate corporate menus and corporate banquet menus,” he says. “Here, I write the menus for everything. We have a lot of specialty menus, with food tailored to specific events. It gives chefs a lot more freedom. With freedom comes responsibility in the sense that quality has to be there, and consistency has to be there. That’s needed to develop the loyal clientele.”

Recruiting employees to work in boutique-hotel foodservice can be somewhat challenging, Manchester says.

“We don’t have the big name of a Hilton or Marriott that a lot of workers associate with hotels,” he says. “Even though we are the beginning of a brand, potential employees can see the potential. I have a lot of cooks who are hungry to move up. They see that with ZaZa, especially if a new hotel is opening up every three years.”

Manchester says boutique hotels’ restaurants are expected to be forward thinking.

“Boutique hotels have a ‘wow factor,’” he says. “If you walk into a Hilton or a Sheraton, you know what you are going to get. You know what the rooms look like. You know what the bathrooms look like. You know what the shampoos look like. Here at ZaZa, we have 36 different room plans. You always get a different experience from the rooms to the changing menu.”

That sets the bar high for providing impeccable food and service in the dining room, he says.

“Our food has to be something you can’t get anywhere else,” he says.

That is also the focus of the 130-seat Proof on Main restaurant at the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, Ky.

In April, Michael Bonadies, formerly of the New York-based Myriad Restaurant Group, was named president and chief executive of ACE Unlimited, which owns the year-old 21c and plans to expand the brand nationally with its other owners, Laura Lee Brown, Steve Wilson and Craig Greenberg.

“My partners here are major art collectors, and they wanted to do several things with the hotel,” Bonadies says. “One thing was to create a hotel that would help revitalize downtown Louisville and make it more attractive to urban development. Another was a place to showcase their art collection.”

The restaurant, Proof on Main, and chef Michael Paley emphasize local ingredients.

“The restaurant is very much farm-to-table,” Bonadies says. “It benefits very much from the agricultural bounty that exists here.”

Kentucky has invested money in encouraging farms to produce artisanal products, Bonadies says. Those include bison, farmed striped bass, hams, bacon and Kentucky’s famed bourbon. Also, chef Paley has developed relationships with smaller farms since the hotel and restaurant opened in March 2006.

In the year since, the hotel and Proof on Main have drawn traffic to Louisville’s downtown area.

“Two years ago, standing on Main Street in Louisville, there was no traffic after 5 [p.m.]” Bonadies says. “Almost no cars after 6:30. We wanted to get people back downtown by removing every obstacle and objection someone might have.”

The hotel is situated in western downtown Louisville, once home to 50 distilleries and known as “Whiskey Row” from the 1840s to the 1920s.

For such popular dishes as bone-in tenderloin or a double-smoked ham salad, current-day customers are now about 90 percent to 95 percent locals and the remainder are hotel guests, Bonadies says.

For a deeper sense of place, Proof on Main serves a variety of Kentucky bourbons, some bottled exclusively for Proof on Main including special barrels of Rip Van Winkle and Woodford Reserve. The bar menu, available through the late night hours, includes food specially designed to be paired with bourbon.

While lunch and dinner are popular meal periods, he says, “breakfast is a challenge. People grab something quick, and you don’t do a lot of volume. We’re busier on weekends when it’s more social. A boutique hotel is challenging. You have a lot of moving pieces because you are doing breakfast, lunch, dinner and catering.”

On the other hand, “the advantages are the built-in business of the guests as well as groups that are using the hotel,” he says.

The hotel has 91 rooms.

A contemporary art collection, drawn from Wilson and Brown’s personal collection and their foundation, is exhibited in the hotel, and it draws private parties of 10 to 250 people to the property.

“Catering is a good source of revenue,” Bonadies says. “What we have here is unique in that it has become a cultural and social center for downtown Louisville. …In today’s compressed world, any operation that offers multiple experiences will have a competitive advantage.”

Such a “multiple experience” is behind a new marketing program spearheaded by Gabriel Gabreski, chef at the 60-seat Blue on Blue restaurant at the 86-room Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Personalized dining is the main focus of an Avalon marketing program started in April.

“We got together with the sales team and the food and beverage director, and we came up with the idea of using our weekly trips to the farmers market as a great experience for guests,” Gabreski says. “We allow guests to pick out ingredients, and we take it back to the hotel and prepare it. It’s a great celebratory meal. You see the complete cycle of purchasing, preparation and service.”

The “Chef’s Table” program allows patrons, for $250, to go with Gabreski on his trip the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market and, for $175 per person, to dine on the ingredients bought during the trip. Gabreski also gives a personalized tour of the kitchen, offers fresh seasonal cocktails—also made with ingredients from the farmers market—and introduces each of the seven courses and wine pairings as if guests were at a family dinner.

Gabreski says boutique hotel foodservice “requires a lot more creativity. You stand out a little more. …Our architecture is unique. Our rooms are unique. So our food has to be unique. It’s part of the unique package.”

Gabreski says Blue on Blue allows for more culinary adventure than most hotel restaurants.

“It’s run much like an independent restaurant,” Gabreski says. “You get to know your clients a lot better.”

The Avalon Hotel doesn’t do banquets, Gabreski says.

“The advantage of a big hotel,” he says, “is you can book a 1,000-seat banquet and generate a lot of revenue, whereas here you have to watch every item for every meal period. You have to maintain an eye on everything.”

For example, this summer he is adding a deep-fried, battered whole morel mushroom from Oregon stuffed with a California-produced Crescenza cheese with a summer truffle and a light salad of pea tendrils.

“We have a little more freedom to be more adventurous because the rooms help provide revenue,” Gabreski says. “I find that hotel guests tend to manipulate dishes more than guests at an independent restaurant. “We try to accommodate all the requests. …People are fickle. If they don’t get what they want from us, they’ll go somewhere else.”

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