Will big-name chefs to boost your hotel?

Many hoteliers feel the restaurant is the centre of their business and would never dream of asking someone else to run it. As David Harris discovers, what lies behind that sentiment is a devotion to the highest tradition of hospitality - bed and board.

Good hotel restaurants are like classic cars - lovely to own but expensive to run. Just as some diners find that the best way to enjoy a fine restaurant is when somebody else is paying, so some hoteliers have found that the best way to run one is to get someone else do it for them.

Conventional wisdom has it that hoteliers are poor restaurateurs, better at making profits from rooms than kitchens, so it is unsurprising that the past decade has seen a series of top hotels bring in outside help to run their restaurants, from Gordon Ramsay's all but complete takeover of the old Savoy Group restaurants to provincial successes such as Michael Caines's restaurant in Exeter's old Royal Clarence hotel (now, of course, the Caines and Brownsword-owned Abode Exeter).

Less publicity is given to the number of hotel restaurants that have chosen not to bring in outsiders, which remain the overwhelming majority. It is as if the understandable interest and controversy in the reinvention of iconic eating places such as the Savoy Grill and the Connaught has overshadowed the fact that many a hotelier would never cede control of their restaurant, no matter how talented the incoming chef.

For many, the restaurant is the heartbeat of the business, although it is rarely the most profitable part. Tim Hart, the owner of Hambleton Hall in Rutland, admits that he "almost" thinks of his 17-bedroom hotel as a restaurant with rooms. Hart says: "You really could say Hambleton is a restaurant. Guests come here to enjoy themselves and the main sport that they come to enjoy is eating."

They also come for the handsome building, for the gardens and for the bedrooms - and with each bedroom costing more than £20,000 to refurbish, Hambleton is not a grand restaurant with plain sleeping arrangements. It is just that, for most guests, the food is the main attraction.

So how much does Hambleton make from its food and how much from its rooms?

Hart says: "It is very difficult to compare returns for restaurants and rooms because it takes years to get a return on a hotel bedroom. Our restaurant does well, but I think that, for many hotels, restaurants have come to seem like an inconvenient sideshow. Traditionally, there is no doubt that hoteliers have always found it difficult to be on intimate terms with their restaurants."

That lack of intimacy has, with lamentable frequency, translated into lack of profits, but to treat bedrooms and restaurant as entirely separate financial entities just doesn't make sense.

At the Castle hotel in Taunton, owner Kit Chapman says: "When you look at a hotel restaurant, you have to be careful about how you define profitability. Running restaurants is very costly. If we ran a Michelin-starred restaurant on a stand-alone basis, we would have gone out of business long ago. The business is sustained by occupancy."

Chapman adds that he could run a far more profitable hotel if he were to opt not to run a restaurant, but that is not what he wants to do, which betrays a bullish attitude that underlines how many country house hotel-restaurants exist more on the passion of those who run them rather than on a gallop towards profit.

Chapman says: "I run this restaurant because I choose to. For 25 years or more, I have wanted a very special restaurant, and that is what I think we have here. I have had four chefs in 25 years and they have all had to sign up for the English Project." That project is Chapman's contribution towards the revival of English cooking, and all the chefs at the Castle - Chris Oakes, Gary Rhodes, Phil Vickery and Richard Guest - have enhanced their reputations while there. Chapman remembers them all partly by the dishes they cooked.

"Chris Oakes did the best Lancashire hotpot I've ever tasted, Gary Rhodes's braised oxtail was remarkable, and I shall always remember Phil Vickery's baked-egg custard tart," he says.

He adds: "In terms of accounting, it might appear that the restaurant is losing money but, as far as the Castle is concerned, our shop window is the restaurant. People come for the food and stay with us as a result of that."

Increase takings

Hotels keep control of their restaurants for different reasons. At Hambleton and the Castle, where the restaurants are pivotal and the owners would not dream of letting someone else control them, the reasons are clear. It is the choice of the owner, allied to the fact that the hotel restaurant is a logical place for many guests to take their meal, which increases the takings of the dining room in direct proportion to the occupancy of the hotel.

The same is true at Chewton Glen, the Hampshire country house hotel which spends £1m a year on food and where 60 lunch covers is a quiet day and 120 a good one, says managing director Andrew Stembridge.

"We couldn't operate the hotel without the restaurant or the restaurant without the hotel," Stembridge says. "Some guests come for the food, some for the spa, some for the tranquillity. It's the combination that counts." He adds that those who stay at Chewton Glen nearly always eat there, which is clearly not true in a big city hotel, where guests can and do choose to dine elsewhere.

Nevertheless, many big city hotels still attach great importance to running their own restaurants. David Morgan-Hewitt, managing director at the Goring hotel in London, says: "In a way, it's a philosophy. You can ensure that it fits in with what you are doing in the hotel as a whole. It's also a matter of sustaining the tradition of good innkeeping - which used to mean offering a good bed, a good meal and looking after your horse - and remains the classical approach that we want to foster."

He adds: "I fully understand why other hotels decide to bring in outside chefs, not least because what many hotel owners are looking for is to produce a better asset to sell on."

However, the Goring managing director is not blind to the expense of running big hotel restaurants. It cost £500,000 to refurbish the Goring's restaurant, which reopened last year, including "tens of thousands" on Swarovski chandeliers and £1,500 on each chair.

This investment did reap rewards, though. Overall, food and beverage makes up around half the Goring's income and, since the restaurant reopened, turnover has been up by about 30% on the previous year.

But Morgan-Hewitt admits that the restaurant eats up a far higher proportion of turnover than it gives in profits. He says: "The fact is this hotel, like most hotels, makes more money from bedrooms. We do make money in our restaurant but we have to work very hard and carefully to do so. The best ingredients cost money, we have £500,000-worth of wine in our cellar and the restaurant takes a lot of staff, but it is essential for the hotel."

Not the least of reasons why it is essential, he adds, is because in order to have a hotel with character and charm, "you need to have a ground floor that is buzzing - and to do that you need a good restaurant".

This does not necessarily mean that the restaurant management must be kept in-house, but hoteliers in the classical tradition, such as Morgan-Hewitt, believe it is much more likely to happen when the hotel retains control.

So do many chefs. Jeff Bland, executive chef at the Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh, where the fine-dining restaurant has a Michelin star, argues that the unity between restaurant and hotel is vital. He says: "I did a stage with Nico [Ladenis] when he was on Hyde Park [in London] and we felt completely separate to the hotel. It was a great restaurant, but I'm not sure that the separation was a good thing."

In contrast, says Bland, the Number One restaurant at the Balmoral is very attuned to the needs of hotel guests as well as restaurant diners. He says: "We do things for guests which show that we are all part of the same team. A couple of weeks ago, for example, we opened on a Sunday lunchtime for a celebration of the christening of [singer] Rod Stewart's children. I think this sort of thing is easier to do when the restaurant is firmly tied to the hotel."

In harmony

There is no reason, Bland admits, why outsourced hotel restaurants should not do similar things, but he believes they are less likely to be in harmony with the rest of the hotel.

He also makes the point that when any hotel associates its restaurant strongly with an individual chef, there may be a gap that is hard to fill when that chef decides to move on.
If a hotel restaurant wins its reputation in its own right, then arguably
it is a reputation that is easier to
preserve.

In the end, however, it does appear that those hotels that keep control of their own restaurants do so simply because it feels like the right thing to do. It goes against the grain for traditional hoteliers to give up control of their restaurants.

"I can't help feeling that to bring in someone from outside, whatever the advantages might be, is an admission of defeat. I wouldn't like it at all," says Morgan-Hewitt. It is a sentiment one might hear from old-school hoteliers up and down the land. For them, a hotel and its restaurant are indivisible, even if food does make less money than beds.

The game of the name Big-name chefs brought in to rejuvenate hotel restaurants do not stay for ever. The past decade has seen Marco Pierre White, who held three Michelin stars at the Oak Room in Le Meridien Piccadilly, first hand back the stars and then leave the restaurant; French Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, who consulted on the Terrace restaurant in the same hotel, is no longer doing so; John Burton-Race, a double Michelin-star winner, cooked with distinction at London's Landmark hotel but then left; and Brian Turner, still in place at the Millennium in London's Mayfair and at the Copthorne hotel in Slough, is no longer at the Crowne Plaza Birmingham NEC.

Unsurprisingly, such departures are less highly publicised than the chefs' arrivals, but the above is not a list of failures. All these restaurants were wculinary successes. Some did not generate as much business as had been hoped, but the reasons why they closed were as mixed as the reasons why almost all restaurants change: things move on.

What do you think? Should hoteliers keep control of their own restaurants and work hard for profit - or hand it over to an expert and save themselves the headache?

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