HOTELS

Bob Puccini

Seeing The Unseen
July 7, 2008

What I find most interesting about what I do is seeing the unseen. That is, generally whenever we are called to look at a troubled property or new location, the question that comes to my mind is, “How do I look at this from outside the paradigm that exists?”

It is kind of like those old puzzles, where if you look at a black and white cut out long enough you can see the face hidden within it. Or like this mindbender below:

The answer is they are all parallel; the vertical zigzag of the pattern disrupts your perception. Or maybe this:


 
I guess you get the point. Looking at a new restaurant project is a little like this: When you come to it, people patiently explain what they see and why they see it; the trick to our business isn’t listening, but really trying to see what they don’t, or what can be with some changes to re-orient perception.

There are hotel restaurants everywhere that break all of the classic rules attributed to a successful restaurant: located on a rooftop; no separate entry; poor signage or location; or one of my favorites--that the restaurant has to match the hotel’s style (I like to point to Masa’s, a wildly successful and perpetual 4-star restaurant in the '90s in San Francisco with chef Julian Serrano, located in a mid-quality 3-star San Francisco hotel).

Let me tell you that there are no rules; you need to see what your competitive advantage is and how to exploit it. Once you start believing what you can’t do, you will lose. We are working on a dining room in a 450-room hotel in the downtown area of a major city in Texas that averages 30 diners a night and is across the street from a 200-seat restaurant doing a big business (the hotel’s guests are going here). The hotel says there is no business at night in the downtown area, but is it only because they don’t quite see that it is a matter of providing a venue where people want to be?

I could write a book about this (by the way, we are writing one that will be out in the spring), but I don’t want to take too much more of your time on this now. Next week we can talk about how to fight the paradigm and break rules. It really is a '60s thing, I think, to enjoy breaking rules.

Posted by Bob Puccini on July 7, 2008 | Comments (0)