A hotel restaurant by the Market Square. Why a good location is not enough
A full hotel does not guarantee a busy restaurant. Assessing à la carte menus, service availability and shared costs through a hypothetical Wrocław hotel.
A full hotel does not necessarily mean a full restaurant
A hotel by Wrocław’s Market Square. Guests stay on site, the city centre is on the doorstep and the hotel has an à la carte restaurant. The conditions seem ideal.
Yet a full hotel does not necessarily mean a full restaurant.
Consider a hypothetical hotel by the Market Square. This illustrates the problem rather than reporting results from a particular property.
A hotel guest is not automatically a restaurant customer
If breakfast is included in the stay, guests have a natural reason to use the hotel’s food and beverage service in the morning. In the evening, they may want to explore the city and choose somewhere for dinner.
The hotel restaurant competes with nearby venues. The convenience of taking the lift downstairs is not always enough. Guests need a reason to stay: interesting food, atmosphere, good service or an offer that suits their needs.
The same applies to people who are not staying at the hotel. Do they know the restaurant welcomes them? Can they see the entrance and menu? Do they regard it as a place to meet, or simply part of the hotel?
A Market Square address creates opportunities. It does not replace a clear restaurant concept.
The paradox: we must be available, but for whom?
The hotel wants guests to be able to eat throughout much of the day. The kitchen remains ready, the dining room is prepared and service staff wait.
Orders arrive irregularly: a few dishes in the afternoon, a quiet evening, then a group ordering all at once the next day.
There is tension between the restaurant’s role as a hotel amenity and the expectation that it should make a profit in its own right.
These roles can complement each other. But the hotel needs to define the restaurant’s purpose and the cost of maintaining availability. Otherwise, it is easy to hold the team accountable for results without considering the conditions in which it operates.
A bigger menu does not solve the problem
Expanding the menu can seem like the natural response. Add a burger, pasta, fish and regional dishes so that everyone finds something.
Each additional item requires ingredients, preparation, refrigeration space and labour. With few orders, some ingredients move slowly. Costs arise before anyone sits down.
I therefore do not start by asking how many dishes the menu should contain. I examine what sells, what preparation it requires and what remains after preparation and sale.
A shorter menu may help, but simply removing a few dishes is no substitute for that analysis.
One kitchen, several different tasks
The same hotel team often prepares breakfast, handles à la carte orders, delivers banquets and provides room service.
A quiet restaurant does not necessarily mean an idle kitchen. Equally, a busy kitchen does not prove that the à la carte restaurant is profitable.
Allocating all team costs to the restaurant can make its results look worse than they should. Ignoring preparation and service readiness can make them look too good.
Accounts need to reflect the use of shared resources. Decisions should also distinguish costs that would actually disappear after changes to hours or menus from costs the hotel would still incur.
See how to assess breakfast, restaurant, bar and banquet performance
What would I examine at this hotel?
I would compare sales by hour and day with hotel occupancy, events and staff working time. Where the available data allows, I would also examine the mix of resident and external guests.
Next I would review individual dish sales, portion costs, preparation, ingredient utilisation and waste.
The guest’s route to the restaurant matters too. Can reception recommend it? Is the offer visible before arrival and during the stay? Do the menu and opening hours match when guests actually want to eat?
Only then can we decide whether to change the menu, work organisation, sales approach or the restaurant’s role within the hotel.
The aim is to establish which parts of the offer to retain, what to change and what cost the hotel consciously accepts to keep its restaurant available.
How I approach this at Hospitality Pro
I combine performance analysis with observation of kitchen and service operations and cooperation with other departments. I help establish the cost of maintaining the à la carte offer, identify unnecessary demands on resources and decide which changes to test.
Sometimes it is worth testing a shorter menu during quieter hours. Elsewhere, the problem is poor visibility, incorrectly allocated costs or weak cooperation between reception and F&B. The solution should follow the property’s circumstances.
A hotel restaurant does not need to be full all day. Its owner should know why it remains available, what that availability costs and what it contributes to the hotel as a whole.