The joy of the hotel restaurant may soon be a thing of the past
With times tough for hospitality, some properties are limiting their dining spaces – or doing without them altogether, says Mark C O’Flaherty
What a joy it is to have an epic dinner then hop into a lift upstairs to bed. It’s something I’ve enjoyed in some of the best hotels in the world, but it comes at a notable cost. A great hotel restaurant goes hand in hand with a violently expensive room rate, and the marriage of the two is ruinous. Sometimes this kind of thing is in the format of “a restaurant with rooms”, and dinner is the whole point, but because of the way we travel and the way we like to spend our time, more and more this is becoming “rooms without a restaurant”.
Most of the Locke aparthotels, the Ruby and CitizenM chains
If you’re paying £100 for a room, why would you pay two or three times that price for dinner?
have dispensed with any kind of evening meal operation – and it’s a growing trend. The Hobson, opening this spring in a former Cambridge police station, will have no restaurant. Its website promises better prices for a luxury product “by not having to subsidise loss-making zones”. The hotel will have “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 figure the same. “CitizenM’s view has always been that its guests are keen to explore the most exciting restaurants of the city they’re visiting, rather than dining in a drab hotel restaurant,” says the hotel group’s chief brand officer, Robin Chadha.
For some new hotels, it’s a roll of the dice. When the Fellows House opened in Cambridge in 2021, it incorporated the Folio, a swish restaurant space that has its sights set on more than just residents. It is cleverly priced – the chef ’s dinner menu is £25 for two courses – and it is always busy. Lauro Chainho, director of food and beverage at the hotel, thinks that stripping away restaurants “removes the human interaction and magic” that happen in hotels, which is why they wanted the Folio. “It’s a business model that’s still alive,” she says.
In some cases, hoteliers opt out of being restaurateurs for exclusivity rather than because of the negligible profit margins. Riad Mena is one of the Telegraph’s best-reviewed hotels in Marrakech, and the super-chic owner Philomena Schurer Merckoll likes to keep the ambience of the property and its six rooms like a private home. “It is important we keep dining here just for our residents, rather than compromise on intimacy and service,” she says.
Robbie Bargh, responsible for developing dining rooms in luxury hotels, including getting chef Anthony Demetre to reopen Wild Honey at the Sofitel St James, believes the hotel restaurant has a healthy future, if it’s shaped properly. “It should be a showcase for artisans and showmanship,” he says. “There needs to be excitement and drama.”
Some hotels need a destination dining room, and it must have an identity that complements the hotel but gets a buzz on its own. Claridge’s is currently without a definitive fine dining restaurant, but culinary director Dmitri Magi is close to announcing a replacement for Daniel Humm’s Davies and Brook, which was quietly put to sleep when Humm wanted to make it vegan.
There’s a gulf between Claridge’s and a CitizenM. If you’ve got the kind of prime real estate space a lot of the latter brand’s hotels occupy, you’d have to charge fortunes for dinner to break even. And if you’re paying £100 for the room, why would you go for dinner downstairs for two or three times that?
The hotel restaurant isn’t dead, but it’s no longer a given. If you’re in an exciting city rather than stuck on a private island, you have a million options. We’re going to see a lot more rooms without restaurants in the coming years.