Taipei's top hotels are engaged in a massive food fight. This is not the kind of food fight seen in the movie Animal House, with hamburgers and pies thrown across the room. This battle is being fought with expensive restorations, elegant restaurant design, famous chefs and delectable dishes.
The Westin Taipei triggered the food fight when it opened in October 1999, with plans for 12 state-of-the-art restaurants and bars. Taipei's top five hotels have responded to the challenge, and each one has embarked on a top-to-bottom renovation designed to bring facilities up to the latest standards.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WESTIN TAIPEI
The five most expensive hotels in town -- the Grand Hyatt, Grand Formosa Regent, Sherwood, Ritz Landis, and Far Eastern Plaza -- all have deep-pocketed owners who will spend whatever it takes to remain on top of the heap. The Grand Hyatt has already remodeled three of its restaurants, with two more planned, and upgrades are underway at restaurants in the Ritz Landis, the Far Eastern, the Grand Formosa Regent and the Sherwood hotels.
The 288-room Westin has set a high standard. It is small but well-run and brand new, and it has already become a magnet for downtown business meetings, conferences, and lunches. The Westin has opened 11 of its 12 food and beverage facilities, all of them lavishly designed and decorated. The last one, Sean's Irish Pub, opened late last month.
Piece de'restaurant
Like its Taipei competitors, the Westin is targeting Taiwan residents, and expects 85 percent of its food and beverage revenue to come from local diners. Asians, unlike people in Europe or the US, believe the best restaurants are found in five-star hotels. In Taiwan, this raises the food and beverage proportion of hotel revenue to as high as 70 percent, compared with about 30 percent in the US and Europe.
So far the new Westin restaurants are far from full, although its recent hairy crab and hot pot promotions have been successful, says public relations manager Dennis Liu: the hotel sold 1,500 hairy crabs at NT$1,600 apiece.
The Westin is promoting its restaurants with a variety of offers, as are its competitors. For the hotels it means tough competition, but for Taipei residents, the ongoing war means good prices and great food.
"The winners are always the customers -- they'll get lots of value for money," said Andrew McBurnie, newly appointed general manager of the Grand Formosa Regent hotel. The price will be market driven.
The stakes are high, because Taipei hotels are competing in a slow economy and a flat tourism market. Taiwan attracted 2.3 million visitors in 1995, a 9.6 percent increase from 1994, but in the past five years visitor numbers have stagnated. Just 2.4 million people visited Taiwan in 1999, according to the Taiwan Tourism Bureau, compared with the 10.3 million who visited Hong Kong the same year. Taiwan's hotel occupancy rates and per capita visitor spending have not improved since 1995.
The recent decline in the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) is also cause for concern. Declines in the TSE index usually reduce discretionary spending in Taiwan, and some hotels are reporting 10 to 20 percent declines in revenue due to the slumping stock market.
The 10-year-old Grand Hyatt Taipei was the first to respond to the Westin challenge. Two years ago, the 870-room Hyatt launched a top-to-bottom US$15 million, four-year refurbishment that will renovate all the rooms and the ballroom, build a new Regency Club, and remake all the food and beverage outlets. By the end of 2001, the Hyatt guest rooms, the lobby, and all five restaurants will be completely remodelled.
The Hyatt's Cafe, Irodori and Pearl Liang restaurants are already finished, and so is the Regency Club.
Those three rebuilt restaurants are ultra-modern facilities that equal or surpass even those in famous hotel cities like Hong Kong and Singapore.
The ground-floor Cafe has taken buffet dining to a new level. It's a big space, but a series of alternating table and chair settings and floor designs has broken up the room, while the buffet stations, scattered in distant corners, alleviate the line-ups that plague other self-serve setups.
A less visible battle is underway to attract the lucrative banquet and weddings business. At the Grand Hyatt, 45 percent of food and beverage revenue comes from banquets, and 30 percent of the banquet revenue is from weddings. The Hyatt has built a wedding presentation room, and has hired a dedicated wedding consultant. The Hyatt's new ballroom re-opened in September, fresh from a US$3 million facelift, and the Grand Formosa Regent will renovate its ballroom as well.
Big ballrooms
Far Eastern Plaza hotel will answer with a brand-new NT$220 million ballroom of its own, which will be finished by the end of 2001. That space will come from the adjacent shopping mall, and the Far Eastern will keep its current ballroom as well. "This will put us in same league as the big ballroom players of Taipei," said Far Eastern Plaza general manager Philippe Caretti.
The 422-room Far Eastern Plaza is just six years old, but it has also embarked on a full scale rejuvenation. The Far Eastern is the top hotel in town based on revenue per available room and average room rate, but it is not resting on its laurels. Because it has just 16 rooms per floor, the Far Eastern can close up and renovate floor by floor, which hides the work from hotel guests while knocking just 4 percent off available occupancy. "No drilling, no dust, no smell," said Caretti. The Far Eastern is spending US$6.1 million on the room renovation, or about US$15,000 per room. Its lobby-level restaurant will be renovated next.
The Ritz Landis competes for the same market as Far Eastern and Hyatt, and it is spending lavishly to remain among the elite. Two years ago it received a new exterior, and the lobby and health center have been remodelled. Next up are restaurants and the rooms. "This is not a `soft renovation' -- we are going to make everything new," said Ritz Landis general manager Arno Moretto. We have to improve because there's so much competition.
As is the case with Far Eastern, the Ritz doesn't appear to need a revamp. Following the renovation, its Paris 1930 restaurant will have a small dance floor, a boutique bar, a couple of private rooms, and a new color scheme, said Moretto. The Ritz Landis will retain its landmark touches: the art deco motif, sit-down check-in, polished stainless steel, frosted glass, and black marble.
The classy Sherwood is just a few blocks from the Westin, and the two are direct competitors. Like its rivals, the Sherwood has embarked on a thorough restoration, beginning with the Toscana restaurant and the meeting rooms, and finishing with the rooms.
The Toscana facelift is finished, and diners will notice an immediate change: daylight flows in through new skylight windows, and the place looks more like a well-lighted Venice terrace than its previous dark, intimate incarnation. Other changes are afoot: the Sherwood's four function rooms have been merged into three larger rooms, and the guest rooms have been fitted with broadband Internet access. In mid-September, the Sherwood began to renovate its 350 guest rooms.
The makeover is none too soon for the Sherwood, which has fallen from its pinnacle as the most expensive accommodation in Taipei, and is now in third place, behind the Far Eastern and the Grand Hyatt. The Westin and the Far Eastern have both taken market share from the Sherwood. The Far Eastern attracts the same Asian bankers and analysts as the Sherwood, but its Shangri-La management connection gives it an advantage in attracting guests from Hong Kong and Singapore. Unlike its competitors, the Sherwood is independently managed, although it is marketed through Leading Hotels of the World.
Keeping pace
The 546-room Grand Formosa Regent is keeping pace with its competitors. The Formosa Club renovation was finished in September, the Brasserie restaurant was partly remodelled, and the fourth-floor Japanese restaurant has been converted into more banquet facilities. The Grand Formosa will begin a full-scale renovation of its 10 restaurants beginning in March 2001, said McBurnie, and will start a rooms renovation in June.
Taipei-style food wars may be going out of style. Hotels with 10 to 12 food and beverage outlets are an anachronism, and most new hotels in the US and Europe normally have just one or two restaurants and bars, said McBurnie.
"If you earn US$100 from rooms, US$80 is profit. If you earn US$100 from food and beverage, just US$20 is profit," he said. "Hotels have to ask themselves why they are in the food and beverage business." So how will McBurnie fill the Grand Formosa Regent's 10 restaurants? By virtue of its Chungshan North Road location. "We're on this side of the [Hsingtien] temple, and all our competitors are on the other side of the temple," said McBurnie. "And besides, our new restaurants will be orgasmic." Even the Westin might have trouble matching that.
Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛) has died of pneumonia at the age of 48 while on a trip to Japan, where she contracted influenza during the Lunar New Year holiday, her sister confirmed today through an agent. "Our whole family came to Japan for a trip, and my dearest and most kindhearted sister Barbie Hsu died of influenza-induced pneumonia and unfortunately left us," Hsu's sister and talk show hostess Dee Hsu (徐熙娣) said. "I was grateful to be her sister in this life and that we got to care for and spend time with each other. I will always be grateful to
REMINDER: Of the 6.78 million doses of flu vaccine Taiwan purchased for this flu season, about 200,000 are still available, an official said, following Big S’ death As news broke of the death of Taiwanese actress and singer Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛), also known as Big S (大S), from severe flu complications, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and doctors yesterday urged people at high risk to get vaccinated and be alert to signs of severe illness. Hsu’s family yesterday confirmed that the actress died on a family holiday in Japan due to pneumonia during the Lunar New Year holiday. CDC Deputy Director-General Tseng Shu-hui (曾淑慧) told an impromptu news conference that hospital visits for flu-like illnesses from Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 reached 162,352 — the highest
COMBINING FORCES: The 66th Marine Brigade would support the 202nd Military Police Command in its defense of Taipei against ‘decapitation strikes,’ a source said The Marine Corps has deployed more than 100 soldiers and officers of the 66th Marine Brigade to Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) as part of an effort to bolster defenses around the capital, a source with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. Two weeks ago, a military source said that the Ministry of National Defense ordered the Marine Corps to increase soldier deployments in the Taipei area. The 66th Marine Brigade has been tasked with protecting key areas in Taipei, with the 202nd Military Police Command also continuing to defend the capital. That came after a 2017 decision by the ministry to station
PETITIONS: A Democratic Progressive Party official quoted President William Lai as saying that civil society groups are organizing the recall drives at the grassroots level Some civil society groups yesterday announced that they have collected enough signatures to pass the first-stage threshold to initiate a recall vote against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators in 18 constituencies nationwide, saying that they would submit the signatures to the Central Election Commission (CEC) today. They also said that they expected to pass the threshold in eight more constituencies in the coming days, meaning the number of KMT legislators facing a recall vote could reach 26. The groups set up stations to collect signatures at local marketplaces and busy commercial districts. The legislators their petition drives target include Fu