HospiBuz Desk
Hotel restaurants, once a glorified destination for high-quality cuisine, today fight a resolute negative connotation as a result of their association with a hotel, this sentiment is gradually changing among the traveling public, it is still tough to entice guests and locals to try a hotel restaurant outside of influential gateway cities.
The difficult part is making your restaurant seem like it isn’t part of your hotel.
This may come off as a confusing approach since it concerns dropping an association between two businesses that, in the past, would have been seen as complements to one another. Were complementing one another
However, with such a strategy demonstrating successful among boutique hoteliers, it’s hard to deny the results.
A division between hotel and restaurant may be essential for marketing and operations at a micro level, but an experienced hotel and restaurant duos can become partners, not opponents,
and will create a symbiotic ecosystem where both parties can mutually benefit and learn from one another.
Three Hotel Restaurant Trends
1. Pull Back the Curtain
The saying goes that “once you know how the sausage is made, you’ll lose your appetite for it,” but this just doesn’t hold up in today’s restaurants. Open kitchens are here to stay, and diners want to see what is going on behind the scenes. People want to see the action, they want to be a part of it, and this adds story and drama to the act of dining out.
2. Embrace Speed
Grab-and-go isn’t moving anywhere, except maybe to your hotel’s guest rooms. This trend not only prepares up your hotel to appeal to additional local diners and non-hotel guests, but it also makes meals more palatable over social media, and packaging your food in a quality to-go bag is still easier than providing a full room service tray. People are eating with their eyes and will make their decisions based on the photos and stories they see on Instagram.
3. Flip the Space
Hotels are in full order of their spaces, so why waste them on a particular aesthetic? Hotel guests don’t want to eat fish in the same environment that served them omelets that morning, no matter the quality, but with a little extra effort guests can be fooled—in a fun way, of course, changing of the plates used before, the silverware to put out and even the artwork on the walls. With a little thinking outside the box, you can end up with two great restaurants in one.”