The Mythical Beast Saving Hotel F&B

To all my friends in corporate F&B and those whose job is to create concepts, I know you’ve been there. Your latest concept is such a great idea, having cracked that elusive alchemy behind awesome F&B, you’re shaking up the market. It's so cool in fact that your guests and owner will love it, as will the Area VP who’s opinions you love to hear. Which is lucky because you will, at length. In short this is going to be the shit right? Six months later than it was meant to, it finally opens and it’s exactly as you hoped and imagined it, wouldn’t be. The generic design is too polished, the lighting is bright enough to perform open heart surgery, the music system hopeless, the playlist worse, the uniforms dreadful, the food and drink a distant relative of the original idea, the kitchen twice the size it needs to be, why is there a buffet, and the OS&E - for fuck sake that’s ridiculous. As your heart sinks you instantly know two things, your idea will fail before its even opened and in a few short weeks the blame game will begin. As it was your idea it will probably be your fault, or worse the poor GM and their team, or maybe the corporate office, the development team, the designer, or maybe even the marketing strategy. You also know what comes next, doomed promotions, desperate cutbacks and worst of all the dreaded head office task force, which definitely won’t fix anything. Your worst fears have come to pass as in the process of bringing your great idea to life the “the” has been lost and its slipped from being the shit to just shit. And I know this because I’ve been there with you too many times. This has to stop, the pain, the blame, the confused and comically bad execution, all of it, enough.?

Ok rant over, but there has to be a better way to do this? Having spent time with serially successful restauranteurs, whose concepts we all admire and shamelessly copy, the answer is right there. Surprisingly simple and hiding in plain sight the answer is Cerberus.No really, stick with me, while he was a Greek mythological three-headed dog, guarding the gates to the underworld, his synonyms include curator, protector, overseer, steward, warden, supervisor and watchdog. These are the key roles the most successful restauranteurs play in bringing their ideas to life. Sure they have a team of specialists around them, often driven mad as they obsess over every last detail. From the original idea to launch night and beyond they are the constant custodian. And as I know all too well they can be infuriating to work with, but it’s their constant, relentless focus that makes the difference. It’s their super-power and the simple singular reason they succeed.?They are the guardian and overseer of the idea and the curator of its execution, so yes the answer is Cerberus.

That singularity of approach is of course in direct contrast to the collaborative nature of Hotel development, which goes something like this. The F&B component will be developed by the overworked and under resourced corporate teams or specialist consultants like us. The outcome should be a series of awesome and commercially viable ideas for each of the F&B spaces with a clear brief for how they’re to be developed, designed and operated. Assuming this has been done well, which is not always the case, let's move on to what usually happens next. With the initial scope completed the F&B specialists find themselves relegated to side roles, or worse moved to their next project. While the totally awesome ideas were of course crystal clear to them, the problem is that all too often the only record of this is the PowerPoint they left behind. Some of which are great, some well intended and some are diabolically bad, and always open to interpretation. Which they are, endlessly. Moving through development teams, ID, brand, and owners all of whom have their own perspective and agendas it should be no surprise the concepts become, to put it politely “confused”. What’s more alarming is that to this point nobody who’s going to operate the concept has been involved in any way at all. By the time the GM and team arrive everything has been and ordered and built, all the decisions made. At least it can’t get any worse, unless the GM’s have their own concept ideas, the Chefs theirs and then of course there’s the ever helpful Area VP. It’s no wonder ideas get lost in translation. Sometimes literally.?If you wonder how your cool Korean Diner became a Pan-Asian Fine Dining Buffet here’s you answer. You see without an all seeing guardian we’re not really giving ourselves a chance are we??

I’ll accept that comparing the development of multiple hotels with a single restaurant entrepreneur is too simplistic, maybe even a touch wishful. But then wishing for less pain, less blame and better, cooler more awesome?F&B in our hotels can be no bad thing.I’ve always loved how our industry is fuelled through the collaboration of ideas, skills, disciplines and teams. You’d expect me to make the case for the F&B specialist to be that guardian, truthfully though I don’t care who it is.?In the glorious, complex industry of ours changing how we do what we do is so much easier to say than, you know, actually do. However if we want to get our F&B right it might be time for us to be a bit less collaborative and bit more Cerberus - just saying.