Kings of the kitchen (from left to right): Barry Sondern, Dan
Piccolello, David Holland, Todd Kohls, Michael McPhie, Brian
Pierce
Sometimes, it’s the people
in lesser-known roles who turn out to be the key players.
So it goes with food and beverage directors. Most guests never lay
eyes on them; few actually know what they do. Even meeting planners
often funnel their F&B concerns through intermediaries, such as
the conference services manager or event team specialist. Yet,
these directors are the lodging industry’s most important employees
when it comes to driving F&B revenue -- hotels’ second most
important profit center (after room rates), upward of a 40 percent
margin in any full-service property.
The F&B directors who share their expertise on the
following pages were chosen for their hands-on approach to meetings
business. All are adamant about establishing an early and ongoing
communication with planners, from site inspection to on-site
arrival. They believe a quality meal can be served on any budget.
They are committed to the notion that the ultimate success of an
event is indelibly tied to the food and drink served.
“There are a lot of moving parts involved in food and
beverage,” says Dan Piccolello, F&B director at the 800-room
Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. “Sometimes I feel like I am standing
there, baton in hand, keeping them in sync. If they move out of
sync, they’ll collide, and if that happens, the banquet will be a
disaster.”
Every F&B director is responsible for a hotel’s entire food
and beverage operation, which includes all restaurants and bars,
room service, banquets, weddings -- in sum, all in-house meals --
as well as off-site catering. Add to the job description the
oversight of the staff supporting all of these operations. In large
convention properties, that could be as many as 300 or more regular
employees who require constant training, along with support staff
brought on to help out during peak times. In addition, directors
must purchase all the food and identify and retain key suppliers.
They also work side-by-side with the executive chef in designing
all of the hotel’s menus, from fancy banquet to fleeting meeting
break.
Knowing what works
The F&B directors with an added creative edge are
those who have a hands-on culinary background, whether having
worked their way up in hotel kitchens from dishwasher to sous-chef
or having studied cooking at a prestigious culinary institute.
“At a lot of properties, the F&B director’s role is very
institutional, almost clinical. If the conference services manager
comes to them with a planner’s question about wine pairing, they
have to go to their sommelier for the answer,” says Brian Pierce,
F&B director at the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale (Ariz.) at
Troon North. “Because I have culinary training, the planner knows I
can speak directly to their question, and that immediately makes
them feel more comfortable and confident.”
Michael McPhie, F&B director at La Posada de Santa Fe
Resort & Spa and a formally trained chef, agrees. “When a
meeting planner asks me if I can add this to the plate or change
that, I can tell them from experience whether it will work,” he
says. “A lot of my F&B colleagues will have to check with the
executive chef.”
Q&A WITH AN F&B EXPERT
Kathy RoweAt Boston-based Sonesta Hotels & Resorts, Kathy Rowe, senior vice president, oversees direction of the chain’s 22 food and beverage directors. She also is the creative voice behind Sonesta’s recently launched Food Is Art program, which gave chafing dishes in every hotel kitchen the boot.
M&C: What’s your F&B philosophy?Rowe: I believe people eat with their ears first, then their eyes, then their mouths. When you put that plate in front of a customer, the food on it should look beautiful. Take a slice of tenderloin at a carving station. Instead of the guest getting a slice and moving on to the next station, the chef will decorate it with a dollop of garlic-roasted mashed potatoes, two spears of grilled asparagus and drizzle it with a raspberry demi-glace. The guest walks away with a miniature work of art.
M&C: What exactly is the role of an F&B director?Rowe: They are the backbone of F&B operations. They are the true talent and creativity behind the scenes.
M&C: How do you involve the service staff?Rowe: In training, we spend a lot of time describing the food, the flavors and the textures to them. And we build the serving stations together so they can experience the creation of the food and get to taste it. The service staff are the ones serving the guest, so it is absolutely critical that you make them a part of the whole operation in order to get their buy-in.
Darling dish: Filet mignon at Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort, Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.M&C: Where do menu ideas come from?Rowe: Our F&B directors like to compete with each other. When the F&B director at the Key Biscayne property developed the Floridian desert station, the F&B director at the Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort [in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.] was like, “aha.” He came up with a tapas station. They see and hear what the others are doing and are always trying to take it to the next level.
M&C: What trends are evolving?Rowe: Building food on the plate, mixing textures and temperatures. Warm crispy noodles with a smooth cold slaw makes two temperatures and two textures come together. -- C.A.S.
Fancy worktable: The
executive chef’s office at the New Orleans
Marriott
Show and tell
At the New Orleans Marriott, F&B director Todd Kohls
enjoys bringing planners into the heart of his operation -- a
process greatly facilitated by management. Five years ago, the
hotel decided to move its F&B department, which generates $25
million in revenues annually, front and center stage during site
inspections, which can number as many as five a day. A $25,000
renovation transformed the executive chef’s office, located in the
hotel’s busy kitchen, into a mini-banquet area, complete with a
stainless steel dining table and a ceramic floor.
It is here that a meeting planner sits down to champagne and
conversation with Kohls and his team, which includes the executive
chef, the banquet services captain, and the directors of catering
and event operations. “I can’t tell you how many planners will say,
‘This is the first time I’ve been on a site visit and allowed to be
in a kitchen,’?” says Kohls. “They love the atmosphere of watching
the whole kitchen working around them, and it’s our way of saying
we have the staff and the resources, and we guarantee you our
F&B will make the difference.”
This strategic F&B marketing has proved so successful, it
has been officially designated a best practice by Marriott.
Working it out
A truly creative F&B director can make the best of
most any restriction. For example, “I have a group coming in two
weeks. They have a tight budget and asked for a discount off the
regular catering menu,” says Barry Sondern, F&B director of the
Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta. “Rather than just say, ‘OK,
here’s your discount,’ I’m going to take that same menu and create
meals that meet their price points and still look and taste great,
like taking the filet mignon and turning it into a terrific flat
iron steak.”
Menu choices -- or the perceived lack thereof -- often become
another test of an F&B director’s mettle. “Many hotels aren’t
flexible on their banquet menus, and that’s a terrible thing,” says
David Holland, F&B director at The Lodge at Sonoma, a
Renaissance resort in the heart of California’s wine country.
“After all, planners are the people driving
the business.”
How far will Holland go to please? Several months ago a client
requested a whole roast suckling pig be served at a dinner,
something the hotel had never before been asked to create. “It was
crucial to his event, though, and we made sure he got it,” says
Holland.
While going off menu poses a challenge to the entire flow of a
kitchen’s food operation, it’s also a great chance for an F&B
team to strut its stuff, says the New Orleans Marriott’s Todd
Kohls. “We encourage planners on their site visit to think outside
the box and do things differently. When they say they’d like to try
a certain entree but are afraid it won’t work, we say, ‘Trust us.
We can plate that for 2,000.’ And they always say no one ever told
them that before.”
It helps that Kohls, a 23-year F&B veteran who visits the
Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Culinary Institute of America four times a
year scouting for new talent, is passionate about his department’s
contribution to meetings business. “We like to take things to a
different level, because without the meetings business, our people
don’t have the work,” he says. “And after Hurricane Katrina, which
was a huge thing to go through, we know we have to step it up and
get the word out.”
Indeed, Kohls’ role in site inspections has become such an
important force in snagging meetings business that Marriott
recently named him a salesperson of the year, a title typically
awarded to members of the sales force.
Going the extra mile
The hotel that asks planners to fit its schedule of operations has
the formula backwards, says Hyatt’s Dan Piccolello. “It’s my job to
make our facilities fit the client’s needs, not the other way
around.” Opening restaurants an hour earlier in the morning,
extending the lobby coffee shop hours to 2 a.m. and keeping room
service humming around the clock are just some of the ways
Piccolello reworks his department’s operations to meet planners’
requirements.
It’s also the little extras that help make the difference
between a great convention experience and a mediocre one, notes
Piccolello. The makeup of the group will help dictate how he stocks
the bars, what extra munchies he will add to the bar menus and what
to-go items he’ll offer in the lobby coffee shop. “When you have a
large group in-house, they come back from a night out and they
usually are hungry and want to unwind in the bar, or take something
into the lobby or up to their room,” he says. “It’s all about
understanding people and traffic patterns.”
Dos and don’ts
Even the most senior meeting planners can trip up when in
comes to food and beverage. Here are some insider tips on ways to
enhance the planner-F&B relationship for the good of all
concerned.
Communicate. Need a special green tea for the
CEO? Are some attendees on a strictly kosher diet? Don’t wait until
the last minute to tell the F&B director. “I can’t do 30 kosher
plates the morning of a breakfast, because I don’t have a kosher
kitchen,” says Omni’s Barry Sondern. “I have to go and find a
supplier, and maybe they can’t squeeze me in. Now you’re stuck.”
But with enough advance notice, says Sondern, he can get anything.
For a recent “green” association, he stocked the hotel’s kitchen
with organic coffees and recycled all papers, bottles and cans
during their stay. “We were able to do that because the meeting
planner started working with us a year out,” he says.
Similarly, “If you find out that even one group member is
allergic to something like peanuts, call us immediately,” advises
Four Seasons’ Brian Pierce. “If one person misses the fact that we
have an attendee allergic to peanuts, we are all in trouble.”
Nix personal preference. Just because you
might swoon for a particular entree, don’t assume your taste buds
speak for the whole group, says David Holland of The Lodge at
Sonoma. “Seventy percent of people don’t like cold, poached salmon,
but meeting planners love to request it,” he notes. “Then, nine
times out of 10, when the first person who says they don’t like
fish gets a chicken plate, everyone else begins asking for it. It
turns out to be a terrible waste of food, and the meeting planner
gets stuck paying for all the plated differences.”
Don’t jump the gun. “Meeting planners love to
have the entire buffet laid out and ready to go a half hour before
anyone arrives,” says La Posada de Santa Fe’s Michael McPhie. “Let
me tell you, food dies in a chafing dish. Anything that’s sitting
out there that long will be inedible.”
Stay destination-focused. Holland prides
himself on executing group requests. However, he says, planners
sometimes choose themes purely on a whim that work against the
meeting’s location. “Don’t do a Mardi Gras party if you have chosen
Wine Country for your meeting,” he says. “We can certainly do the
theme, but it doesn’t fit the destination. Better to pull in
elements from the destination and make them work for you.”
Don’t be shy. “I know planners might be
nervous about asking a sensitive question like whether we have
enough staffing, but they needn’t be,” says Kohls. “Because of
Katrina, I didn’t wait for them to voice that concern to me. I
brought it right up to them.” In fact, Kohl did not lose a single
member of his 262 staff, including 22 managers.