The resumption of our food & beverage activities, especially for hotel, will require a real differentiation. The development of strong partnerships to stand out is an opportunity to unite and restart stronger.
Choosing to work with a partner, a brand, a Chef, requires reflection in line with his vision and objectives to be achieved. The success of such an approach will in any case be assured only if it brings added value to both parties and therefore is “Win-Win”.
Do we have an interest in partnering? to share our respective images? A resumption of our activities will require good visibility and joining forces to develop may not be a bad idea today to have good visibility.
Let’s share recommendations to ensure such success in the field of our food & beverage activities.
No one will be able to afford to reopen a business that won’t work. So you have to position your concept well, get it started correctly and work hard to ensure its success. In my article “Brand Book” of your restaurant, I summarized all the points to think about and decide for positioning and launching. In this article, we will focus on the reflection of adding to your restaurant a partner, a brand, a Chef who can support faster development through reciprocal notoriety.
Alone we go faster, together we go further.
African proverb
So would you like to go faster or further ?
Define your goal
The vision of your business will define where you want to go but also who do you want to become? This first question will help you define your goal and how to get there.
After this period of health crisis, closures, confinements or limited travel, periods of restrictive curfews, the company must ask the right questions to ensure its reopening in the best conditions.
The choice to partner allows you to quickly reposition yourself in your market and ensure that the messages to be conveyed to its customers to be won back will circulate through different channels. There is strength in unity and now is the time to prove it.
So yes, let’s join forces, find the best partners to promote his business and think about bringing the business back together. Let’s use our respective strengths to win back the hearts of our customers and their loyalty !
How to choose a partner ?
The expectations of our customers are emerging more and more precisely. Today, a hotel has every interest in partnering with a well-ness professional partner by jointly offering stay offers, for example. The search for well-being, to take care of yourself, to get back to doing sports, exercises, has never been so important.
But the choice of a partner lies first of all in your vision, the DNA of your company. The latter must not derogate from it and do its research on the complementary partner who responds to the same DNA or will complete your vision to ensure its success. So yes, choosing your partner means choosing an entity that meets the same criteria as you and has the same vision of the business. For food & beverage activities, the exercise is the same.
Otherwise, you might as well rely on its internal strengths, its teams, its Chef, to work on a local, regional concept, with a strong identity and which will set you apart from your competition.
Getting started with the concept
The teams, the management, will be the keys to the success of the launch of the concept. Make sure that the establishment takes ownership of the concept and works jointly with the partner to ensure its proper implementation.
Regular monitoring and assessment is essential in order to ensure consistency and regularity. Although your company chooses to set up a Pop Up concept, which will be renewed after the season or the year, the start-up must be done as in any business, with the idea of making it last the concept.
Ideas for concepts that can start again very quickly
In France
Hipster-Asia. Whether Thai, Korean or Chinese, Asian cuisine is on the rise, provided it is precise, neat and tasty – in short, high end. The many openings (in the capital and elsewhere) attest to this: Pitaya, Seoul Mama Paris, CAM, 21G Dumpling, etc. On the plate, the chefs of the new generation concoct dumplings, phôs, sobas and baos which compete with bentos and donburis. “To get away from it all, the French are fond of foreign cuisine from around the world”.
Pacific. To the delight of culinary travel enthusiasts, Hawaiian cuisine is one of the latest trends. We swap the plates for bowls straight from this Pacific archipelago. In line with the sexy healthy trend, these poke bowls offering a balanced dish based on rice, marinated raw fish, fresh fruits and vegetables are all the rage. “It’s healthy, pretty, colorful and completely Instagrammable.” OnoPoké, Pokawa, Poke bar and My Poki follow this trend. In the same vein, Californian cuisine is also getting noticed. “The hot California lifestyle is reflected in food today.” In Paris, Echo offers specialties from Venice Beach soon imitated by The Cali Sister, by Capucine Frerejean and Juliette Vigand.
Carnivorous. High quality meat bistros and concepts 100% dedicated to “meat-eaters” are springing up all over France. “The French consume meat more responsibly”. However, these single-product restaurants, often equipped with maturing cellars with transparent walls, make it possible to offer customers “local meat, traceable, and therefore, better for health”. Among the concepts of steakhouses in the capital, we can mention the Vivanda workshops of chef Akrame Benallal, Clover Grill of Jean-François Piege and the Beef Club of Matthieu Alfandari.
Food & Retail. The gourmet concepts where you can shop and taste the products in one place answer to the great snacking trend. “We are breaking down the old restaurant model to push the walls and promote discussion and interactivity.” Let us quote for example Boulom, “the bakery where we eat”, in the XVIIIe arrondissement of Paris; the butcher-restaurants Persillé (in Paris and Levallois-Perret) and Bidoche (in Paris); and also Eataly, a 4,000 square meter concept store dedicated to Italian gastronomy, near the Paris City Hall, mixing delicatessen, pizzeria and trattoria.
Fusion. Fusion cuisine, consisting of mixing influences from different countries, continues to be emulated. The South America-Japan combination celebrates Nikkei cuisine and all the flavors of Peru or Brazil to create “a cuisine that is sunnier and more spicy”. Here again, the proposals are multiplying with the Japanese-Brazilian restaurant Uma Nota, the Beef Bar and its gyoza with kobe beef and Matsuhisa, the Japanese gourmet restaurant at the Royal Monceau hotel.
Vegan. With 6% of French vegetarians, 5% consuming gluten-free and 3% vegans, “concepts based exclusively on vegetarianism are hardly profitable”. Without going so far as to open up a 100% “veggie” concept, offering a vegetarian à la carte menu is now essential. There is also a real appetite for “free” diets: lactose-free, gluten-free, meat-free, fat-free, additive-free, etc.
Abroad
Tailored. Founded in 2012 by chef Anthony Carron, the 800Degrees chain is a hit in the United States. For these pizzas cooked over a wood fire at 800 degrees (hence the name), the customer chooses everything down to the smallest detail: the size and the ingredients, of course, but also the thickness and even the quality of the dough. in short, tailor-made taken to the extreme. After Los Angeles, Miami and New York, 800 Degrees opened in Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai. Allowing customers to take part in the design and finishing of what they eat in restaurants has become very trendy.
Deco-food. A restaurant where you can buy everything, including the chairs, crockery and bouquets of flowers that decorate the table, was the idea of a duo of American designers, Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch. In the heart of the Soho district of New York, La Mercerie can also be considered a decoration store where you can eat before leaving with the cups and cutlery sold on site. Cozy and refined atmosphere, like the dishes on the menu, inspired by French cuisine. And for good reason: the French chef Marie-Aude Rose is a graduate of the Ferrandi school.
Regressive. From a banal product, the donut, Voodoo Donut, a small chain (seven outlets in the United States), triggered a great craze by daring a schoolboy and regressive universe. A la carte: crazy donuts with an atypical look (little monsters, voodoo dolls, satanic logos, etc.) and bold flavors (bubble gum powder, hibiscus icing, for example) to consume in gothic and garish settings . A positioning “100% letting go and 1000% instagrammable which makes it possible to make a difference in an already very invested donut market”.
Food hall, XXL. Created in 2014 in Lisbon, Time Out Market, a huge covered market, can accommodate up to 500 guests over an area of 10,000 square meters. You buy what you want from around thirty small kiosks, mostly dedicated to local gastronomy. Then we sit behind large tables set up in the center of the hall to eat. Huge success for this food hall more than twice the size of La Felicita opened by Big Mamma at Station F, in Paris. But with more than 3 million visitors in 2018, the founders have scheduled more Time Out Markets to open in New York, Montreal and London in the next three years. However, requires a very heavy investment.
Millennials. Quality meat, cooked Japanese style but at an affordable price because it is eaten standing up. Founded in 2013 by chef Kunio Ichinose, Ikinari Steak is already a very popular concept in Japan (it has more than 130 establishments). He began to invest in the United States where he successfully distinguished himself from traditional steakhouses. Cut-to-order products, red brick walls and large wooden tables: this new type of standing tasting, more interactive and more relaxed, appeals to millennials.
Robotic coffee. In this San Francisco bar, order a coffee on a kiosk or on the app: a robotic arm serves it to you. Founded in 2015 by Henri Hu, Café X has three establishments in California and one in Hong Kong. There is no barista or waiter here to chat with. Lack of human warmth? Half of the customers are said to be regulars: “speed and reliability of the service also have their followers”. A success all the less surprising since the products served are prepared from high quality beans from local and / or reputable roasters.
The restaurant, like the hotel, must broaden its offer in the years to come to offer a wider “experience”. Partnerships can also be reflected more broadly today, like businesses becoming places where you can eat, the restaurant owner must think about bringing another added value for his customers and a multiple use of places to increase their attractiveness.
It may be time to change the codes, add a store to your restaurant, a take-out service, retail sales with good traffic (groceries // wines // books // pieces of art // pastries…. ). There are plenty of ideas to develop if we know the expectations of our customers, their catchment area, their market and changes in trends. Stay on top of what appears in certain destinations, test your customers, discuss with them to build the services of tomorrow that will make your company the leader in its market.