Rive Gauche Revival

Outside company breathes fresh life into Baur au Lac�s F&B offering.

By Karyn Strauss, Associate Editor -- HOTELS Magazine, 11/1/2005

The “new” Rive Gauche restaurant features modern furnishings and ambient lighting for a decidedly contemporary look and feel.

The chic bar of Rive Gauche already is succeeding in attracting locals in the evening hours.

What do you do when you lose your chef who created a thriving restaurant concept and, in turn, that concept loses some of its cache? For the Rive Gauche Restaurant & Bar in the renowned Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich, it meant starting over. The management team decided to close the 7-year-old establishment to reposition it with the goal of attracting a younger and trendier clientele. To accomplish that aim, for the first time in the hotel’s long history, the management team looked outside its own skills set to bring in a company whose sole business is creating and operating stand-alone restaurants. It wanted to find a partner to help with concept creation, design, staffing and marketing for the “new” Rive Gauche and chose Zurich-based Five AG to undertake the challenge of creating a new destination restaurant.

“We wanted to be able to compete with local restaurants,” says Baur au Lac Managing Director Michel Rey, who adds that the restaurant scene in Zurich has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, making competition that much fiercer. “Fifteen years ago there were probably 150 restaurants in Zurich; now there are more than 1,000. We’ve seen big, big expansion in the restaurant scene.” Thus, Rey knew he had to up the ante to compete and decided on a cooperation with a group of young gastronomes—Five AG—who run their own well-established and very successful restaurants. “Beside good gastronomic know-how and experience, they also will provide us with a good network of younger customers who regularly go to their restaurants. So, we can take advantage of their network,” he says.

The main impetus for the repositioning, Rey explains, was that the restaurant had been steadily losing evening business. Rive Gauche, which has always been dominated by locals, had no trouble with its lunch service—catering to a mostly business clientele. However, at dinner Rey says the restaurant often had become a sea of empty tables. Thus, his immediate goal is to increase evening business by at least one-third.

It is not the first time in the restaurant’s history that it had fallen on difficult times. In fact, prior to being Rive Gauche, the same space held the hotel’s famed Grill Room—a restaurant that had been popular for nearly a century. But by the 1980s the concept had become a bit tired, and management thought it too closely resembled the hotel’s premier fine-dining establishment, Restaurant Français. So when the entire hotel underwent renovations in the mid-1990s, the Grill Room was transformed into Rive Gauche. The concept blossomed under the direction of an up-and-coming Swiss chef who had studied in Hong Kong and thus introduced “east meets west” cuisine. While successful for a time, once the chef left, the original concept mostly disappeared. As a result, Rive Gauche lacked a clear identity.

Fast forward to January 2005, and Rey and his team decide to close the restaurant to let Five AG re-concept it. Returning to its roots a bit, the company conceived a modern Mediterranean grill featuring a wide variety of fresh meat and fish dishes. In terms of décor and ambience, the restaurant and bar received a complete overhaul. “The only thing we kept was the name,” Rey says. The new atmosphere is contemporary chic, with splashes of bright color, ambient lighting, a transparent entranceway that allows customers to see and be seen, as well as flat-screen televisions behind the bar and, for the first time, background music. A highlight is the communal table set in the middle of the restaurant that includes raised seating like one would find in the bar. In addition, Five AG also was responsible for hiring new employees. Rey says that 85% of its staff is new. Another first is that the restaurant has hired a hostess/greeter, as is commonly done in American restaurants but not so much in Zurich.

With the menu and look of the restaurant complete, the next task for Five AG was to market the “new” Rive Gauche to a trendy clientele. The team started by throwing a lavish re-opening party on September 1 that attracted more than 1,000 people. “It was a big event for Zurich,” Rey says. “And it brought in a much younger clientele—which is our aim.” Adds Baur au Lac Owner Andrea Kracht: “Five AG has a great network in Zurich, both professionally and personally, so much so that they were able to bring in 1,200 people for the opening. It was a bit overwhelming, actually, but a great night for Zurich.”

Both Rey and Kracht maintain, however, that the true test of the restaurant’s success will be six months, a year and five years from now. “At launch, restaurants appear to be successful. The test will come six months from now,” Rey says. Kracht adds, “Now the restaurant is full, but the question is will it stay that way? The goal is to build up another institution in Zurich, so we will have to wait and see.”