Outside input

The Hotel Magazine June 2007

You bring the experts in, you let your restaurant out, you shake it all up and turn it around – that’s what outsourcing’s all about.

Its one O’clock on a Wednesday in London EC2, and the Hoxton Grille at the Hoxton Hotel is doing pretty respectable trade. Smartly dressed men and women, talking business over lunch, occupy several of the dark wood tables in the middle of the modern 105-cover brasserie.

On one side is an open kitchen – with plenty of activity to watch, even though the place isn’t full – and on the other is a small central courtyard, enclosed by large windows that flood the restaurant with natural light. If I hadn’t entered the venue through the sliding doors of the 205-bedroom Hoxton Hotel, I don’t think I’d know I was dining in a hotel restaurant – more a trendy city brasserie.

Of course, that’s exactly the aim of the Hoxton Grille, which technically, isn’t a hotel restaurant at all. The Hoxton Hotel and the Hoxton Grille are separate businesses, under different ownership and without any crossover staff.

When Sinclair Beecham, joint founder of the Pret a Manger sandwich chain, opened his first (and, for the moment, only) hotel last year, he joined the growing number of hoteliers who are outsourcing their food and beverage operation.

Despite his expertise in the industry, he felt the restaurant, bar, room service and banqueting would be better looked after by someone with plenty on experience in the restaurant trade, so he got together with Simon Wright and Jon Pallagi of Room Restaurants (who run restaurants in Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester) and leased them the space.

Sitting back and looking at how busy the Grille is on a Wednesday lunchtime, let alone on a Friday or Saturday night, Beecham is convinced he’s made a smart move – and it’s one he’ll probably repeat when he finds a site for his next hotel.

“It may well be different for some small independent operations, but generally I don’t think hotels do restaurants very well,” he says. “I mean, how many food an beverage managers run great restaurants? They’re trained to run a hotel not trained to run a restaurant, so restaurants in hotels tend to be charmless.”

From the outset Beecham was determined not to make that mistake at the Hoxton: he wanted a casual brasserie serving “simple food that people like, done well”, and with the kind of design and atmosphere that would draw in locals as well as hotel guests.

He was introduced to Pallagi and Wright, whose Room restaurant in Liverpool is at the 62 Castle Street Hotel, and was impressed by their pedigree and proposals for the Grille.

Wright, who worked in F&B for chain and independent hotels before setting up Room Restaurants, says: “Hotels tend to make the majority of their money out of bedrooms, so an awful lot end up with bland, coffee shop-type operations because decisions are being made for people who may only occasionally use those spaces.”

“What we do is think, ‘We have a space here, let’s make it a really great neighbourhood restaurant that just happens to be in a hotel’, as well as making sure we look after breakfast, room service and meeting rooms.” So Room Restaurants runs the bar and brasserie and provides breakfast, lunch, dinner and room service – as well as catering for meetings in the Hoxton’s business centre – and the hotel gets a percentage of the turnover.

“Effectively they pay me rent, but based on how well they do,” Beecham explains. “I think we’ll see more hotels outsourcing because it makes sense to have somebody who lives or dies by how well their restaurant does operating in your hotel. You’ve got to ask yourself, would your restaurant be making money if it were s stand-alone business, and if the answer is no, then you should outsource.”

In April Pallagi and Wright opened a sister restaurant to Hoxton Grille at the renovated Balmoral Hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Phil Barker, a first-time hotel buyer, called them in even though he already rubs two restaurants of his own.

Baker explains: “I’d seen the boys at the Hoxton and because it was our first hotel I quite liked the idea of them concentrating on the hotel and them concentrating in the restaurant, rather than us taking on too much. I like having a division between the restaurant and the hotel because it makes the restaurant more appealing to outside diners.”

The 70-cover Harrogate grille operates along similar lines to its Hoxton sister (Baker also regards the association with a London hotel as an advantage), in that it provides, breakfast, lunch, dinner and room service, as well as catering for private dining.

However, the difference is that in the Harrogate hotel guests get priority, so restaurant staff have to be mindful of how busy the hotel is when taking reservations from outside.