April 1981: Hotel Foodservice: The End of Culinary Con

 Offering inspired f&b that challenge industry standards.

 

For four days in January, The Sheraton Corporation took over its 1,400-room flagship, Sheraton-Boston, and tossed a sensational pep rally for 2,500 food and beverage employees and spouses who came to Boston from all over the world. The occasion was the company’s fifth biennial World Conference, this edition headlined as The Sheraton Spectrum of Excellence. It was that.

Sheraton pulled out all stops, spared no expense. Someone said it shelled out over $1 million for the conference. Sounds about right. 

Luncheons speakers included Gael Greene, restaurant critic; Henry Kissinger, academician, former Secretary of State, and gourmand; and Rand V. Araskog, chairman, ITT, Sheraton’s parent company.

There were panels—lots of them: theme and focus explicit, intended effect implicit. How do advertising, purchasing, marketing, public relations, financing, the competition, design, security, and an awareness of consumer trends, needs, and demand collectively impact the success (or not) of a hotel’s food and beverage program and lead to the fulfillment of Sheraton’s “Spectrum of Excellence?”

Not to be forgotten and perhaps most important, was what president and c.e.o., Howard James, in his opening remarks, deemed central to a successful food and beverage program: how do interactions of every employee from top to bottom, hourly to salaried, fulltime to part-time, line to management contribute (or not) to that success. Without a discussion within each panel of employee interactions the panels would be a waste of time. Sheraton execs made sure they wouldn’t be that. They moderated the panels.

Multimedia shows accompanied each presentation. Laser writing, slides, and film swashed and flickered, dazzled and impressed. Loudspeakers pulsed hard and soft with everything from disco to Vivaldi.

And then the receptions. There were three of them, one for each night. All spectacular. The opener, overwhelming in its design and delivery, spotlighted exotic food and drink prepared and dished out by food and beverage employees from Sheratons in India, Europe, and the Middle East. The following night, more of the same, but catered by the company’s Pacific Division. The finale bumped, groaned, and gyrated with pleasures of Latin America: great food and drink, of course; but, beyond that—so far beyond, that you had to be awed by Sheraton’s professionalism and its daring—it burned itself out after stoking a celebration of South America as fiery as anything you’d expect to encounter at a Carnival in Rio.

It was worth it. All of it. The receptions did more than entertain. They reinforced what Sheraton has been bragging about for years: great hotels are great not just because they are elegantly appointed and well-groomed, but because they offer inspired food and beverage that continually challenge industry standards and the competition: other hotels and the entire universe of independent and chain restaurants.

In his opening remarks, Howard James, said, “We’ve come into an era where everyone must recognize the important contributions food and beverage make to the success of all of us. . . . When we say, ‘Taste Sheraton,’ we’re literally putting our money where are our mouth is. For much too long, we hid the light of food and beverage under a bushel, expecting menus that wowed them in Boston to keep customers happy in places that wouldn’t know scrod from squid. Today, with our change to Signature restaurants, our use of local produce, our acknowledgment of local tastes, and our focus on food in our advertising, we’re finally reaping a well-deserved harvest. The taste of success is sweet.”

To call the World Conference a “pep rally,” as I did earlier, is a bit unfair. There was more going on than backslapping and self-congratulatory adulation. A good many of the seminars pinpointed areas of corporate concern where, it was felt, individual properties might think about burnishing their performance.

At a Saturday morning session, Sig Front, Sheraton’s senior v.p. and its director of marketing, admitted that the company’s Taste Sheraton campaign introduced in 1978 had done much to build the company’s image as a foodservice front-runner. According to Front, in 1980 the company served over 100 million meals at its 415 properties worldwide. Still, insisted Front, hotels could improve these sales figures significantly. He suggested that hotels, in an effort to boost f&b sales and profits, give over at least 25 percent of their marketing efforts to the promoting and selling of food and beverage.

Perhaps the conference’s most telling remarks were to be found in a speech by Peter Karpaty, president, Unifood, a Sheraton subsidiary which last year purchased, for Sheraton and other companies, food valued at $70 million. Karpaty warned that today’s consumers—better educated and more knowledgeable than those of a generation ago—are more intense, more confrontational, more demanding than ever, concerned about nutrition (“Not a fad,” he said, “but a permanent habit.”), freshness, portion sizes, and chemicals in food. Travels all over the globe have introduced them to ethnic cuisines stimulating their tastes and educating their palates to say nothing of stimulating their tolerance for diverse cultures.

“Your customers,” said Karpaty, “will demand quality, will resent gimmicks. What is most important today is good food properly presented and served. The era of the twirling rooftop restaurant serving a view and little else is over. That goes for fast food restaurants, too, where a new generation of consumers will begin to question the value of the food they’re served there. The era of culinary con is over.”

Hotel kitchen photo: hxdyl

(For more on hotel dining, see February 1987: Hotel F&B No Longer Exclusively a Hotel Brand.)