Loading ...
In most restaurants today, the food and wine have never represented better value, nor been more skilfully prepared, nor been served so enthusiastically. If this statement sounds sweeping, it is based on hard facts. The recession has stopped restaurateurs raising their prices. The internet has fuelled creativity among chefs and raised customer awareness to a new level. Another factor that is still growing in importance, particularly in Britain and the US, is that so many young people feel the lure of a career in the fascinating world of food and wine, despite the long hours and unattractive pay.
The final factor (all but forgotten now that it has been in place in Britain for almost three years and longer in the US) is the smoking ban in public places, thanks to which food and wine can taste as they should. This significant improvement is best appreciated when visiting those countries without a ban.
The smoking lounge at the Lanesborough hotel, London
However, restaurateurs, waiting staff and kitchens in countries where the smoking ban is now in place do have another big challenge: how to deal with the case of the disappearing diners.
These disappearances, which can arise several times during a meal, occur when smokers decide it’s time for a cigarette break and, stopping only to pick up their mobile phone and glass of wine, head for the door, usually without telling anyone and often passing the waiter bringing the next course on their way out. While the waiters struggle to keep the food hot, the customer is out on the doorstep.
Restaurateurs acknowledge that there is little they can do about this. But as well as “putting a massive spanner in the running of the service”, as one described it, doorstep smokers do affect the front-of-house: there are cigarette butts on the floor; new customers have to walk through a fug of smoke; and UK licensing laws, which allow the customer to take a glass of wine outside (something that is not possible in the US, for example), can make the exterior look more like a pub than a restaurant.
While many accept that this is a situation that they simply have to manage, a growing number of hoteliers across Britain, as well as a few restaurateurs, are tackling the ban by opening up specific areas to lure back the small group who used to be some of their best spending customers: cigar smokers.
Before the 2007 smoking ban, a third of all sales by Hunters & Frankau, Britain’s prime importer of Cuban cigars, were to the hospitality industry. That proportion plummeted again as the recession started to bite. But last year cigar sales to hotels, restaurants and bars increased by more than 10 per cent, in line with the construction of a growing number of comfortable outdoor smoking areas (where 50 per cent of the wall area has to be permanently open to the outside, allowing a circulation of fresh air to minimise the potential for damage to the staff’s health). Known in the trade as “cosas” (or “comfortable outdoor smoking areas”), these use under-floor and overhead heating to keep smokers warm.
There are now more than 220 such smoking areas in Britain, 73 of them in London, including two new restaurants that have them built in to their design – Galvin’s La Chapelle in the City and the second branch of Roka, a Japanese restaurant in Canary Wharf. In New York, at Eleven Madison Park, waiting staff will prepare the cigars for their customers, which they can then smoke in the park right outside the restaurant’s front door.
Many of the smoking areas in hotels have been introduced by their cigar-smoking owners, such as Tim Hart at Hart’s in Nottingham, Khalid Affara at his Ten Manchester Street Hotel near London’s Oxford Street and at the “cigar shacks”’ at Hotels du Vin across the country. These areas, with their sales of not just expensive cigars but the digestifs to accompany them, represent an opportunity to recoup the revenue that the smoking ban removed at a stroke.
They also present their owners with the commercial opportunity to rival the Garden Room of the Lanesborough Hotel, which I would guess has achieved the highest turnover and profit per square metre of any hotel or restaurant in the country since it opened in 2007. Judging by the hectic scene that greeted us at 7.30pm one weekday evening, these 44 seats may even have the highest turnover of any hotel bar anywhere in the world.
What helps achieve this turnover, as the waiter promptly explained, is that fact that there is a minimum charge of £25 for anyone other than hotel guests. With cigars ranging in price from £11.50 to £1,500, and the most popular at £57, this is easily reached – although the hotel’s practice of adding 12.5 per cent service but then incorporating this into the subtotal and leaving the service charge blank on the credit card slip must lead to many customers spending more than intended.
But what was once a small and rarely used garden has now become a magnet for cigar lovers from around the world thanks to the hotel’s far-sighted decision to invest in an extraordinary range of cigars and to the encyclopedic knowledge of Giuseppe Ruo, its director. Its position on the lower ground floor at the back of the hotel allows a breeze to blow through the room, just as it might in a bar in Havana. The sound of the buses circumnavigating Hyde Park Corner, along with the need for the heaters, will, however, remind you that this is definitely the heart of London, not Cuba.
source: www.ft.com