Domed to fail?
The most humane action might be to put the Millennium Dome to sleep in a quiet and orderly fashion and get on with the next 1,000 years. But the debate surrounding the future of the country's most controversial millennial project means the Dome is still in the headlines well after its official closure.
As Caterer went to press, the Legacy Consortium, led by millionaire and Labour Party donor Robert Bourne, was clinging to its "preferred-bidder" status. If contracts are exchanged at the end of February as planned, the 17-acre site will become a hi-tech business park. However, the Dome's chief executive, Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, is still not out of the frame, and is eager to buy the site and continue running it as a visitor attraction.
As it stands, however, the Dome's restaurants, bars, cafés and kiosks closed on 31 December. Having been poised a year ago to feed 12 million visitors and take a share of an anticipated £50m catering sales, operators are now assessing the impact of a year during which time just half the projected number of visitors - 6.52 million - came and catering revenue was a mere £36m.
Despite the statistics, none of the caterers interviewed say the year had been a financial disaster, although they are reluctant to reveal sales figures (whether this is because of contractual agreements or reticence is unclear). Most are pleased with the publicity and, publicly at least, there is none of the bitterness that might be have been expected.
Of the branded outlets (accounting for 30% of public catering sales at the Dome), the smaller ones fared better because of lower overheads, says Andrew James, head of catering at the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), which ran the Dome.
Snuggled together in two food courts were New Covent Garden Soup Company, Opajohn's Famous Wrolls, the Great American Bagel Factory, and AMT Espresso.
Opajohn's director Jonathan Morris saw the Dome as an ideal place to introduce his Indonesian filled crêpes, which are already proving popular in Holland.
Morris insists the year has been "absolutely worthwhile", but James is disappointed. "I wanted to have a new product from Europe, but to get a British holiday-maker to try something new is not easy."
Nevertheless, Morris is persisting with plans to open five Opajohn's in London and is looking for investors.
Kris Engle, managing director of the Great American Bagel Factory, was also lured by the PR potential. A low-cost mobile cart used during busy times proved lucrative, and she says the year was "a business success".
For Peter Bartlam, franchise development manager at the New Covent Garden Soup Company, a low capital outlay was crucial in making his venture viable, although he will admit only to doing "fairly well" financially over the year.
There were mixed views from the bigger outlets. Yo! Sushi invested a third (£150,000) of normal set-up costs to create a 60-seat restaurant at which revenue was half to one-third of a typical central London site, according to managing director Robin Rowland. He was not only disappointed with visitor numbers, but also in finding customers price-conscious and unadventurous in eating habits.
Things were better over at coffee shop chain Aroma, which still managed to achieve two-thirds of its target sales and even three-quarters of its initial profit target, according to marketing manager Richard Scott-Clark.
And Birds Eye Wall's is hoping to roll out the ice-cream parlour concept it was testing in the Dome. Having set target sales at £750,000 based on 12 million visitors, it was only the introduction of vending machines later in the year which enabled the company to reach target. Speaking in mid-December, the parlour's general manager Bob Bhartiya said: "We will probably end at £770,000-£780,000, of which vending will account for £90,000-£100,000."
On the contract catering side, the job was shared between Compass, which ran hospitality and staff catering through its subsidiary Letheby & Christopher, and Granada (as it was then), which ran a range of restaurants and bars. NMEC paid all Granada's fit-out costs from a £10m kitty and each outlet paid it a 20% commission on sales. Mike Arnold, Granada's operations director at the Dome, is coy about the figures, but says: "NMEC provided 50% of the projected numbers. We are much nearer our targets than that."
James also confirms that Granada achieved its 40% share of public catering revenue.
Particularly successful were the 100-seat Harry Ramsden's fish-and-chip restaurant, which Arnold says "surpassed expectations"; Pizza Pasta, with its informal and familiar menu which netted about £7,000 a day, according to James; and Juicepiration, a fresh-fruit juice bar which ended 50% up on original sales targets. That concept and Hot Bites (hot roast-meat sandwiches) will probably be rolled out elsewhere, while there are plans to open Sea Bar, an upmarket seafood snack and bar operation with an average spend of £10 per head, at the new Docklands conference venue, Excel.
Performance elsewhere was mixed. A NMEC policy of minimal signage was relaxed during the year to help restaurants upstairs that the public didn't explore, but the likes of Trade Winds and Fruits of the Earth both struggled for most of the year.
Acclaim!, the fine-dining restaurant run as a joint venture between Granada (kitchen) and Letheby & Christopher (front of house) lost money. James is quick to stress the aim was only ever to break even, but adds: "The sales target was set at £1.9m, assuming 12 million visitors. It achieved about £900,000. We were about 90% of the way to breaking even by the end." That is despite halving the number of seats to 120 at the end of March and simplifying the menu.
Both James and Arnold have strong views on how they would run it if given a second chance. Arnold would favour a bistro-style operation, while James is adamant he wouldn't run a joint venture because of management difficulties and the politics involved. He would also have spent less on the fit-out (Acclaim! cost £1m to set up).
But a fine-dining restaurant was central to the vision of the Dome's operations director, Ken Robinson, who left the project in February 2000 when Gerbeau took over as chief executive from Jennie Page.
Robinson has remained an assiduous Dome-follower since his departure, and maintains that Acclaim! worked "nearly as well as we could have hoped".
He adds: "We wanted to take leisure catering to a different level by having a complete range of styles, from the likes of bagels to Acclaim!, at high-street prices." That ambition, says Robinson, was achieved.
And although James admits that he and Robinson had "a number of disagreements" over the catering provision, he says his former boss was the linchpin in the whole project. "Ken built the Dome. Without him, the Dome wouldn't have opened on time. Nobody put in as many hours and to have it all chopped away was hard."
For his part, Robinson says he's not bitter. He argues that analysis should focus not on the accuracy of visitor projections, but on why people didn't come. "I feel disappointed that so many people made the decision to not go to the Dome on the basis of hyped and misleading information."
Damning press reports
In an article he wrote for Leisure Management magazine in October, Robinson cites several reasons for the public's reluctance to see the Dome for themselves, but lays the blame essentially at the door of the press and politicians: "What over-rides all other factors must be the media's incessant and all-pervasive damning of the Dome."
Robinson is outspoken about the issue of sponsorship, too, in particular the £12m deal struck with McDonald's. "It was very generous, but the deal was that there would be no other family-style restaurants [such as Burger King or Pizza Hut], and in retrospect that was a shame."
For James, it meant being wary of domination by one operation, particularly as one of the two restaurants was the largest in Europe with 460 seats. He stipulated that they could not exceed 30% of the overall catering turnover, compared with Granada's share of 40% and the other branded operators together at 30%.
Similar "official supplier" agreements made with Coca-Cola, Typhoo, Wall's and Mars prevented any competing brand being sold at the Dome, except where a specialist product was required. "The sponsorship team had to get in £150m and were doing deals away from me that impacted on me. If I were doing it again, I'd want more involvement in sponsorship negotiation. It was unfair - we were asking branded operators to come to the Dome because their concept was popular and then saying they could not sell this product or that product," says James.
The trials of the year behind him, and now looking for a fresh challenge, James remains a resolute supporter of the project and is keen to stress the achievements.
"We brought in 6.5 million people in one year. Okay, it's not as many as we'd hoped, but it is still a hell of a lot. The Dome was the number-two paying attraction in Europe behind Disneyland Paris and number one in this country by a long way."
James's is just one of many brave Dome faces. It can only be hoped that, come the year 3000, the powers that be will look back and take note when planning their millennium extravaganza.
