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FOR HOTEL, RESORT, AND CASINO FOOD & BEVERAGE OPERATIONS

Work, Watch, or UnwindCooper’s homegrown Burger Bar strikes a nerve

with juicy, guest-satisfying results, p. 27

BANQUET DIPLOMACY: Smoothing chef-client relations, p. 13

Big brunch buffet vs. à la carte, p. 37

Modern Fine Dining: Cocktail trends, p. A1

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HOTELFANDB.COM SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2015

27 September October 2015 | Hotel F&B

Business Between the Buns

Cooper Hotels beefs up restaurant and events business in one fell swoop. BY TAD WILKES

Local Burger Bar

28 Hotel F&B | September October 2015

What owner Cooper Hotels did next changed its game entirely, not only in the concept and draw of the restau-rant but in event dividends as well.

“The Fanatics idea ran its course,” says Andy Laubscher, corporate di-rector of F&B with Cooper Hotels. It was a straightforward sports bar, in place for several years, with “TVs ev-erywhere and fried chicken fingers,” says Hana Colvin, executive chef at the Murfreesboro DoubleTree. Colvin was brought in about two years ago to get the property moving, along-side Laubscher as he studied burger concepts in Nashville, Las Vegas, and beyond, on the way to creating the Burger Bar concept to replace Fanat-ics in both locations.

Fading Fanaticism“We considered Fanatics a sports café, putting as much or more emphasis on the food than on the beverage alco-hol,” explains Cooper VP of Opera-tions Brian Carney. “Our food sales were falling off, so our strategy wasn’t working. Additionally, the sports

cafés, now seemingly sports bars, were attracting a drinking crowd not appreciated by our hotel guests. Also, the combination sports and bar ambience that had developed was not conducive at all to a breakfast atmosphere—again not appreciated by our hotel guests. We did not be-lieve that the Fanatics concept, even if revised, reflected the upper-up-scale positioning of our DoubleTree by Hilton hotels.”

“We were missing our targeted demographic, not pleasing our hotel guests, and, not insignificantly, pro-ducing a negative bottom line at both locations,” Carney says.

Building the Burger BoomThe team exploited the freedom they had to switch gears. “Our company has great creative freedom, since we manage and own our ho-tels, but we are working closely with Hilton Worldwide to review and ap-prove all new restaurant concepts,”

Laubscher says. Colvin says the Burger Bar concept germinated from the simple realization that the two hotels were selling a lot of burgers. Call it a meat hook.

“There’s always going to be some-thing that’s your hook that people come back again and again for,” she observes. “Here, we went to the ex-treme of tailoring our entire concept around that one thing. That can be translated many ways in your res-taurant, whether it’s upselling your wine program or focusing on fantastic homemade desserts. Everyone has a hook they can work off of.”

While going to an extreme, Cooper simultaneously made everything

Guests at Fanatics Sports Bar & Grill locations in DoubleTree by Hilton in Murfreesboro and Johnson City, Tennessee, were, well, less than fanatical.

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“It’s a good atmosphere to get some work done

Burger Bar feels more like a

sophisticated, modern coffee

house than a sports bar, featuring a long,

raised community table in the middle

of the restaurant, equipped with

electric plug-ins, where guests may have a drink and a burger, meet, and

interact.

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easier. “The Burger bar is a very sim-ple menu, slightly smaller than what we had in Fanatics,” Laubscher says. “We have appetizers and some entrées and salads, and the big section of the

menu is obviously the burgers that you can customize.”

Once Cooper settled on the con-cept, they workshopped ideas for about five months, Laubscher recalls. He tripped around the country to

burger havens, taking notes.“Twelve to 14 months out, the

space was designed by AKA Design in Memphis, and we’ve been working with them on several other projects in the company,” he says. “They designed our space and picked all of the décor and everything else. The construction didn’t take long— maybe four and a half months from the time we started demolition to the time we opened.”

Murfreesboro, just outside Nash-ville, was the first location of Burger Bar [opened June 2014], with Johnson City following about a month later. Compared to Fanatics, Burger Bar is significantly smaller at both hotels, an intentional design to free up the rest as meeting space [see sidebar]. The two Tennessee Burger Bars hold 80 or 85 restaurant seats, Laubscher says, “which is plenty.”

“With Middle Tennessee State University here [in Murfreesboro], it’s a really fast growing area, just boom-ing,” Colvin says. “And Nashville’s becoming such a food destination, it’s really important to keep up with trends in the area. Looking at per-formance at various hotels across the company, burgers are one of the best selling things across the board. So it made sense to do something people love and do it well, with a different spin on it, in a classy way. You don’t have to dress up in a sportcoat, but it is upscale and modern. Bringing something like that to the area was important, and it has succeeded.”

Gone is Fanatics’ outsized, rowdy atmosphere, replaced with a millen-nial-friendly space where you can still catch the game. Burger Bar includes a long, raised community table in the middle of the restaurant, equipped with electric plug-ins, where guests may have a drink and a burger, meet, and interact. “To a certain degree,

continued from page 28

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we modeled ourselves a little bit after Starbucks,” Laubscher says. “It’s the kind of the crowd we want to attract.”

“It’s a good atmosphere to get some work done, for a business trav-eler, while enjoying the experience,” Colvin says. “We still have a couple of televisions, and people still come watch the game, but there are a lot more business travelers using the space. We also have some quiet seating for people to relax. Wedding parties will come in before or after a rehearsal.”

For breakfast, Burger Bar includes a “built-in, very sleek, nice-looking buffet that caters to the DoubleTree brand, because DoubleTree has a spec’ed-out branded F&B product for breakfast, so we accommodated that,” Laubscher says.

“Our breakfast bar experience in Burger Bar versus our previous breakfast setup has created a more customer-friendly process for the most important meal of the day,” says John-son City Executive Chef Becky Mon-toya. “From the frost-top where you can grab fresh fruit and yogurt to our built-in induction chafers where you can get scrambled eggs, biscuits, or pancakes, your overall breakfast expe-rience is updated, fresh, and modern. Our display for breakfast breads and sleek juice dispensers save on space and provide a personalized breakfast service. [The previous breakfast ser-vice at Fanatics] was the same style of breakfast service, but now displayed more open, with a lot more style.”

Montoya feels her leadership abili-ties have benefited from the freedom Cooper had in the revamp of Fanatics into a real, Cooper-owned destina-tion restaurant in Johnson City.

“My role during the concept change was one that allowed us to create a unique menu for our area

and perfect the presentation de-tails for the new menu items,” she says. “During the transition, I had the opportunity to train the staff, explore marketing ideas, and test


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While the full-service Burger Bars grill up juicy results in Tennessee, Cooper has crafted a quick-service version for the Embassy Suites Detroit Metro Airport and the recently opened Hilton Orlando. The Detroit property has a restaurant as well as a Starbucks. “What we’ve expe-rienced was that the Starbucks outlet would do very well in the morning where everybody gets their espresso,” says Andy Laubscher, corporate director of F&B, Cooper Hotels. “But then during the day, the traffic would slow down, and in the afternoon, we wouldn’t really see that much difference. But we tried different concepts, such as soup, sandwiches, and so on. Since we’re dealing with a lot of sports teams over the weekend, we decided to put in kind of a soup and sandwich component and put the Burger Bar express in there. Sales have increased really nicely in that outlet and made the space much more profitable.”

One menu board presents the Starbucks offerings while another lists Burger Bar items, Laubscher explains.

The Burger Bar Express in Hilton Orlando is in a similar situ-ation; the hotel has a full-service restaurant with a Starbucks next to it. “We just put a Burger Bar Express in there,” says Laub-scher. “It’s only been in there for a short while, but first numbers show us that we’ve been able to increase revenues nicely so far.” — TW

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out the food quality and preparation methods. Overall, the process, while difficult, was both a learning and growing experience. I feel confident that I am a more rounded executive chef due to my involvement in this unique and modern concept change.”

Here’s the BeefFor the meat of the matter, Cooper went with 100% certified Hereford beef. “It’s all locally sourced—only natural ingredients, all from farms that provide the beast our rancher owned,” Laubscher says. Even better, they get it easily.

“Sysco was able to get us into their test kitchen in Nashville where we tasted several different burgers, but the Hereford beef product was by far the best product we had tasted, and Sysco is able to ship a fresh and non-frozen product for both full-service locations,” Laubscher says. “The beef is farmed in northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky.”

At price points of $10 to $11 per burger, “we are priced higher than some of the chain restaurants like an Outback or O’Charley’s or something like that,” Laubscher says, “but it’s locally sourced. It’s the best burger product in the market, and we felt we will be able to get a dollar or two or three more than a competitor just because we felt we had a much better product out there.”

It’s not just burgers, though. Col-vin points to a current menu favor-ite, deviled eggs, as an example. In any case, sides and options stretch a finite number of items a long way. “[Guests] may not come in and have just a cheeseburger and fries; they may have a portobello mushroom burger with homemade pimento

cheese and sweet potato or onion fries,” she says. “People love cus-tomization, and it’s something they rave about.”



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Grilling NumbersLabor cost has decreased by as much as 9%, and food cost has decreased by 2%, Carney says, with revenues across the two full-service Burger Bars up 23% year over year.

“You can customize the burger 1,000 different ways,” Colvin notes. “It’s a great product. It comes in fresh, and we hand-patty it. With all the different toppings and sauces, the client is never going to be bored. Plus, we have entrées and appetizers and great desserts and milkshakes. It’s easy to control la-bor for this, because you don’t have a huge spectrum menu. You have something focused. And you don’t

have to keep as many ingredients if you’re focusing on one specific thing. I came to this property four months before we started construc-tion. Numbers were tricky at first, but utilizing this concept has made it easier to control.”

ReactionCooper uses a Belly frequent-dining program to sign up customers via iPads in the restaurant, which al-lows them to track metrics on age, gender, and more about customers. “We get a nice slice out of every demographic—teenagers, college-age kids, young professionals, older couples, and so on,” Colvin says. “But we are bringing in more of the

young professionals for this concept.“I’m a big part of our social

media, being a younger profes-sional myself,” Colvin continues. “I do some of the Facebook posting we utilize. We have a burger of the month that we post pictures of, and we talk about the sourcing of local produce. The feedback from people, they love that they’re able to create something that’s their own. You’ve got a lot of places now like Chipotle, Moe’s, and even Subway, where you go in and pick and choose what you want, and you get something you’ve contributed to. By giving people not necessarily a blank canvas but a paint-by-numbers concept for them to work off, they love that.”



Local Burger Bar

In converting from Fanatics Sports Bar & Grill, the Murfreesboro and Johnson City, Tennessee, locations of DoubleTree by Hilton reduced the restaurant’s vast square footage and were able to seize the surplus as meeting space. “This was a space that was about 3,200 to 3,400 square feet, depending on the location,” says Cooper Hotels Corporate Director of F&B Andy Laubscher.

“Fanatics was a huge, sprawling restau-rant, with pool tables, poker tables, and a big bar shaped like a baseball bat and glove. It was over the top,” says Hana Colvin, execu-tive chef at the Murfreesboro property. “By going to the sleeker, more modern aesthetic, we were able to keep a 100-plus-seat restau-rant with a large bar, but we were also able to add meeting space for the hotel.”

The two hotels were built with ballrooms and boardrooms, but not break-out rooms, Cooper VP of Operations Brian Carney says. “The meeting space that was created by dividing Fanatics

has allowed us to be more available for small meetings,” he says, “but also bigger meetings that need to divide into groups as part of their programs.”

Carney says banquet and catering rev-enues have increased approximately 33% percent year over year since the changes, which gave each of the two hotels around 1,700 feet of additional meeting space.

“In many cases, we were right on that threshold where we had outgrown certain groups or where we could only book one group into the ballroom,” Laubscher says.

“We were really able to show our ap-preciation to some of our regular groups,” Colvin says. “We have the Disabled American Veterans in here several times a year, and we

do weeklong events with them. We named the new meeting space the Veterans’ Room to show appreciation.”

Repeat business has shown that the appreciation is mutual. —TEW

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Take, for example, a recent burger of the month, the Umami Burger: Salmon, sriracha mayo, Asian kimchi slaw, and a fried egg, on a toasted brioche bun. When Colvin posted an image of the burger on Facebook, announcing it as the burger of the month, one customer commented, “I’ve had this. I loved it. I begged for it to come back as the burger of the month! How am I supposed to diet with the Burger Bar within walking distance from my office!”

Laubscher says guests they’ve chatted with have said some version of the following: “‘I sat down in your restaurant and looked at the pric-ing, and it was a little more than my usual $8.95 or $9.95,’ but when they got the product they were like, ‘This is so worth it—an excellent product and presentation and also the flavor of the different ingredients.’ We’ve never had anybody say, ‘This is too expensive, and I’m going to walk out of here.’ They’re really pleased.”

Tad Wilkes is managing editor of Hotel F&B.

continued from page 34One burger of the month at the Murfreesboro DoubleTree was this Salmon Umami burger: salmon, sriracha mayo, Asian kimchi slaw, and a fried egg, on a toasted brioche bun.

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