23 February 2010
Soft openings
Although I do a lot of restaurant reviewing it's generally in the context either of guide book writing or of travel features where the stress tends to be on established restaurants typical of the place under discussion, rather than something that's brand new. I often turn down invitations to new openings at home simply because I rarely write about the city I live in (although I happen to be doing so right now) and so there's little conceivable benefit to the establishment in question. PR people often seem interested merely in fulfilling their quotas rather than calculating the worthwhile and persuasive column centimetres to be gained, and I like a good meal as much as anyone else. But fair's fair, and 'never accept a freebie just for the sake of it' is a motto more writers ought to be adopting.
For those not familiar with the jargon, a 'soft opening' is when a restaurant, entertainment venue, or hotel has only just opened and does not feel itself yet fully ready for the limelight. In the case of restaurants it tends to mean that the venue is still in dress rehearsals, and the team of staff still learning the peculiarities of the restaurant's physical form, of preparing and serving the newly-created menu in a timely way, and to work together efficiently. For hotels, however, it often simply means that the building's owner (very often a different entity from the company managing the property) is desperate to start earning revenue after spending astronomical sums on construction, and so the building opens with not all floors or facilities complete.
One suggestion in The Guardian piece is that where restaurants are advertising discounted menus during their soft openings (I've never encountered this, but still) then it's fair to give them credit for that, and leave a full review until it is clear from the full price menu on offer that they are fully operational. However, if a restaurant is charging full prices from the beginning then it deserves to be reviewed comprehensively. It can't have its cake at full price and eat it.
The same argument doesn't quite work for hotels. I very often review hotels during soft opening, particularly in China, and the experience is almost always one of profound incompetence due to the supply of well-trained staff falling short of the Chinese hotel industry's needs, and the tendency of staff to hop from job to job at short notice.
But guide book cycles being what they are, and getting longer in response to the global drop in tourism volumes, there's a choice between reviewing a new Chinese hotel before it's ready or not mentioning it until the following edition, which may be two or three (or more) years away. The opening months do tend to see heavy discounting but it's against a figure which expresses what the hotel thinks it would like to get for a room, not what it may actually ever achieve on a regular basis, and since even when a hotel is fully up-and-running no two neighbours may be paying the same rate anyway, and heavy discounting remain the norm, there's not the same argument for an easy ride from the critic.
And then there's the pressure to have something new, which both demonstrates that the research has been thoroughly done, helps to differentiate a guide from others in print not yet updating for new editions, and conversely prevents your guide from missing a major hotel that those updating slightly later may cover. Unreasonable though it may be to do so, people do say, "Your guide's no good/out of date. It doesn't even have hotel X in it."
I was turned down by one new Beijing hotel this year, but in general there's a recognition that guide book coverage is important to success, whether a hotel is targeting a leisure or business market, and that decision was probably unwise. I assured the hotel in question that I'm fully familiar with the chaos that is soft opening in China, and in fact the only way to review soft openings is to take into account the typical arc through which a Chinese hotel goes and expect an, at best, a disorganised experience and hardware that half works. Experience, talks with management about recruiting and training policies, added to direct experience of the design, comfort levels, and hardware in general enable something sensible to be said about how the hotel will be when it settles down. Technical problems will be fixed, staff will gain experience, and gradually it will all come together until another newly-opening hotel offers staff a little more money and entices them away. For some hotels, a soft-opening-like second-rate experience comes later, when all the staff have been poached.
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