It’s such a joy to have an epic dinner and jump into an elevator upstairs to sleep. It’s something I’ve enjoyed in some of the world’s best hotels, but it comes at a significant cost. A great hotel restaurant goes hand in hand with an outrageously expensive room rate, and the marriage of the two can be a financial disaster. Sometimes this kind of thing is in a “restaurant with rooms” format, and dinner is the whole point, but what we see more and more, because of the way we travel and the way we like ours spend time and money, it’s “rooms without a restaurant”.
Most Locke hotels and the Ruby and CitizenM chains have abandoned any kind of evening meal operation – a growing trend. The Hobson, which opens this spring in an architecturally significant former police station in Cambridge, will not have a restaurant. Its website promises better prices for a luxury product “if you don’t have to subsidize loss zones”. The hotel will have “special arrangements with nearby bars and restaurants” for guests to take advantage of. The Hobson assumes you’re coming to Cambridge for the city, not the hotel.
Other mid-budget hotels are similar. “CitizenM’s view has always been that its guests want to explore the most exciting and innovative restaurants in the city they visit, rather than dine in a hotel restaurant,” says group Chief Brand Officer Robin Had to. “Of course, there will always be a place for restaurants associated with the best super hotels, which are destinations in themselves.”
For some new hotels, it’s a roll of the dice. When Cambridge House of Fellows opened in 2021, it included The Folio, a relatively fast-paced restaurant space with views of more than just residents. It’s smart, great value – £25 for two courses for the Chef’s Dinner. The dining room is always busy.
Lauro Chainho, the hotel’s Director of Food and Beverage, feels that removing restaurants and opting for automated check-in and apps takes away the human interaction and magic that happens in hotels, which is why The Fólió wanted from them. “It’s a business model that’s still alive,” she says. “We know that 40 percent of guests are choosing us [to eat] dinner and 80 percent choose to add breakfast to their room rate.”
In some cases, hoteliers refuse to be exclusive except for the negligible profit margins. The House of Fellows is using its restaurant to help with word of mouth, making it a solid choice for people looking to stay in the city.
Riad Mena is one of The Telegraph’s best-reviewed hotels in Marrakech, and super-chic owner Philomena Schurer Merckoll likes to keep the property and its six-room ambiance like a private home. “We have two great chefs who source the most seasonal produce every day,” she says, “but it’s important that we keep food here for our residents only, rather than compromising on relationship and service.”
I recently stayed at the new Ace Hotel in Sydney, and it was clear on my first night that the top floor restaurant, Kiln, has created a deafening buzz within a few months of opening. There’s a flamboyant doorman with an iPad and designer diners queuing for the elevators to go up and eat dry-aged ribeye with ponzu for $160 (£91) a plate. The food, like all aspects of the hotel and restaurant design, is great, but it represents a potentially fragile business model. Kiln might be the coolest restaurant in Sydney for a decade or more. Or not.
On the other side of the world, at one of the first Ace hotels, in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan, chef Markus Glocker recently opened a fancy restaurant inspired by the Viennese Secession Movement in the space occupied for most of the life of the hotels by British chef April Bloomfield. Her restaurant, The Breslin, was a national landmark and defined the hotel’s identity for many.
The new restaurant, Koloman, has been met with strong critics, but the general consensus from locals is that it is too serious, and is not going to inspire joy in the long term. If you are staying at the hotel – which now feels run down – and you don’t want dinner, you can go to Koloman for a Viennese breakfast – croissant, ham and cheese and a boiled egg. It will cost you $34 (£28).
To complete a triptych of case studies on the fate of hotel restaurants: the London Ace closed in 2020, taking the popular Hoi Polloi restaurant with it. The hotel reopened as the One Hundred Shoreditch, but the new dining room, Goddard & Gibbs, died within six months. It was not part of the area. Hoi Polloi was founded by Pablo Flack and David Waddington, who founded hip east London spot Bistrotheque. Being in-house is like Kim Jones designing a ready-to-wear range at a fashion house. You are guaranteed a guarantee. Hoi Polloi transcended the “hotel restaurant” idea. Goddard & Gibbs did not.
Robbie Bargh, who is responsible for developing dining rooms in luxury hotels, including getting chef Anthony Demetre to reopen Wild Honey at Sofitel St James, believes the hotel restaurant has a healthy future, if it is shaped and invest properly.
“It should be a showcase for artisans and exhibitors,” he says. “It should be for locals as well as world travelers, and there needs to be more excitement and drama. Restaurants can tell stories, and provide lights, camera and action.”
Sure, some hotels want a destination dining room, and it needs to have an identity that complements the hotel but also gets a buzz on its own. They are the types of restaurants you couldn’t order room service from (and there have been cases of famous chefs fighting hotels for not serving food to guests in the room). Hélène Darroze at The Connaught and The Connaught Grill are part of the hotel but have independent luxury bubbles.
Sister hotel Claridge’s is currently without a confirmed fine dining restaurant, but culinary director Dmitri Magi is close to announcing a replacement for Davies and Brook Daniel Humm, who was quietly put to bed when Humm wanted to do it. vegan. Sybaritic Mayfair is not ready for tortured asparagus at £200 each.
The gulf is between Claridge’s and CitizenM. If you have the kind of prime real estate space that many of the latter brand hotels have, you’d have to spend a fortune on dinners to break even, once you’ve got the place staffed and the warranty stocked.
And if you’re paying £100 for the room, why would you go to dinner downstairs two or three times? The hotel restaurant is not dead, but it is no longer given. If you’re in any exciting city rather than stuck on a private island or a small town on the edge of civilization, you have a million options. We will see many more rooms without restaurants in the coming years.