Dining with dinosaurs
Serving 7,000 hand-cut dinosaur biscuits to children, Champagne teas to art viewers and bacon butties to aircraft enthusiasts reflects just some of the wide range of styles and menus produced for visitor centres by Eliance, the commercial catering arm of Elior UK.
"Clients like our can-do attitude," says Carole Carr, operations director. "We're small enough to have a flat hierarchy. I have the autonomy to make decisions, and my catering manager can manage the operation instead of managing bureaucracy. I like to think we have a finger on the pulse of what the customer wants, not what we want to give them. It's all about bringing quality and a different style and offer to museums."
UK presence
Eliance was set up in October 1999 by its French parent company, Elior SA, which wanted a presence in the UK, and whose clients included the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. Almost immediately it won its first contract at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, and over the next 12 months was awarded the catering contracts at the Wallace Collection near London's Oxford Street and the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, near Cambridge. It has recently won the contract to cater for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. All contracts are concessionary, with Eliance paying a percentage of turnover to the client.
Each contract is different in its clientele, menu and culture. The Natural History Museum (turnover £1.8m) is sited in a major tourist area. It attracts a mix of schools, families and tourists and is subject to term-time and seasonal variations. The Wallace Collection (turnover £600,000), situated in a residential area, has a steady attendance of gallery visitors and restaurant diners with no great fluctuations. Duxford (projected turnover £850,000) is an airfield in the middle of the countryside with points of interest sited along a mile-long runway. It has six air shows a year, attracting up to 25,000 enthusiasts per show.
The main challenge at the Natural History Museum is managing the fluctuations of the two million visitors expected this year while retaining catering staff.
"One week we might need 50-100 staff, and the next it drops to 20. This is our second year, so we've established a pattern and manage to maintain a core of chefs and caterers," says Carr, who had to deal with 12,000 visitors a day queuing for up to three hours to see the new moving, talking dinosaur that was unveiled in February this year.
"We hit on the idea of producing dinosaur biscuits and were selling 7,000 a day," Carr continues. "They are still on the menu and prove consistently popular. It's our duty to provide a range of food to please children, such as Kids' Boxes, where they can choose their own contents. This is a very family-friendly museum, and I think if you find an upset child and can appease it, it takes the pressure off the parents and makes their day easier.
"Eating is ultimately part of the visitor experience, and if you have a bad experience this reflects on the rest of the image. So we try to consider their needs every step of the way."
In keeping with this philosophy, Eliance made a "substantial" investment in the catering facilities, providing rebranding, new decor, furniture and counters. There are four catering outlets attracting an average spend of £2.50-£3.60 - a snack bar where schools can bring their own packed lunches; the Waterhouse Café, seating 80, serving speciality coffees, sandwiches, cakes and cold drinks; the self-service, 160-seat Life Galleries restaurant, offering dishes such as spinach, ricotta and mushroom cannelloni with tomato sauce, garlic bread and green salad (£5.75); and the Globe restaurant in the Earth Galleries, seating 120 and selling snacks such as jacket potatoes.
Eliance also runs the staff restaurant. And it caters for internal hospitality, such as seminars and conferences, which account for 5% of the turnover.
The Wallace Collection opened its doors to Café Bagatelle in June 2000 and in 12 months it has already become a destination restaurant with glowing reviews in the press. The gallery, which had no catering facility previously, had been radically redeveloped to include a lecture theatre and library. The open courtyard was glassed in and converted into the 80-seat Café Bagatelle .
With an average spend per head of £14, this is rather more than a café, offering dishes such as seared loin of tuna and salad niçoise for £11.75 and a Champagne tea for £12.50.
It was an instant success, exceeding its budget, turning away people on its opening day and continuing to maintain a regular clientele. These fall into three categories: gallery visitors, ladies-who-lunch and businessmen.
"It's a lovely setting, and people like the idea they can have lunch and then pop up and see The Laughing Cavalier or a piece of Limoges," says Carr. The gallery is marketing its new conference facilities hard, and Carr expects this side of the catering to increase.
Duxford, in the windswept Cambridgeshire countryside, is a far cry from the cut-glass atmosphere of the Wallace Collection. Its visitors are mainly families, air enthusiasts and war veterans. Eliance won the contract from Sodexho in September last year. At that time the main restaurant, Interludes, was positioned at the end of the runway, while the Aerodrome Café sold snacks in the summer from converted barracks halfway down the runway, and a nearby temporary facility sold sticky buns and drinks.
A new outlet, Café Duxford, opened in May. Its situation in the Norman Foster-designed American Air Museum at the opposite end of the runway from Interludes prompted Eliance to make changes to the existing operations.
Snacks available
"Instead of having the main restaurant at the beginning of the runway, which is a mile long, we decided to have it halfway down, with snacks available at either end of the runway from Interludes and Café Duxford," explains Carr.
Caf‚ Duxford seats 28 and is positioned inside the museum with aircraft hanging above and below it. It opened on Good Friday this year and took £2,500 on its first day. It sells items with a US theme, such as muffins and club sodas. Snacks at Interludes include "robust" food like bacon butties and chips.
Eliance also refurbished the Aerodrome Café, renaming it the Runway Restaurant, which is now open all the year round, selling meals such as chicken balti served with naan or rice at £6.25, fresh pasta with tomato and basil for £5.75 and apple pie with cream or custard at £2.50. Spend has increased by 22%.
"People have usually come a long way to Duxford, and there's no protection from the weather here, so they like large portions of hot food," says Carr, who sees Eliance growing through an offer of two distinct styles reflected in the Natural History and Duxford museums and the Wallace Collection.
"For years, poor-quality catering has been accepted in museums, but we've demonstrated that we can work with the client to find what their market is and what they are looking for and deliver a range of quality services," she says.
Eliance UK
Central House, Balfour Road, Hounslow, Middlesex TW3 1HY
Tel: 020 8607 7220
E-mail:company@eliance.co.uk
Managing director: Dan Wright
Staff on visitor sector: 143
Predicted turnover in visitor sector: £3.4m
Predicted turnover for Natural History Museum: £1.9m
Predicted turnover for Wallace Collection: £650,000
Predicted turnover for Duxford: £850,000
