Attention Getters
By Karyn Strauss, Senior Editor -- Hotels, 12/31/2006 11:00:00 PM
In the competitive landscape of food and beverage, savvy hotel chefs and F&B directors are always striving to find innovative new ways to entice both hotel guests and locals to choose their restaurants over the free-standing establishments. And from small plates and tasting menus to display kitchens and a la carte banquets, the hotel industry has not suffered from a lack of trendsetting food and beverage ideas of late. But it is not every day that a completely new concept is born. Rather, today, when thinking about trendsetting ideas, what matters most is creativity. It is about fresh concepts that add a twist to the familiar. For example, it can be taking a great cocktail menu and creating an interactive class to teach guests how to mix the concoctions at home. That is because today what guests really want is for hotels to provide them with an experience beyond the expected.
It is this out-of-the box thinking that unites the following roundup of fun and noteworthy new F&B concepts from around the globe.
Fine-Dining Fast Think dining on classic French fare means long hours at the table and an overload of rich, heavy sauces? Think again. Sofitel hotels across North America are out to set a new tradition in French dining with its new 30-minute lunch program. This refined, four-course meal is guaranteed to be served within 10 to 15 minutes of ordering. That is because all of the courses are served simultaneously utilizing four small plates set on one platter (a porcelain answer to a Japanese bento box construction).
“The reason behind the program is that even though people are dining out more often, the timing for lunch is a big issue. And where our hotels are located (in major metropolitan areas) our business clientele need to be assured a great meal for entertaining purposes but in a very short time,” explains Jean-Marc Jalbert, senior corporate food and beverage director, Accor North America. “So we came up with a concept that would be trendy and fresh. The idea of serving it on a square plate with four distinct offers was attractive and easy for the kitchen to produce.”
Menus, which will change monthly, offer customers a choice of modern French fare, including three salads, three appetizers, three entrees and three desserts. Sample selections may be a mini onion soup bowl, crab cake or seafood/lobster medallion for the appetizer. Salads could be a frisee salad with bacon and truffled vinaigrette, and an entree could be a 4 oz. filet or steamed snapper with fresh vegetables. Prices range from US$18 to US$28. “Guests have a tendency to think French food is too heavy and takes too long to eat. We wanted to show that we could produce a full, high-quality meal in less than 30 minutes.”
After less than a month of executing the menu, response, Jalbert says, already has exceeded expectations in several markets. For instance, in Minneapolis, the new menu already accounts for 30% to 35% of total lunch sales without any promotion. In Chicago, the menu is proving very popular with the “ladies-who-lunch” crowd, who also are adding wine flights to the offering, he says, adding, “We’re not really planning any special promotion around it because word of mouth is proving to work really well. If I increase my lunch covers by 20% to 30% I’ll be happy. We’re already seeing great success.”
Liquid Appreciation
From expanded wine programs, extensive martini menus and a new slew of specialty cocktails, hotel barkeeps are responding to consumers’ growing interest and demand for premium spirits. It is not just enough to have a hip, new bar; today guests are looking for hotels and resorts to offer inventive, signature cocktails to add to the overall experience. And while studies show alcohol consumption may be lower, guests are showing they want to make the most of their experiences and go for the best. The new trend now is for hotels to add fun, educational programs that allow customers to become their own “mixologists.”
“There is certainly a new trend in cocktail mixology nowadays,” says Tom Warden, the designated “Liquid Chef” at the JW Marriott Phuket’s new Blue Bar. Marden creates what he calls “culinary beverage explosions,” combining alcohol, food items and other ingredients, including frangipane-scented sea salt and saffron-infused tapioca pearls, as well as unique, flavor-filled molecules suspended in the drinks. “People are willing to experiment more with unconventional ingredients such as lemon grass or kaffir lime,” Marden says. “I personally like to discover new flavors by infusing liqueurs or teas to find new tastes and flavors. This allows me to build signature [drink] menus.”
Some of the hottest drinks at the resort currently are a red cherry mojito—fresh fruit juices mixed with premium spirits has become essential, Marden says—and his port and cognac sour. And for guests who want to learn the art of exotic cocktails, Marden teaches classes at the resort’s new Ginja Cook cooking school. The class is aptly called “Molecular mixology: shaken or stirred.”
Across the globe at the Casa Magna Marriott Puerto Vallarta, meanwhile, another trendsetting idea in mixology is connecting education more closely to locale. In this case, it is tequila. The resort recently launched a new tequila appreciation program, complete with on-premises tequila sommelier, more than 60 brands of tequila and 117 designated by-the-glass options and its own agave azul on property, which produces a proprietary brand of tequila. “We’re located at the epicenter of tequila culture, and we’re actually one of the very few resorts in the world that grows our own agave azul on our grounds and produces our own tequila,” says General Manager Dennis Whitelaw. The tequila sommelier does regular tequila tasting classes for the resorts’ guests wherein guests learn about the culture and heritage of the product as well.
Tea Discovery
Given its much lauded health benefits, tea is back in vogue and as HOTELS previously reported, more and more luxury properties around the world have brought back afternoon tea service. At Park Hyatt hotels, however, a simple, elegant tea time just will not do. The idea here is about giving guests a more unique experience and a bit of an education wherein the hotels are approaching tea as they do wine programs. At NoMI, the high-end restaurant of the Park Hyatt Chicago, guests can partake in newly launched tea pairing dinners and regular tea tasting classes. And the newly reopened Park Hyatt Washington, D.C., has introduced a tea cellar featuring vintage, reserve, and single-estate and artisan teas. The pièce de résistance, however, is the Pu-Erh aging cellar, the first of its kind in the United States. Pu-Erh is Chinese for “cave-aged,” explains the on-site Tea Sommelier Ardina Kievts. Similar to the complexities of wine, she says, the flavor characteristics of these teas are altered by both the length of time they were aged and the climate of the caves themselves. “So we have different vintages of teas. The older they are, (the oldest available in the cellar dates back to 1985 and is priced at US$300 a cup—no one has been bold enough to try it as yet) like wine, the more full-bodied the taste.”
The hotel offers 15 varieties of Pu-Erh teas, the majority of which are aged one to four years. But Pu-Erh, while unique, is only one of seven categories and 53 varieties of tea offered in the cellar. Thus, Kievts spends much time explaining the elaborate menu to guests—again much like a wine program. The question, she says, on most people’s minds are the health benefits. For example, she says, “they are interested in the difference between white teas and green teas, because they are so familiar with green tea and its health benefits. But, I educate them about how white tea is actually the healthiest because it is not fermented at all—it is used right away after drying, so it is the richest in antioxidants.”
The cellar also offers tea flights for guests to sample a family of white, green, oolong, black or Pu-Erh teas. Served in espresso cups and in individual glass teapots, guests are told how long to let each variety steep and taught to understand the subtle nuances between each type. In addition to traditional tea service, the hotel also features cocktails made with tea-infused vodka.
Intermezzo Whimsy
Looking for a way to create a more interactive and memorable dining experience, the JW Marriott Grand Lakes in Orlando came up with the idea of using small spritzer bottles in the dining room to replace more traditional presentations of sauces, dressings and even the palate cleansing intermezzo course. For example, instead of serving the requisite sorbet, Sous Chef Dan Yates came up with idea to create a tangerine spritzer made of simple syrup with fresh fruit juice. Guests spray the concoction directly into their mouths—and can take port wine-reduction spritzer served with a cheese course, a vanilla-balsamic served with fruit and a simple presentation of high quality, aged balsamic vinegar and olive oil to be sprayed over a green salad, served in a martini glass.
“People love it; it’s a real wow,” says Chef Mark Beaupre. “A lot of the things we like to do are interactive, and this is another way for guests to participate in the dining experience in a new way.” The types of spritzers continue to grow as chefs come up with new concoctions. “It could be used for a sauce, or you could put a flavored butter in there that is sprayed over lobster,” he says, adding that there is also a perceived health component as guests are better able to control the amount of product used. Yates says that so far tests have shown that the higher the alcohol content in the ingredients, however, the better the spray factor. “Thicker solutions are harder to spritz,” he says. For now the restaurant is only using the bottles for its chef’s dinner—a group dining experience in the kitchen wherein chefs interact with guests throughout every course of the meal. The event, which Beaupre says they do almost daily, can accommodate 40 guests.
Prime Time
David Burke’s Primehouse, an upscale steak eatery located in the James Hotel, Chicago, takes the quality of its meat seriously. Very seriously. To prove it, the well-known New York Chef and B.R. Guest restaurant group invested US$250,000 in its own prime Angus bull, aptly named Prime, because of his “proven ability to sire offspring that achieve the coveted USDA quality grade of prime (less than 3% of all the meat graded in the U.S. annually).” The 2,500- lb. (1,133-kg) , 5-year-old pampered “pet” bull lives on at the 1,200-acre (485-ha) Creekstone Farm in Henry City, Kentucky. He has become the restaurant’s official mascot and even got his own line of steak sauce.
Then, once the top-of-the-line beef gets to the restaurant, it is dry-aged in the restaurant’s own on-site, Himalayan pink rock salt-tiled aging room. At any one time, in fact, there is approximately US$18,000 worth of meat aging in that special cooler. The aging process gives the meat an almost nutty flavor, with the length of the aging pro cess differing by cut/fat content of the meat, explains James’ Beverage Manager Rory Gurland. For example, a filet, the leanest cut, is aged no more than five days, whereas a bone-in rib-eye steak is aged up to 40 days. Gurland stresses, however, that the way to judge if the meat is “ready” has to do with its weight more than the specific number of days, as the chefs look for the meat to shrink by about 20% to indicate that the fat has been concentrated into the meat (therefore, giving it its flavor). The biggest challenge for the kitchen staff, he adds, is anticipating its needs on any given night given the aging process.
And so far those needs have been pretty strong with the steak-loving Chicago crowd flocking to the hip, new establishment. Beyond the prime steaks, Primehouse offers the traditional steakhouse fare with some inventive twists. For example, rather than the typical twice-baked potato, Burke’s version is more of a broccoli and cheese gratin baked inside a giant Idaho potato. For a unique, interactive dessert experience, homemade doughnut holes are served with three “injection” bottles of vanilla cream, chocolate and apple butter. Guests are encouraged to use the bottles to fill their own doughnut holes, creating a bit of unexpected fun. Burke’s signature cheesecake lollipop tree finds its way onto this menu as well.
Direct comments to kstrauss@reedbusiness.com
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