No strings attached: here come the pop-ups

For a fleeting moment, the grand hotel restaurants flung open their mahogany doors and let the people in. The starched white linens were put away and the tables kept bare. The champagne stayed in the cellars, and guests swapped fine china for pewter bowls and piles of pan tomate. They could come as they were, so long as they called each other comrade.

This all happened over a frantic few months in Barcelona in 1936. As Spain corkscrewed into civil war and Catalonia fell to radical anarchists, the new government vowed to democratise its stuffy hotel dining spots. A propaganda newsreel from the time revelled in the task. Panning past rows of happy eaters, the narrator declares “a new society”. A glittering parlour once graced by “frivolous girls and lazy aristocrats” was transformed into an open hall “full of humble men and women”.

None of this would last. By 1939, the anarchists were dead or in exile, crushed under the twin heels of Franco and Stalin. The hotel restaurants reopened as before, with workers swept out to the street and the aristocrats returning to their favourite tables.

It is an image that hotel restaurants have never completely lost. Though recent decades brought more dynamic partnerships with big name chefs, too many guests see the in-house dining experience as uninvitingly sedate. It is a problem that knocks hotel balance sheets. Despite vast expenditures, F&B margins slipped nearly a quarter in the 14 years to 2014, according to a survey of UK hotels by STR Global.

New audiences

Peter Ducker has faced these problems his whole career. After graduating with a degree in hospitality management from Oxford Polytechnic, he worked as a hotelier and independent ‘gun for hire’ for more than three decades. In 2005, he joined the Institute of Hospitality as a board member and became its chief executive in 2013. But though his career has had many turns, the difficulties of hotel F&B have stayed frustratingly constant, Ducker laughs. “There has always been a challenge here,” he says. Though not exactly a “necessary evil”, hotels “have always struggled with their food and beverage offerings”, he adds.

This has lingered on even as celebrity chefs perked up traditional hotel restaurants from the 1980s. Icons like Anton Mosimann or Marco Pierre White might have boosted publicity, but they still served complicated food to fussy guests. Things are not much better nowadays, a situation hardly helped by our frantic technological age. While guests were once chained to their concierge for advice or escaped back to their hotels for some peace, iPhones and TripAdvisor open up entire cities for curious travellers to explore. Some hotels report 85% of guests strolling right past reception and looking for dinner down the street.

Ducker is unsurprised. “If you visit a city like London, you’re here to experience the city,” he says. “Why would you confine yourself to eating in a hotel, just because you’re staying there?”

Rick Enders, general manager at the Budapest Marriott, echoes this view. Though elegant hotel fare has its fans, Enders believes guests increasingly want more authentic dining experiences. “If I go to Paris, I don’t need to go to Starbucks,” he emphasises. “If I go to Italy, I want to go to an Italian cafe. What we see more from a tourist perspective – especially from the younger generation – is that they want a local experience, because they can have Starbucks in their home country.”

This reference to the “younger generation” is no accident. Just as in the rest of the hospitality industry, young people are blasting at the walls of conventional hotel F&B, Ducker says. “The spending power of twenty and thirtysomethings is very significant these days,” he notes.

Stefan Breg agrees. “Millennials are different from the generations that have preceded them,” he says. Breg, formerly of Starwood and IHG, is now at Keane Brands, an F&B design and consultancy firm. “They want hotel restaurants to respond to their needs in a way that they haven’t in the past, and expect immediate satisfaction.” Where their parents might have been happy with canard à la presse, young guests expect ‘Instagrammable’ milkshakes and one-time-only sliders.

Impressive range

How is the industry reacting to these demands? Rather than keeping F&B in-house, or franchising space out to famous chefs for long periods, some hoteliers are experimenting with temporary popups. Though they have only appeared over the past few years, their range is already impressive. Hotels have promoted everything from Cornish seafood in London to Indian street food in Edinburgh.

This enthusiasm is easy to understand. For starters, pop-ups are far cheaper to launch than regular restaurants. Instead of hiring new staff, and renovating or building a dining hall from scratch, hotels just refashion what they already have. The results can be spectacular. The Plaza Athénée, in Paris, recently converted its courtyard into an elegant Mediterranean restaurant, complete with a pop-up fashion boutique on the second floor.

Publicity is another draw of the pop-up model. By only keeping them open temporarily, hoteliers can recreate the buzz that more solid establishments only manage in their early days. Claridge’s did this to brilliant effect during the 2012 Olympics, when it invited famed Danish chef René Redzepi into the kitchen. “There were things on TV about this menu,” Ducker remembers. “If you’ve heard that the best restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen, and that chef can come over and cook for a week, it’s going to be a very attractive proposition for people.”

Rather than “operating a dull hotel restaurant, which offers a menu offering that doesn’t change from year to year”, Ducker says hotels have the chance to “be creative with [the] space to build a buzz around the business, create local media interest, attract guests and put itself on the landscape.”

These advantages filter down to everyone, he continues. “The customers win, because they get something different; the hotel staff win, because they get a buzz happening around the hotel; the chefs in the hotel win, because they have another chef coming who shares their skills and shows a different approach to food; the hotel wins commercially, because it generates business and the chef who comes in wins because they get showcased.”

Feeling Hungary?

A lot has changed since Redzepi swept into London. Over the six years that followed, hotel pop-ups have become markedly less posh, something Rick Enders has been involved in himself. Apart from managing the Budapest Marriott, he was also instrumental in bringing pop-ups to the city. This was done through Marriott’s ‘Canvas’ scheme, which has successfully launched new F&B venues in Marriott properties from London to Dubai, where the Nawwara dining area offers a sense of luxury with gold accents.

As with other pop-ups, Enders and his team hoped to outflank expensive hotel restaurants. “From a Marriott perspective, launching food and beverage outlets [ourselves] is always very costly,” he explains. “When we looked outside, we realised we were able to basically promote a food and beverage concept with much less money than we would invest ourselves.”

Unlike other pop-up ventures, Canvas turned proceedings into a competition. After receiving over 65 entries, a jury invited five finalists to show off their plans in person, before Enders and the other judges picked a winner: Marionett, a stylish beer hall overlooking the Danube. Marriott was there to give support, providing the bar with an initial $40,000 investment – far less than the average $275,000 it costs to open a restaurant – and helping with everything from the air-conditioning to the speaker system.

It was important to provide guests with a sprinkle of the real Hungary, Enders explains. “Marionett was stocked with Hungarian beers in different flavours: lagers, light beers, dark beers. Some beers came from very small local Hungarian breweries that you’re unable to get outside [the country],” he says. Marionett twinned its tipples with special events perfect for eager young Instagrammers, including talks from successful millionaires and poetry readings.

Just like other pop-ups, Marionett gave the hotel some brilliant publicity. “When I look at the marketing that we received from a hotel perspective, money wouldn’t have been able to buy it. The exposure on social media was just unbelievable,” he says.

Just a fad?

Though setting up Marionett made clear financial sense – and mirrored successful pop-ups elsewhere – it closed down last Christmas. Profits were “quite mixed”, Enders admits. “[The entrepreneurs who founded the bar] thought that they’d get in much more traffic than they actually did. Maybe one of the reasons is that it was located at the Marriott, so a lot people might have [had] the perception of something within the hotel [that] was very expensive, which it wasn’t. ”

This speaks to one of the main challenges of running a successful popup: time. They might have the advantage of surprise, but pop-ups need to grab customers quickly. The hourglass is not gentle on entrepreneurs who fail. Perhaps this explains Breg’s uncertainty about pop-ups’ future. “There are some examples in Europe of pop-ups working, but they are like sundried tomatoes [were] a few years ago,” he says. “It’s very faddish, but when you actually add up the number of restaurants there are out there, it’s a niche.”

Enders concedes that Marionett did not go as planned, but the joy of pop-ups is that slip ups are, almost by definition, temporary. “Marriott International is going more to the innovation side, even if [Marrionett] itself was not 100% successful,” he says. Enders means what he says and already has plans to open a new pop-up in Budapest. The same flexibility that empowered Marionett allows him to try new ideas, he stresses. “Since it is prime retail space, we have the ability to do something else.”

Ducker comes down somewhere in the middle. Like Breg, he agrees many hoteliers “think it is easier not to [start pop-ups]”. But he is sure they can help shape hotel F&B in general. “Food is becoming more exciting all the time. How do you make your hotel exciting and different? How do you make it stand out? This is the way,” he says. Innovative hoteliers may not quite snuff out the traditional hotel restaurant but, like the hopeful anarchists in Barcelona, they can at least push hotel F&B towards something new.