May 14, 2013 at 11:47 AM ET
for The New York Times
Louis Martorano, executive chef at the Hilton Orlando, says he would like to use local suppliers even more.
For years, most hotel restaurants could easily be dismissed as unremarkable and unsurprising, their menus seemingly unchanged from year to year. But lately, they have been following the lead of upscale restaurants and offering ingredients grown or produced nearby.
“Most hotels for years tried to cater to a mass market,” said Charles D. Dorn, managing director of the Dorn Group, a hospitality consulting firm. “Now, in fact, they’ve all kind of realized that doesn’t work anymore.”
Mr. Dorn said hotels’ embrace of the locally sourced trend is an evolution of hotels’ increasing focus on environmentally minded practices. It also helps them differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace, where catering to business travelers is a priority. According to the Global Business Travel Association, business travel spending is expected to climb by more than 5 percent this year.
Janeen Driscoll is one of those traveling foodies. She stays at chain hotels once or twice a month for her job as a director at a public relations agency, she said, and she is often too busy to venture past the hotel lobby for meals.
“While chain hotels offer great value, they’re usually and typically not places where you are eating,” she said. For food aficionados like her, she said, “They just don’t offer a lot of local flavor.”
When she does spot local ingredients on a hotel restaurant menu, she said, “I like it immediately. I know that that hotel has done its homework to source local products.”
At a visit last winter to the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada, Ms. Driscoll said she was happy to discover a French fries dish called poutine, made with Alberta beef, that was served in the hotel’s lounge. “It gave me a unique feeling of a sense of place,” she said. “Local foods give you a great feeling of culture in a very short period of time, especially when you’re traveling on business.”
That’s the reaction hotel food and beverage managers are trying to elicit.
“We want our hotel guests to feel like the restaurant in our hotel is a local experience,” said Mike DeFrino, executive vice president for hotel operations at Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants. About 70 percent of those guests across Kimpton’s portfolio are business travelers, he said.
“We really think if the restaurant is popular with the locals, if you will, it’s going to feel to the hotel guest that they’re eating in an authentic restaurant, not a corporate-configured stereotype,” Mr. DeFrino said.
Last May, the Hyatt Hotels Corporation started a food initiative across its brands, requiring in part that chefs at its roughly 120 full-service hotels in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean incorporate at least five local ingredients in their menus. Susan Santiago, vice president for food and beverage at Hyatt, said that “local” was defined, for the most part, as within 50 miles.
The practice of highlighting local food has a distinctly American flavor, though. In many parts of the world, ingredients prepared and served at hotels come from nearby because large distribution networks do not exist or operate on the same scale as in the United States.
“In Europe, you don’t have these national purchasing groups,” Ms. Santiago said.
Although sourcing local food has its charms, its also has challenges.
Cost can be a concern. Some hotel chefs say that buying local ingredients is more expensive since small farmers, ranchers and fishermen do not have the same economies of scale as their larger counterparts. But that is not always the case. Local food may cost less, in part because the cost of shipping ingredients hundreds or thousands of miles is eliminated. Ryan Littman, the chef at the 18 Oaks restaurant at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort and Spa, working with a local cattle ranch, cut his beef costs by about a third.
Maintaining an authentic supply of ingredients can be difficult, especially if a big corporate or social group wants to feature ingredients that are typically associated with the destination, but because of poor weather, the time of year or other circumstances, they are not available locally. Chefs use phrases like “seasonal vegetables” on menus, which allows them to serve whatever is freshest and most readily available.
Big catering orders are especially hard because they require hundreds of portions at the same time, said Keith Roberts, executive chef at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel. “The volume is a difficult challenge for us, especially on a banquet menu that doesn’t change seasonally,” he added.
Louis Martorano, executive chef at the Hilton Orlando, says that while event planners were now “a lot more flexible” on variations in the menu, he still gets requests for out-of-season ingredients or items that cannot be obtained locally.
When the Hilton Orlando opened in 2009, one of its four restaurants was based on a “farm to fork” concept, and Mr. Martorano said his use of local suppliers expanded from there. “It’s something we work on constantly. I’d like to see it grow more.”
“Planning with them is huge,” Mr. Martorano added, since 80 percent of the farms that provide him with ingredients are within 100 miles of the hotel. “I have to talk to my farmers.”
The ranch that provides the grass-fed beef served at 18 Oaks sells almost all of the beef it produces to the JW Marriott. Several Fairmont hotels in the United States and Canada have joined with local craft breweries to brew beers specifically for each hotel. Last year, Mr. Roberts in Santa Monica bought out one farmer’s entire crop of black currants and froze them to use in a sauce for a duck dish throughout the winter.
Hyatt even persuades farmers to come regularly to one of its big-city Andaz brand hotels. Three years ago, the Andaz Wall Street in Lower Manhattan started a farmers’ market that runs through the summer and fall.
Ultimately, this focus benefits travelers, said Dan Simons, principal at the consulting firm Vucurevich Simons Advisory Group. “People still like to form some memories when they travel,” he said. “People want to know where they are and that they’re not just hamsters on a wheel.”
Roff will take up the role with HKTB immediately