Management of a restaurant in a hotel – harmony or the harmonica of standards

please, see the beginning in “A restaurant in an hotel – objects and non-objects of consulting”

One way or another, any project team decides for themselves what will be the object of consulting for them and what they will not consult on. Our company also has to answer this question. For example:

- we do not consider ourselves to be specialists in fast-food in all of its forms – neither in the form of a project, not from the consulting perspective (but we will be always happy to recommend you some decent people who can do this part better than we could). To be more precise, we are not dealing with cuisine and ideology within the context of fast-food industry, but - at the stage of investment planning, with our expert knowledge and our pleasure - we could build a realistic finance model, logistics system (all aspects of it) and we could quickly implement this in reality. When we say “implement in reality”, we always mean that there has been a working structural unit built by our team that has been working successfully for at least a half a year within methodology provided by us which has also been managed by our team for this period of time. Plus procedures, accounting policies, trained staff, product matrixes, estimating charts, and calculation rules, certified skill and knowledge of accounting and operations management programmes. In addition to that - effective logistics solutions and partnership relations with the suppliers, including a portfolio of agreements and a number of other extremely useful things – this is what our Customer gets at the point when we leave the project.

When a customer or an investor insists that we are in charge of all the aspects of catering service, including the hotel’s kitchen, F&B and the room service, in this case we always bring in our own F&B directors, chefs and sous-chefs, whose many years of experience will allow the customer to receive in the end of the project a fully-operating restaurant and catering service which are up to the European standards of quality and which can resolve any routine and non-routine challenges. All issues related to replacement of the majority of purchased fast-food supplies and ideology with “human” alternatives are discussed while still “ashore”, at the initial stage of the project, and are an indispensable condition for the time of our project. By the way, this practically does not increase the cost at all. Funny enough, but in the country that for so many years has been the test grounds for trials and introduction of “creative” researches of the world food industry monsters, there still exist quite decent suppliers with excellent products at more that reasonable prices.

If we are approached with a case when all what we can see is a dead body of a business, we can only consult you on how to organise the funeral and how to create a more life-loving child. But what if, for instance, there is a restaurant in a hotel, there are customers and it is marketable, but it does not bring any profits? Most often, this is not the fault cuisine choice or quality, nor the chef’s fault, but rather a traditional systemic error in the hotel or other venue management standards. In this case, it is these particular standards that should be identified at the subject/object of consulting. There are no valid reasons to hire an interesting and talented chef only to immediately start tying his arms and legs with your own misconceptions of how he should organize his working space and work itself.

Your chefs and sous-chefs - bought for very serious money and with 15 or more years of experience in European sold out hotels - are they pealing root vegetables and boil buckets of pasta to feed your “economy range” guests who were convulsively sold their 50% discount package offers by the Sales department humanoids – those offers that were put together by their brothers in collective mentality from the Commercial department?

Someone dislikes the idea that the restaurant will be open not only and rather not so much for the hotel guests?

Someone disagrees that a restaurant must become a significant revenue-maker for the hotel instead of being a rustic tool intended to assist in increasing the number of hotel customers (and for some unknown reason the number of sold rooms or bookings does not want to grow anyway)?

Someone is sure they sell “bed units” as opposed to services?

Someone thinks (and this is correct) that a cost-effective restaurant in a hotel that makes revenues for the hotel will undermine the positions of resourceful dashing lads and lasses from the room service?

Wonderful! This means that we move on to the next project stages:
- project personnel management;
- project hierarchy, communicators and navigation.