Spotlight On: Jean-Pierre Etcheberrigaray, F&B Concept Specialist

By Derek Gale, Senior Editor -- Hotels, 8/28/2008 11:00:00 AM

Jean-Pierre Etcheberrigaray is vice president, food & beverage, the Americas, for IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group). A former director of food & beverage and general manager at various properties around the world, today Etcheberrigaray is responsible for overseeing F&B operations for multiple IHG brands, as well as identifying trends and creating concepts to keep pace with the company’s rapid hotel development and brand repositioning. He took a few minutes recently to talk with HOTELS about his work.

HOTELS: How does your experience as a GM inform your work on F&B concepts and your oversight of F&B operations?

Etcheberrigaray: It makes it easier for execution. It makes me more credible with my colleagues on the operations side. We are a hotel restaurateur—we are not a restaurateur open five nights a week, and for breakfast and lunch two days a week. We are open 24 hours, 365 days a year. You hold hands with the hotel. A lot of people talk about F&B, but this is F&B associated with lots of mattresses and banquets and a kitchen. There’s a huge difference [between this and] a restaurant open five to six nights a week.

HOTELS: What major F&B projects or initiatives are in the works right now at IHG?

Etcheberrigaray: The InterContinental brand is positioning itself way differently as an F&B brand. It is going beyond the level that used to exist. We believe in bar positioning. There have been a lot of successful, signature bars created with fantastic ambiance near ethnic style restaurants in our properties. In Atlanta, XO bar is the busiest bar for cognacs in the Americas. It fits the brand perfectly and is followed by a restaurant that brings a French brasserie style to the Atlanta market. The same thing happened in Boston with a rum bar that is off the chart, and a restaurant called Miel. I remember four years ago, people said a rum concept in Boston was not going to work, but it is our most successful bar—it’s just insane—you can’t get a seat there at night. And at the InterContinental San Francisco, there is a unique grappa bar with 150 grappas, grappatinis and grappa cocktails. People are loving it because it is different, unique and pushing the envelope.

People may drink less today, but they drink better. People want to indulge and have fun. The IC brand is cutting-edge in philosophy and is making strides, with the developments in the pipeline looking very promising.

HOTELS: Rum is popular in Boston? So exactly how much does a hotel’s location and/or the demographics of its guests play a part in what a new F&B concept will be?

Etcheberrigaray: We believe that a property is the center of the local neighborhood. If you believe that, then you need to attract and cater to the neighborhood. You need to penetrate and be part of the local society. To do that, you need to do a lot of investigation and research work. You need to see what’s happening in that zone and get familiar with the place. You’ve got to feel and touch it, because every city, and every neighborhood, is different. A successful place is where the local market hangs out and spends money on F&B. If the hotel guest follows through, that is a bonus.

As a company, we like to be tailored to our different markets. We don’t try to be one formula to everyone, especially now, as more and more we are going toward farm-to-table menu concepts, where what’s available in Detroit might not be available in Tampa or Pittsburgh.

HOTELS: That said, how do you feel about replicating F&B concepts in different IHG properties across the region?

Etcheberrigaray: I feel good about it. But it needs to be market orientated. Just because a formula works in XYZ, it is not necessarily going to work somewhere else. But a lot of them could work. To make a chain, or a standard, however, is not our philosophy. But if concept can work in three to four or even 10 different places, why not? We have a couple concepts that work in a dozen hotels because they have a good formula that fits the properties and customer backgrounds. They all have different twists, but why reinvent the wheel if you have a good formula?

HOTELS: So how much time do you spend on site at individual properties?

Etcheberrigaray: Three weeks out of four per month, I’m on the road at a property, a property site, an architect’s office or a designer office.

Every time we do a property site development, of course the first thing we do is look around the geographical zone, which puts me into five to 10 restaurant spaces and all the bars for that city. Before we develop anything we find out what is the competition. In the old days, we’d say competition was the five main hotel restaurants, but today it is really what’s within a 10-minute walk from your property. I do this walk from each property just to see what our guests will have to experience.

From there, you take into account the hotel competitive set and also the up-and-coming concepts or popular places that exist in that city, village suburb. Then you try to imagine when working on a blueprint for a property coming three to four years down the road what will be different or new in three to four years. So there is a present analysis and there is a vision of where we should be three years down the road, which makes a good recipe.

HOTELS: Lastly, what are some of the key trends in hotel F&B right now?

Etcheberrigaray: A lot of people are looking at the easy way out. Outsourcing is a big, huge monster because all of a sudden a couple of companies have put in a name chef or designer, or a celebrity something, thinking that could be the solution. I’m not too sure about that—it may fit according to the place. In some cities or geographical zones,  celebrity outsourcing works, and there are different ways to skin that cat—management deals, concept deals, name deals, etc. That is a trend, and people are looking for that.

But outsourcing needs to be re-analyzed. Why give the silver platter, or gold nest egg to somebody who knows how to plate better? A lot of people don’t want to deal with the headache. They say on the rooms side it is 80% profit and 20% headache, while on the F&B side, it’s the opposite. That’s an old myth, but a myth that’s still on.

Every location has to be analyzed—for some you might find a good operator that can do better than you the F&B, so you want someone to take over that place. If you do outsource, you must consider the HR side—who are the employees, how are they hired, where do they change, who trains them and how do they fit into the hotel? Where does the delivery come in? How do you split the garbage, electricity, etc.?

Another trend—in the old days you used to have a lobby and then a bar off the lobby. Then you used to have the restaurant. Today, you have a restaurant/bar and then lobby comes on the side. The formula now is for a bar within a restaurant and a restaurant within a bar. There is a trend where people want to eat at bars today—it is no longer the taboo that it used to be. It is no longer taboo to have breakfast at a nice bar, or a burger or Caesar salad or a filet with fries in the evening at a bar. So you’ve got to create your bar.

As for the lobby itself, depending on the brand, you don’t want people checking in, going through the lobby, and seeing people with their fingers full of ketchup. We like a lobby where people can sit back, relax, see action and motion, listen to music—people attract people, and the designer and architect have a great responsibility in designing the traffic flow. But should the lobby be a restaurant? I don’t think so, I disagree with that. The lobby should be comfortable according to the market you’re going after.