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Three Big Barriers to Collaboration
Remarkably Resilient
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By Elizabeth Blau Founder & CEO, Blau & Associates
These phrases and their pandemic-era meanings would never have occurred to us in February of 2020. Two and a half years later, they have become common parlance of a time and place that none of us could have imagined, and we'd all soon like to forget. But the lessons we've learned are too valuable to forget, and we must now more than ever, be willing to share best practices.
As a result of the Covid-19 global pandemic every industry was immensely impacted, but the hospitality industry had to navigate near impossible commercial seas. Over the last two years, hotels and restaurants have been forced to close by government mandate, and then attempt to reopen while their customer base was still fearful of travel and dining indoors. As lockdowns and mandates were lifted, the whiplash of pent-up demand brought new challenges with dramatic increases in tourism and dining out forcing hospitality to contend with supply and labor shortages. In a cruel twist of fate, rising prices, logistics, and labor have now created an environment where restaurants struggle to maintain service levels that customers expect.
With the immediate crisis of COVID-19 in our rearview mirror, it has become somewhat easier to plot our post-pandemic future, and embrace the "new normal," in our pro formas and strategic planning.
Two years our primary concern was literal survival, with our frontline staff immediately affected and the real specter of liability, each operator had to determine how to move forward in the face of the unknown. Beyond the challenges of capacity limitations, contact tracing, daily PPE regulations and the real time management of often contradictory guest expectations – we had to contend with industry "experts" from all corners offering opinions and predictions on the future of hospitality. In May of 2020, it was a popular conclusion that buffets would be a thing of the past, paper menus would never again be in the hands of diners, and dining rooms would be significantly empty for years.
Thankfully, many of the most dire forecasts have not played out, and the new normal, is actually at least adjacent to the old normal. The fretting over scanning QR codes, erecting plastic barricades, and obsessing over high-touch items like spoons in a buffet line have ultimately proven temporary.
As many of us have known instinctively our whole lives, hospitality was ultimately the industry people were most anxious to return to and treat as a safe port in the storm – the one they needed to feel normal in their lives despite everything else to the contrary. As we continue to emerge from the clouds cast by 2020: guests are back in line at buffets, servers are passing menus out at tables, reservation lists are again prime real estate, and hosts are once again warmly greeting regulars with physical contact. long-term strategy; with no real way of determining a return of group, leisure, and international travel in force, hotel operators were emboldened to take risks they may never have imagined. In their food and beverage divisions, efficiencies in in-room dining, coffee service, and hours of operation have shifted from "let's give it a shot" to best practices. There are few executives I know of prior to the pandemic would have pictured themselves replacing elegant in-room dining service at their 5-Star properties with take-out food wrapped in saran wrap, placed in disposable containers and dropped outside the guestroom door.
Expanded reservation systems have replaced busy walk-in style seating at three-meal venues, streamlining the experience of both guests and staff. The return to "normal" in hotels is taking longer, but the decisions made during these have become better with practice and fully integrated into what a hotel stay is. As guests return to hotels for longer stays and a greater list of to-dos, feedback is appreciative of both the return to what they love about being in a hotel and the new and/or revised service they are surprised has made it better than before.
This realization of the role that hospitality plays in peoples' lives has led to an increase of attention and awareness of the industry's susceptibility to collapse. Advocacy on behalf of small restaurants, boutique hotels, and local watering holes was almost instantaneous. The simple act of placing a take-out order became a performance of civic duty, an earnest choice to support a neighbor. Perhaps buoyed by this, a wave of self-determined advocacy from chefs, restaurateurs, and purveyors has emerged as an incredible by-product of this time. In their quest to create a more secure future for themselves and their businesses of passion, these individuals continue to gain strength and power through organizing and legislating on behalf of the entire industry.
While we, as restaurateurs and chefs were trying to make our guests more comfortable by playful ideas such as filling empty dining chairs with giant teddy bears to space out tables, presenting virtual at-home cooking demos and providing imaginative curb side to-go cocktail kits – the reality was those facing food insecurity were on the brink of devastation. As a restaurant community of people responsible for dreaming up beautiful dining concepts, innovative cuisine and feeding the community, this devastating reality became quickly apparent that there was going to be an unprecedented number of food insecure people that would quickly no longer have access to meals. In Las Vegas especially, after the absolute shut down of the hospitality industry, none of the normal channels of food distribution to shelters, food pantries and nonprofit organizations could be followed and came to sudden halt.
Out of a necessity to fill this void, Delivering with Dignity was born; a nonprofit organization that I helped co-found and launch in March 2020, along with other community leaders and local restaurant partners. The Delivering with Dignity program is a novel system that simultaneously feeds those in need, while supporting the economically devastated restaurant industry by providing supplemental revenue through the meal program. Through private financial donations and government grants, Delivering with Dignity partner restaurants create and average of 4,500 weekly nutritious, wellbalanced meals cooked by chefs which are then picked up and delivered daily by community volunteers.
Today, over two years later, Delivering with Dignity continues to operate daily and has safely delivered over 600,000 meals to the doorsteps of the Las Vegas community. To me, there is no better definition of resiliency than the outcome of this program thanks to the determination of our community leaders, volunteers, donors, and incredible hospitality industry. As a restaurateur, I am incredibly proud of my community, our restaurant teams and their resiliency during these challenging last few years. It is my sincere hope that the connections and progress that this time has forged within our industry will only continue to intensify.
Publications like HotelExecutive are important tools in staying connected with each other. The amplification of ideas across the diverse spectrum of hospitality in articles and pieces like this one provide us another bond in our community and our ability to thrive within it.
The vulnerability of hotels and restaurants to longterm impact is not necessarily surprising. These are, after all, businesses which operate on razor-thin margins, even in the best of times. Knowledge of this did not lessen the heartbreaking swath of closures and operational shifts which (in many cases) remain. Professionals across the nation have stories of staff trauma, service challenges, and supply hurdles which all altered their businesses.
From the ashes of these devastating industry burdens, though, are stories of innovation and perseverance. The good faith efforts of leaders in the industry have level-set expectations for guests and staff alike. As the industry moves out of survival mode and into its next phase of evolution, these expectations move in tandem. Some will remain and others will become relics of the era – the former will shape who we are today and who we will be in the future.
About Ms. Blau: James Beard Award Nominee Elizabeth Blau is the founder and CEO of restaurant development company Blau + Associates, a firm dedicated to creating world-class hospitality experiences, and is widely credited with transforming Las Vegas into the world-class culinary destination it is today. A judge on CNBC's Restaurant Startup, she also operates several restaurants in Las Vegas and Vancouver with her husband chef Kim Canteenwalla including: Honey Salt and Buddy V's Ristorante, a collaboration with TV's Cake Boss Buddy Valastro. Ms. Blau also is author of "Honey Salt: A Culinary Scrapbook," which was named Best Cookbook of 2018 by Food & Beverage Magazine.
