White tablecloths, haute cuisine giving way as market tilts toward younger crowds. Just three months ago, Danny Grant, executive chef of RIA, the highly acclaimed restaurant inside the Waldorf Astoria Chicago, was the only Chicagoan to make Food & Wine magazine's list of the nation's top 10 new chefs. On July 27, the Gold Coast hotel will pull the plug on RIA.
But the delight of taking afternoon tea at a high-class hotel is now likely to be accompanied by another of the nation’s favourite pastimes: grumbling about the bill. Which? has denounced prestigious establishments for charging as much as £85 for little more than a cup of tea and a couple of scones, branding the practice ‘highway robbery’. The consumer watchdog found that the five-star Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge offers an £85 per person afternoon tea, albeit accompanied by a glass of 1998 Prestige Krug champagne.
Former Savoy and Churchill chef David Croft has written Food for Thought – part autobiography, part cookbook – to educate the hospitality industry on the best ways to accommodate for disabled customers in the build-up to the 2012 Olympics and beyond.
The problem with London hotels in the past wasn’t always that the food was unexciting; quite a few hotels had extremely good chefs working for them. No, the problem was that the ambience was unexciting – ancient waiters in dinner jackets, rooms that hadn’t been redecorated since the Duke of Wellington’s day and a rather starchy feel. That’s all changed today and so has the way many hotels see their food service. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, for instance, is really a Heston Blumenthal restaurant which just happens to sit within the Mandarin Oriental hotel – rather than being the hotel’s dining room.
Several weeks ago, we were invited to Marriott's Bethesda, Maryland headquarters to meet with hotel executives and experience the "belly of the beast," so to speak - the Marriott Test Kitchen, where dishes for the chains' more than 1,000 restaurants are created, tested and perfected. For this experience, we, along with several other food and travel bloggers, offered our opinions on dishes for the chain's new "Eat. Drink. Connect." Bistro concept, which was first unveiled 2007 and is expected to be implemented across all U.S. Courtyard hotels by 2012. At present, more than 338 hotels have the Bistro concept in place.
I’ve never been clear about exactly what a sommelier does. It seems a rather mixed job – front-of-house glad-handing mixed with lots of behind-the-scenes work. So I naturally jumped at the chance to have lunch with Lia Poveda, Head Sommelier at the 5 star Milestone Hotel in Kensington.
Do you find there's a difference in atmosphere between a stand-alone restaurant and the dining room of a hotel? It has become commonplace for big name chefs looking for a costly central location to turn to the relative security of high profile hotels. This year we've had Dinner by Heston Blumenthal at the Mandarin Oriental (also home to Bar Boulud, launched late last year) with its clever fruity take on chicken liver parfait. Also in 2010 Michael Caines opened his ABode in Chester, a brand new hotel and restaurant delivering decent tuck in the evening and B&B, and Pierre Koffmann returned to The Berkeley with the successor to La Tante Claire, Koffmann's.
Forget those late-night cheeseburgers ordered from room service. Hotels increasingly are filling menus with low-calorie, low-fat options so you can eat healthy on the road. Among nods to the health-conscious: Hilton will feature low-calorie, low-fat breakfast options at all its hotels by the end of April.
Eating out when he’s home or traveling is not a simple matter for Michael De Cicco, a public relations executive in New York. That’s because De Cicco, who spends almost one-third of his time on the road, has celiac disease — which means he cannot eat foods with gluten in them — and is also allergic to shellfish. He is so passionate about gluten-free dining that he maintains a blog about it, glutenfreemike.com.
To ensure a happy hotel guest, offer excellent service, provide a comfortable bed and never, ever underestimate the power of a free bagel: After a good night's sleep, many travelers these days are expecting -- and receiving -- a good breakfast.
London hotels have contrasting views on this particular topic. Flagship hotel restaurants are often seen as a selling point. This especially applies to luxury hotels, with Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester and Gordon Ramsay at Art Deco gem Claridge’s notable examples, along with Galvin at Windows (Hilton on Park Lane) and Apsley’s at the Lanesborough.
As Brad Nelson sees it, tastes change with the turning of the seasons. And with summer almost officially underway, the VP culinary and corporate chef at Marriott International said the company is making a few tweaks to its restaurant offerings. For instance, braised ribs are tasty, sure, but the dish might not be so appetizing when the days are already hot and sticky. But a light pasta with peas and asparagus? A divine summer dish.
A bottle of vintage Dom Perignon was bought in bar for £35,000 Photo: PA The methuselah of 1996 Rosé Gold, dubbed the 'King of Champagnes', was sold at a top London hotel. A till receipt shows the buyer left a £10,625 tip – in addition to the £4,375 service charge.
Sauces, cakes, chocolates and other dishes containing alcohol may soon disappear from Dubai hotels as Dubai Municipality enforces a ban on their use. The civic body last week sent out a circular to hotel managers “strictly enforcing the ban on use of alcohol in food items and their sale,” an official said on Sunday. A local order from 2003 forbids the use of alcohol in the preparation of food. “Though most regulations under the local order have been enforced properly, Article 15, which bans the use of alcohol in food preparations, their display and sale was not implemented effectively,” said Ahmed Abdul Rahman Al Ali, head of food inspection at the Food Control Department of the Municipality.
SO exclusive is this restaurant on an industrial stretch of Queens Boulevard in Long Island City that it isn’t open to the public and it doesn’t even have a name. But: linens? Check. Floral centerpieces? Check. Sleek gold-ish décor? Check. Daily printed menu? Why certainly: a recent luncheon offered white bean soup with Parmesan crisps and grilled salmon with ratatouille sauced in Provençale herb emulsion. This restaurant’s existence goes to the heart of an issue that could dominate New York’s first major restaurant labor donnybrook in years: the capability of the staff at Tavern on the Green, members of New York Hotel Trades Council.
Hilton Worldwide’s focused-service Hilton Garden Inn and Homewood Suites brands have redone their menus recently to better serve guests while also saving on costs. aAccording to Mark Nogal, Hilton Garden Inn vice president of brand performance and sales support, “We have engineered three different menu options for our hotel operations, meaning that we have worked with the main food purveyors to look at products that are regularly stocked with a long shelf-life to create meals that are nutritious as well as cost effective for hotels to offer.”
On this day, HACCP—space-age technology designed to keep food safe in outer space—became the standard for public schools in the country. The armed forces as well as the healthcare industry will follow sooner than later… What does this mean for the hospitality industry? What does HACCP stand for in the first place? It stands for Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points and is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art food safety program developed by Pillsbury in the sixties for NASA. The FDA regulations establish HACCP as the food safety standard throughout other areas of the food industry for both domestic and imported food products, including seafood and juice. The program for the astronauts focuses on preventing hazards that could cause foodborne illnesses by applying science-based controls, from raw material to finished products
“LOOK FOR VENUES with progressive-thinking chefs in the kitchen,” urges Tom Ney, director-food marketing for Rodale, the Emmaus, Pa.-based publishers of Prevention, Men's Health, and numerous other lifestyle magazines, as well as The South Beach Diet. Ney's attitude represents that of most planners today, who have become much more discerning about their F&B decisions. That goes for the “B” part as well: For example, he always chooses fine wines in 750 milliliter bottles and local beers for receptions and dinners. “I specify wines for ordering, if the wine list does not meet my needs,” he says. “Never hard liquor, except for maybe one specialty drink.”