Aramark at the Millennium Mayfair

Setting up restaurants outside his usual food service remit is not new for Bill Toner. As managing director of Gardner Merchant, now Sodexho, he was involved in launching City Rhodes in partnership with Gary Rhodes seven years ago, followed later by Rhodes in the Square.

Now, as chief executive of Aramark, he has positioned subsidiary company Parallel so he can make an aggressive move into the commercial sector, which is likely to include setting up stand-alone restaurants as well as outlets in hotels and other leisure operations. "Parallel's business currently has a turnover of more than £15m and easily has the potential to get to £100m in the next three to five years," Toner enthuses.

In reality, he believes that there is very little difference between running a restaurant in the workplace and in a hotel. "You need to be able to understand the customer, manage staff and create a product to fit the market in both," he says. "With the resources we have at Aramark we are in a position to be able to run restaurants that will ensure a hassle-free environment for hotels."

Brian Turner Mayfair is the second hotel project for Parallel, which is better known in the food service sector, where it operates more than 1,000 contracts with an estimated annual turnover of £300m.

Headed by chairman Roy Ackerman, Parallel already operates the 130-seat Brian Turner restaurant at the Crowne Plaza Birmingham NEC hotel as well as all the bars and restaurants at the 12 theatres within Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group.

At the Millennium Mayfair, all 45 full-time food and beverage staff are now employees of Parallel.

While the £400,000 refurbishment cost of the new restaurant was paid by Millennium & Copthorne (M&C), neither the hotel company nor Aramark was willing to divulge details of the financial arrangement of the Millennium Mayfair contract. However, it is based on the two parties sharing the expected increased profit from the new venture.

While, historically, hotels have been dubious about contracting out their food and beverage operations, Toner admits it's easier to persuade hoteliers to do so if there is a celebrity chef on board.

Tony Potter, chief executive officer of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, was certainly keen to team up with Brian Turner when Toner first approached him with the suggestion of outsourcing the food and beverage operation at the 348-bedroom Millennium Mayfair hotel, including banqueting for the 400-seat ballroom and 10 other function rooms. "Tony was in the process of upgrading the hotel, and having Brian on board has assisted him in achieving this," says Toner. "For us it was an ideal property with an appropriate restaurant and private dining facilities, situated in a prime location with a large American visitor contingency [from the nearby American Embassy and other major hotels] within a half-mile radius."

With Brian Turner Mayfair up and running for just over a month now, Toner is already pleased with both the numbers of covers and the quality of food and service in the restaurant. "I've been sending in my friends and family, and their comments have been very good," he says. "Brian's food has very wide appeal, and everyone likes the relaxed environment."

Toner believes there is a potential for future projects between Aramark and M&C. "We are in continuous discussions with Millennium & Copthorne and are always looking forward to extending our business relationship with them," he says. "We are also looking at a number of other opportunities with Brian, which may come to fruition within the next 12-18 months, and we may work with other chefs in different locations around the country."

An extra dimension

Potter is equally happy with the business that has been coming through the doors of Brian Turner Mayfair. "We've opened at a very difficult time for the restaurant business, yet the early signs are looking good," he says.

"We've had a very pleasing response from the local residential market, who are using us like a neighbourhood restaurant, although we're not. And for the hotel residents the restaurant has definitely added an extra dimension to the business, as they are regarding it as a very separate space from the rest of the hotel."

Potter explains that the restaurant's refurbishment, completed in April 2003, has been part of an ongoing redecoration of the entire hotel. "The look of the room has been down to the designer, Noel Pierce, interpreting a style that Turner, Roy Ackerman and myself came up with," he says.

From the 45-seat Turner Bar, a wine alley leads into the contemporary-looking restaurant that is a combination of rich woods - highlighted in the oak flooring and wall panelling - and textured glass used in area dividers scattered around the room. Chandeliers and leather seating in azure, taupe, biscuit and sable complete the look.

For Potter, outsourcing the hotel's food and beverage operation has a huge advantage. "The size of Aramark allows it to deal with the peaks and troughs of business better than we can, as well as having greater purchasing power," he says. "There is also the added bonus of having a joint input into the marketing of the restaurant and banqueting facilities, with both us being able to draw on our individual databases."

As far as the future is concerned, Potter says that if the Brian Turner project works to the benefit of both Aramark and M&C, then he will be happy to look at future projects with Parallel. "I'd also welcome the opportunity to work with Turner again - he is a great personality and has a flexible business approach which I like."

Simple, honest food
On the ground floor of the Millennium Mayfair hotel, the idea is for Brian Turner Mayfair to become a destination restaurant in its own right. For the man with his name above the door - and on the flags in Grosvenor Square outside - the setting couldn't be better. However, Turner - hired by Aramark's Parallel division to run the hotel's food and beverage operation - wants people to know that there is nothing grand about the food he is overseeing inside the 86-seat restaurant.

"We are serving good-value, simple, honest food," he proclaims. "There are a lot of fine-dining restaurants in London now where you can eat extremely well, but they are not the kind of places that most people can afford to eat more than once a month. The reality is also that the availability of chefs is short, and we can produce this food with fewer, but not necessarily less skilled, chefs."

The British slant to the menu is only what most members of the public would expect from the man who has carved out a public persona as the brusque but charming Yorkshire chef on BBC TV's Ready, Steady, Cook for the past 11 years. But the reality is that this is a shift from the predominately French-inspired menu that he used to offer at Turner's, the restaurant he ran in London's Knightsbridge for 15 years until its closure in 2001.

For executive chef Paul Bates, the style of food is also a move away from the more refined, classical food he has cooked throughout his career, which has included spells at the Ritz Club, Claridge's, and the InterContinental under Peter Kromberg. "This is very robust, masculine, British food, a lot heavier than I've been used to preparing," says Bates, who, along with all the hotel's other food and beverage staff, transferred from the payroll of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels to that of Aramark in October 2002.

Bates doesn't disguise the fact that it was initially difficult to go from being the hotel's executive chef in his own right to being executive chef under the auspices of the Brian Turner name.

"At first I did feel that the rug had been pulled from under my feet as, of course, there's a certain amount of pride involved," he says. "It has taken time to build up a trust between the two of us and understand each other's way of thinking. It is not easy trying to interpret another chef's menu, particularly as Brian tends to just jot things down on scraps of paper. There have been times when I've had to bite my tongue, and I'm sure he's had to as well. But, there's been no shouting; it is all very amicable."

Turner writes the restaurant's à la carte menu and Bates puts together the daily lunch menu. Bates and his brigade of 18 chefs prepare both menus, while Turner, whose office is now at the hotel, spends the services he is present for in the restaurant.

Starters are generally light in style, but main courses are not for the faint-hearted, packing a punch in both portion size and flavour. Current choices for the first course include smoked eel fillet with streaky Cumbrian bacon on a warm potato salad (£8.50), chicken and soft herb broth (£5.50) and English asparagus with vinaigrette or warm butter sauce (£8.50).

As well as offering traditional favourites such as steak and kidney plate pie with oysters and kidney gravy (£15.50) and pork bangers with mash and onion gravy (£11.50), there is also a selection of grill and roast dishes among the main courses, some of which are cooked on a newly installed rötisserie, which has been a revelation to Bates. "The meat bastes itself as it cooks, keeping it wonderfully moist and producing a fantastic flavour," he says.

Chicken, spiced with ground coriander, cumin, paprika, garam masala, oregano, basil and garlic, is cooked in this way and served with a thyme bread pudding (£14.75), as is roast Lincolnshire duckling served with a pear and apricot stuffing (£17.50). Roasts include a rib of Aberdeen Angus beef with Yorkshire seasoned pudding and shallot juice (£18.75) and a fillet of Gloucester Old Spot served with scalloped potatoes (£14.50).

Bates is producing a lighter selection of dishes for the lunch menu, which offers a choice of two dishes at each course. A typical choice at lunch may be tomato and thyme soup, followed by pan-seared halibut, ratatouille potato, fried prawns and spinach, with apple crème brülée and red berry compote to finish. Two courses from the lunch menu cost £19.50, with three courses priced at £21.50.

Desserts on the à la carte menu are very much of the comforting kind, with the likes of apple and pineapple crumble with clotted cream; fudge and blueberry bread and butter pudding; and steamed treacle sponge pudding with double cream custard all on offer. There are also a couple of savouries: Yorkshire Blue rarebit and duck egg Scotch woodcock, which, to Bates's surprise, are selling well. All puds and savouries cost £5.50. Average spend is £30 per head on food, with covers currently averaging 40 for lunch and 65 for dinner.

FactFile
Brian Turner Mayfair
44 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London W1K 2HP
Tel: 020 7596 3444

Chef-patron: Brian Turner
Executive chef: Paul Bates
Restaurant manager: Vincent Hamel
Interior designer: Noel Pierce of Portfolio Design
Seats: 86
Staff: 30
Cost of refurbishment: £400,000
Projected annual turnover: £3m