Once upon a time there were hotels. The pensions, the Grand Hotels, the guest houses, the inns, the campsites and the residences where tourists – internal or external – went on holiday or traveled from outside to inside Italy to discover this wonderful country, where – everyone says – you eat Very well. Over time, the tourism phenomenon in Italy has changed so much that it has also followed international flows, with better or worse results that are there for all to see.

From closed hotels to open spaces for the city

And then there were the restaurants inside the hotels, an object not so common to be honest, not as common as the breakfast room at least. Over time, these restaurants chased ever greater ambitions, they were places where locals rarely set foot, those who actually lived in the cities where the hotels were located. “We went here for the wedding lunch” a person from Lecce once told me in reference to one of the most historic hotels in the city. This communicates well the sense of strangeness felt by regular customers, like taking a journey inside your own residence.

Hotel catering opens to external guests

Among the biggest and strongest trends of recent years, there is certainly the growth of hotel catering, which is starting to see “external customers” for the first time, a completely new target that requires a service other than half board (trivially, for example, booking or paying on the spot) and who visits the hotel for dinner or a drink. We are synthesizing a phenomenon that has taken place over time, which has arrived from abroad and which is consolidating in ever new forms, a sort of trend within the trend, but there really is a lot to say. Those places that were once seen as impassable areas, fortresses for tourists, now instead become a place to have breakfasts, brunches, aperitifs and dinners, even pizzerias or trattorias. At all levels: from simple coffee to the very high cuisine of some prestigious names. So much so that today opening a hotel without having a restaurant is almost considered unthinkable.

What it’s like to eat inside hotels, at least in Italy

But with what results? At least in Italy, the answer is “it depends”. Because while on the one hand the effort put into organizing space and service, as well as menus in a different way, it seems to us that the results are still – often – unreliable, discontinuous and a little messy. It is often difficult to find information outside, for example menus, telephone numbers, even the address when the entrance does not match that of the guests. If on the one hand the large hotels have been the hotbed of prestigious restaurants and historic cocktail bars, on the other hand the expansion of the proposal and the greater competitiveness of the sector have revealed the possibility of many avoidable projects, which have transformed in a bloodbath for those who opened it, something very similar to a service offered to guests, but not an income. Some make their lives more difficult by also setting up more than one restaurant and increasing their staffing needs.

Prices, menus and critical issues of hotel catering

First of all it is a matter of synthesizing a cuisine that aims to satisfy different tastes: tourists (who want to eat Italian and, possibly, local in many cases) and citizens who instead are looking for something different from what they could find in any tavern or bistro in the area. city. Hence menus with too many ambitions to keep up with the results, dystopian proposals without a thought behind them. Then there is the issue of prices: being intended for tourists, it is common thought that hotel restaurants are more expensive than those on the street. In this sense we have tried to level out the disparities a lot, trying to attract a wider audience with heterogeneous spending capacities. Here too with considerable difficulties and results that are not always consistent. There is also the issue of service and staff: sometimes the room seems almost disoriented in mixing two different audiences, with different needs. To the point that we often have to answer the question in the negative: “Would I return to this place?”. Actually, no.

A reflection on how hotel catering is going

But we must raise our hands and say that we are still – at least in Italy – in the eye of the storm of this phenomenon, which is now settling, showing its strengths and weaknesses. And from here the market will only be able to make a natural selection, pushing projects that are not sustainable out of the mix and rewarding those that have a greater reason for existing. At the base however, it must be considered that the two worlds, catering and hospitality, have always run in parallel until they met despite bringing with them the dynamics of two completely different models. And so this fusion is not always very successful.

Read the original content on CiboToday