Food & beverage Sunny side up
Breakfast has always enjoyed a shining place in the hotel F&B fi rmament, offering guests comfort and convenience as they start their days. But with the pandemic forcing many high-end operators to offer more austere morning meals, might the days of the lavish buffet be numbered? Andrea Valentino talks to Professor Alex Susskind of Cornell University and Albert Rothman, vice-president of food and beverage at EOS Hospitality, to understand how Covid encouraged luxury hotels to adopt the offerings of their mid-market cousins, how the aftermath of the pandemic has seen an explosion of dynamic experiential breakfasts – and whether traditional big breakfasts might live to fi ght another day.
it’s hard to disagree. Offering mountains of bread, acres of bacon, refillable coffee and maybe even a mimosa or three, many hoteliers have long seen breakfast as central to their operating model. As one head chef in London recently noted, the morning meal brings in over a third of the property’s F&B revenue. Guests, for their part, are just as enthusiastic. According to a 2022 study by TripAdvisor, 65% of the customers claimed they picked their hotel based on the breakfast option, while 83% see breakfast as central to a positive experience. Unsurprisingly, the
B
reakfast, so the saying goes, is the most important meal of the day. If you’ve visited a full-service hotel over the past decade or so,
pandemic forced many operators to dramatically cut back. Between social distancing and special cleaning protocols, the extravagant buffets of old suddenly went from indulgent fun to worrying disease vectors. And with room occupancies crashing to just two in ten hotel rooms, according to STR, it made little sense to put on a feast every morning. At the same time, these difficult circumstances inevitably led to more austere breakfast services. Many full-service hotels exchanged four types of eggs with cardboard boxes of croissants and coffee, bringing them more in line with their mid-range competitors. And with the post-pandemic labour market continuing to squeeze margins, there are signs that some properties are sticking to this more simplified style even now.
Hotel Management International /
www.hmi-online.com
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EOS Hospitality
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