Hotel Chains Have Appetite For Food Courts Resturants Big Drain; Grab-And-Go Spots Popular

Running a restaurant in a hotel frequently presents a problem for both the hotel owner and the guest who eats there.

Unless you’re the Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton or some other luxury chain - whose restaurants often are among the best and most expensive in a city - your establishment probably loses money.

That’s why many hotel restaurants - and their food - are dreary. They’re kept open only because a hotel promotes itself as full-service, and many travelers don’t want to leave the property to eat breakfast or dinner.

Increasingly, hotel companies are attacking the problem with services akin to what two of the biggest chains, Choice Hotels International and Holiday Inn Worldwide, have tried in the last couple of years. The companies are offering a kind of enhanced food court in the space that once was a coffee shop, serving a variety of nationally known fast foods.

Choice, which does the franchising for Quality, Clarion, Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, Rodeway Inn and Econolodge, calls its offering the Choice Picks Food Court. There you can buy brand-name food, including Nathan’s Famous, Pizzeria Uno, Casa Ortega, Nestle Toll House, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Healthy Choice Deli and other products.

Hotel franchisees in 17 locations - including one in a Holiday Inn in Rocky Mount, N.C. - have opened the Choice Picks food courts. The franchisees are attracted by the lower labor costs and the popularity of branded fast food, Choice officials said.

“A lot of people just want to grab something and go,” said Al Wheeler, vice president for Choice Picks. “People recognize Pizzeria Uno, for example, and here they can order a pizza and have it delivered up to their room, rather than calling out and having it delivered.”

Holiday Inn launched Convenience Courts, selling a similar array of brand-name food, last year in three hotels near Walt Disney World outside Orlando, Fla. Those hotels mostly cater to vacationers.

In late 1996, a Holiday Inn in Danbury, Conn., that caters mostly to business travelers opened the first Convenience Cafe, and more of the cafes are to be installed in hotels around the country this year.

The cafes are a kind of hybrid of food court and coffee shop. They serve the same variety of brand-name fast food offered in the food courts but also make cooked-to-order breakfasts. In the evening they sell some traditional dinner entrees, such as salmon filet or chicken breast with rice, which come frozen and are reheated.

“The results are exceeding our expectations,” said Ned Barker, Holiday Inn’s vice president for franchise food and beverage service. “The dinner items sell well, but the mainstays continue to be the quick-serve items.”

Interestingly, Hyatt Hotels has found that doing away with its full-service restaurant may not work in a hotel that caters to business travelers accustomed to being served meals at a table.

Two years ago, the upscale hotel chain experimented in its Hyatt Regency in Columbus, Ohio, replacing its regular restaurant with what it called a Market Stand Cafe. You could get a variety of freshly prepared food, but it was all self-serve, cafeteria-style. Customers didn’t like it well enough, and the hotel returned to a restaurant operation last fall, a Hyatt spokesman said.