The Gourmet Restaurant That Happened to Have Rooms

The Gourmet Restaurant That Happened to Have Rooms

This story is about the “Highest-and-Best-Use” (HBU) for hotels.

Forget about “location, location, and location” and possibly licensed branding.
It’s all about market positioning, and you really do not need a licensed brand for this.

The hotel was a little gem just outside the city center and a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World.
And while it appeared lovely, it was bleeding from every pore.

The hotel was incurring losses.
It served the wholesale market rather than the high-net-worth individuals it should have served.
Every month was a struggle to meet debt service, payroll, and suppliers, which invited a series of opinions.

By the time I became the hotel’s General Manager, I thought I understood commercial hotel management.
Revenue management had become one of my passions.
I could read a profit and loss statement with confidence and knew how occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR worked together.
To me, commercial success meant improving the rooms department’s performance.

Ownership appointed an external consultant to supervise the hotel.
He held no formal position within the hotel, yet he exercised considerable influence over its direction.
We could hardly have been more different.
His style was demanding, confrontational, and uncompromising.
We challenged each other constantly.

Despite our differences, he possessed an extraordinary commercial instinct.
One day, he proposed something I considered almost reckless.
“We are no longer going to run a hotel with a restaurant,” he said.
“We are going to create a gourmet restaurant that happens to have rooms.”

I disagreed completely.
The destination was becoming increasingly competitive.
In my mind, the obvious answer was better revenue management, stronger pricing, and higher occupancy.
Why would we deliberately invest in a restaurant that might never generate a meaningful profit?

Rather than trying to convince me in a meeting room, he took me into the city.
For several days, we visited the city’s finest restaurants.
We observed how they welcomed guests.
We studied their menus.
We watched how people lingered long after dinner had finished.

During those visits, he quietly recruited several of the city’s best chefs to join our hotel.
When they arrived, I looked at the payroll in disbelief.
It felt as though we had more chefs than cooking stations.
Salary costs exploded.
Food costs increased sharply.

Many nights, I wondered whether this experiment would end my career.
Yet once the decision had been made, I accepted that my responsibility as GM was no longer to debate the strategy.
My responsibility was to make it succeed.

Together with the team, we transformed the guest experience.
We introduced evenings built around music and local social life.
At the end of lunch, every lady received the rose that had stood on her table as a farewell gift.
It was a small gesture, but guests remembered it and talked about it.

One evening, we introduced something we called the “Chef Catwalk.”
The entire kitchen brigade walked proudly through the restaurant carrying their signature dishes as though they were models on a fashion runway.
It was unexpected. It was theatrical.
People loved it.

Local residents began to visit not simply for dinner but because they wanted to be part of what was happening.
Television crews interviewed well-known personalities in the restaurant.
The hotel developed an identity that reached far beyond accommodation.
For the first time, I understood that people were no longer buying a room.
They were buying a story they wanted to become part of.

The restaurant itself never became a major profit centre.
In fact, after all the investment, it only just managed to break even.
Ironically, that was never its real purpose.

The restaurant changed the perception of the entire property.
Our rooms’ guest mix improved. Booking patterns changed.
Guests no longer chose us simply because we had available rooms.
They chose us because they wanted to belong to something distinctive.

The stronger accommodation performance that followed improved the hotel’s annual gross operating profit by 382% within two years.

Looking back, I realised my thinking had been incomplete.
I believed the rooms were the business because they generated a higher profit margin than the restaurant.
They weren’t.
Revenue management remained essential, but only after we had answered a more fundamental question: what was the highest and best use of this particular property?

The business was creating a destination that people actively wanted to experience.
The rooms simply became part of that experience.

I cannot claim the original idea as my own.
It wasn’t.
I can claim to have learned one of the most important lessons of my career.
Sometimes the greatest contribution a leader can make is not to have the best idea.
It is to recognise a better one, make it their own, and execute it with complete conviction.

This project taught me that numbers optimise performance.
They do not define purpose.
Before improving a hotel’s KPIs, you first have to understand what business the hotel is truly in.
Only then do the numbers tell you whether your strategy is working.

Thank you for reading my story.

This story is part of a series—”The Banana Republic Hotel and What It Taught Me About Myself”—in which I share lessons learned throughout my professional and personal journey and how those experiences have shaped my thinking and led me to develop my own principles.

If you enjoyed reading the story and have the appetite to read another one, you are invited to visit G&A’s website, in particular its INSIGHTS page, where you can find all stories.
Alternatively, click here to be taken to the next story.

I hope it has provided some food for thought, encouraged curiosity, and inspired you to keep learning.

Curiosity, humility, and continuous learning remain among the most valuable tools we possess.

Terminology for non-hoteliers:

• SOP: Standard Operating Procedure – a documented process describing how a task should be performed to ensure consistency, quality, and compliance.
• KPIs: Key Performance Indicators – measurable indicators used to monitor performance and progress against objectives.
• ADR: Average Daily Rate – the average room rate paid by guests.
• RevPAR: Revenue per Available Room – a measure combining occupancy and room rate to assess hotel revenue performance.
• Occupancy: The percentage of available rooms that are occupied.
• DOF: Double Occupancy Factor – the average number of guests staying in each occupied room. A DOF of 1.0 means every occupied room has one guest; 2.0 means every occupied room has two guests.
• AGC: Average Guest Check – the average amount spent by each guest in a restaurant, bar, or other food and beverage outlet.
• CRS: Central Reservation System – the central booking system that manages a hotel’s room inventory, rates, and reservations across all sales channels.
• PMS: Property Management System – the software used to manage reservations, guest accounts, and hotel operations.
• OTA: Online Travel Agency – websites such as Booking.com or Expedia that sell hotel rooms on behalf of hotels.
• GDS: Global Distribution System – a worldwide booking network used by travel agents and corporate travel departments to reserve hotel rooms, flights, and other travel services.
• CRM: Customer Relationship Management – systems and processes used to manage guest relationships and marketing.
• F&B: Food & Beverage Department – all restaurant, bar, banquet, room service, and catering operations within a hotel.
• Half-Board: A hotel meal plan that includes breakfast and one additional meal each day, usually dinner. Drinks other than those specifically included are generally charged separately.
• MICE: Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events – the hotel business related to corporate meetings, conferences, exhibitions, and incentive travel.
• ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning – an integrated software system that connects key business functions such as finance, procurement, inventory, human resources, sales, and reporting into a single platform.
• USALI: Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry – the internationally recognised accounting standard used by hotels to measure and compare financial performance.
• GOP: Gross Operating Profit – the operating profit generated by the hotel before management fees, rent, financing costs, depreciation, taxes, and other non-operating expenses.
• EBITDA: Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation – a widely used measure of an organisation’s operating profitability.
• COS: Cost of Sales – the direct cost of producing the goods sold, such as food, beverages, or merchandise, expressed as an amount or percentage of revenue.
• FTE: Full-Time Equivalent – a standard measure of staffing that converts part-time and seasonal employees into the equivalent number of full-time employees.

About the Author

Raoul Gransier is a Senior International Adviser and owner-focused hotelier with more than 30 years of operational and advisory experience in hospitality, tourism, governance, and performance improvement.

Website

https://gransier.com