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Maps, gaps and guides
Viewpoint Contributions to Viewpoint are welcomed: they should conform to International Journal of Hospitality Management style (see Notes for Contributors) and be of not more than 1500 words in length. Viewpoin& are not-refereed. This has always been a respectable argument, and it impresses my Guide successor, Drew Smith. But when risks of this kind were taken and doubtful restaurants included, Good Food Club members as a body were seldom grateful. Postgate himself always firmly resisted publishing what he called ‘The Nearly Good Food Guide’, and the occasional trawls that were arranged so that voluntary inspectors could visit unknown places in unfinished counties nearly always proved an expensive disappointment, proving only that the residents of Humberside, or wherever it happened to be, seemed singularly easy to please. There are about five times as many hotels and restaurants known to the Guide files than ever appear in the book, but even if they were all included and figured on the maps, the pattern of distribution would scarcely alter: there might be an extra address or two in Northumberland and StrathClyde, but there would be twenty more in Somerset.
Maps, gaps and guides Christopher
Driver
Editor ofThe Good Food Guide from 1970 to 1982; author of The British at Table 1940- 1980 If you edit a book for a long time, you risl k becoming blind to its gaps. In terminal cases, people stop telling you what they are, because they know you will take no notice. But one kind of gap has been obvious in every edition of the Good Food Guide since 1952 - the first that carried any kind of map of Britain. It affronts even the editor when, like a sensible person, he refers to the Guide before planning a holiday, choosing a school, undertaking an assignment, or casting around for an eventide home. What is the use, he asks, of a map with so much white space on it.
Even the maps of France in the French hotel and restaurant guides exhibit similar gaps if you are looking for restaurants of quality - say near the main road from the Pas de Calais to Paris, or in the Limousin, which President Mitterrand has called ‘la France profonde’. But few readers of these pages will find it in their hearts to pity the French for any gaps found in their pattern of ‘restauration’. In addressing the British problem, it ought to be possible to learn something by setting districts which are favoured with plenty of sound hotels and restaurants, or both, against comparable districts which conspicuously lack them. For instance, in the first category, try listing the obvious and less obvious factors that may help to explain the commanding position held in all the major British guides by two rural regions Devon/Somerset and the Lake District. Northumberland and the Welsh Borders may be fair representatives of comparable areas of natural beauty severely neglected by the restaurateurs.
Take a look at that Pictish tract, actually some of the best unspoilt touring country in Britain, between Alnwick on the east coast north of Newcastle and the Isle of Arran on what used to be Ayrshire in the west of Scotland. Or look at the D.H. Lawrence country north of Nottingham where there ought to be enough thesis writers to fill a decent restaurant nightly. Or in London itself, look at the barren boroughs like Hackney, Hornsey and Twickenham. There is not much distributive justice in British eating out. Some will say - not all of them because they are paid to say it, as tourist board officials and the like that I am posing an entirely artificial problem: that there are restaurants and hotels everywhere, all run by lovely people; that it is the snobbishness or indolence of Guide correspondents and inspectors which passes them by. I would be more inclined to believe this if I did not myself live in a district of London that is privileged by almost every measure, but relatively deficient in restaurants, good, bad or indifferent. Others will say (as they have been saying on and off for as long as I can remember, and certainly well back into Raymond Postgate’s time as editor of the Guide) that in the white space areas on the map the Guide is too fussy, and should admit places it knows or suspects are below its standards, in the hope that some benighted traveller will be grateful for them, and that exposure to a higher class of criticism will improve their standards. Int.J.HospitalityManagementVol.3No.4pp. PrintedinGreatBritaln
167-169
Firstly, Devon and Somerset (and especially the latter) and the Lake District enjoy - or endure a long tourist season from Easter to October. With the offer of winter weekends and other devices, many hotels and restaurants are able to stay open and retain their best staff for most of the year. Secondly, these areas lie no more than 150 miles, or three hours motoring, from big conurbations from which people like to escape at weekends if they can. 167
027%4319/84$3.00 + 0.00 fQ 1984Pergamon Press Ltd
Viewpoint
They are popular parts retirement of business and who will often have enjoyed district. This is an important leisure trade.
of England for the professional people holidays in the same source of year-round
Their agricultural tradition is one of mixed farming on a relatively small and human scale. This tradition includes farmhouse cooking and the tourist has, or feels he has, ready access to it through the purchase of ‘edible souvenirs’ such as clotted cream and rum butter in local cafes and shops. The countryside is well sprinkled with properties, the houses of merchants and gentry long since passed on, that can be readily revived as hotels (and for few other economic purposes). Houses of this kind enable semi-amateur caterers to live in a style they could not otherwise afford, as ‘fallen down earls or jumped up wing commanders’, to quote a colleague’s apt characterisation of the type. The Welsh Borders and Northumberland suffer from their failure to satisfy most of these conditions. Amongst urban districts, a similar contrast can be drawn between Manchester and Birmingham; and in the London suburbs, between Golders Green/Hampstead and Highgate/Muswell Hill. In the 1984 edition of the Guide, Greater Manchester had eighteen entries and Birmingham only seven; Hampstead/Golders Green had six entries and HighgatelMuswell Hill only one. Obviously relevant factors, some favourable and some not, which are shared between Manchester and Birmingham include: a manufacturing and commercial centre large enough to make the city a magnet for businessmen from home and abroad; rents and rates which are inevitably high in the city centre but are undercut by unreconstructed cheap property in streets not far away. Most residents work too far from home to return for lunch - which also means, however, that it may be too far to come back into the city centre for dinner. Compared with London, whatever the expense account myths may say, there is little tradition of transacting business in these cities over a meal and a bottle of wine at lunch-time. Nor is there a strong native tradition of catering and service above the teashop and chip-shop level. But both conurbations have high immigrant populations which tend to supply this deficiency. Obviously relevant factors shared between HampsteadiGolders Green and Highgate/Muswell Hill include the fact that both are built on adjacent hills near fine London parks with cultural features
(Kenwood House, Keats’s house, etc.} which bring visitors from all over London, In both districts, stable households of prosperous, upwardly mobile professional people predominate, and there are large shifting populations of young bed-sitter dwellers whose need of meeting places is only partially satisfied by the pubs. These general resemblances are so striking that the presence of interestingly diversified restaurants in one of each pair of localities, and its absence in the other, deserves the attention of social geographers. For instance, how much is attributable to special factors, such as the following: Manchester since the mid-19th century, and Hampstead since the 1930s have both had a strong German/Austrian Jewish element in their culture, which seems to predispose people towards an interest in cooking and a taste for cafe society. Secondly, Lancashire and Cheshire, the counties around Manchester, are dairy-farming areas which have given their names to two famous cheeses. Baking (with Eccles and Chorley cakes) and offal (tripe, chitterlings and black puddings) are also celebrated in the region. Birmingham has no obvious counterparts to these products. Also relevant perhaps is the fact that Lancashire’s tradition is Catholic, Birmingham’s Protestant. Gastronomically, Birmingham’s character, as set out in David Allen’s seminal work, British Tastes, stresses the convenience foods which permit both sexes to make money as fast as possible, consoled by their marked taste for malt vinegar and bottled sauces. The reason for this regional penchant is unknown, though perhaps in pre-freezer days the surpluses or by-products of the horticultural district around Worcester and the brewing district around Burton combined to give the entire Midland region a taste for pickles which is now anachronistic, as well as inimical to serious cooking. In all this, I may have paid insufficient attention to the sheer chances of human settlement and exogamy, which have made Ripon, Eastbourne, Pembroke and Abergavenny, among other towns, places of gastronomic pilgrimage in their time. There is also a clearly established law of economic geography to the effect that two restaurants do better than one, and a cluster do better than two: not many prospective restaurateurs think of opening their own competition down the street even before they have got themselves properly established, but logically that is what they should do when they are colonising a district in which their kind of catering is unfamiliar and alarming. Readers who have been patient so far may care to extend this game to localities large or small with which they are themselves familiar. Oddly, in
169
Viewpoint
Britain very little systematic effort is made by regional tourist boards, local ,town halls or even local newspapers to identify and if necessary correct some of the factors which make it quite certain that foreign or native visitors will be sadly disappointed by the food and drink they consume on their holidays and business trips, and by the edible souvenirs they can take home. Visitors to Britain are expected to rest content with the scenery and culture of the region they select.
Challenges facing the executive a hotel corporation operating in developing countries
of
Ian Graham Sheraton Management Corporation, Denham Place, Village Road, Denham, Uxbridge, Middlesex, U.K.
Are the organisational, marketing, financial and human resource management skills of a hotel manager essentially the same throughout the world, or do these skills differ in both their aspect and emphasis when we look at developing countries? This article will review how political, socioeconomic and human resource factors affect hotel operations in developing countries. It will suggest that the diversity of challenges facing the executive employed in this field should be thoroughly understood at the executive selection stage and that supervision of the executive, together with performance evaluation parameters should continue to recognize these particular factors. Furthermore, hotel management training and development programmes, both at school and corporate levels, must address these issues if the executive is to be equipped to respond appropriately to each situation. Ultimate financial viability and other challenges In many countries hotels have been built as a result of pressure from special interest groups, such as state-owned airline companies and aspiring politicians. Indeed, in some countries we see the hotel industry being used to convert ‘black’ currency into legitimate (‘white’) currency. Elsewhere foreign aid injections may be tied to construction and equipping contracts for infrastructure, including hotel projects. In such circumstances the r&son d’&tre for the hotel will not be to serve any inherent market forces, Int.J.HospitalityManagementVol.3No.4pp. Printed in Great Britain
Nothing can give Wales a rich scatter of 18th century houses, or seduce Manchester’s large Cantonese population away to Birmingham. But what are public promotional organisations for if they cannot help avert the deterioration or disappearance of a local cheese, and make it easier for a really promising restaurateur to open up near a garden or a library or picture collection of national importance, or in an area of outstanding natural beauty?
Thus, all too frequently, hotel executives are assigned to hotels whose ultimate financial viability has never been seriously questioned. Yet it will be to the hotel manager that banks financing the operation will first turn when there are the inevitable shortfalls in debt servicing. Techniques for management of cash flows are seldom addressed by executive development programmes. Procedures to minimize credit and reduce inventories may appear to have little to do with providing an acceptable guest experience, but will be necessary if the next guest is to be able to walk into the lobby. Even when the projected hotel satisfies a perceived need, often over-ambitious construction timetables result in accommodation arriving on the marketplace at the wrong time. Delayed construction can also lead to an exhaustion of initial equity and debt financing with a consequential scramble for expensive bridging funds or cutbacks in specifications. The simplest area to cut back on may be spare-part inventories and backup facilities in the back of the house. The hotel executive will then be forced to prioritize between spending spare funds on completing the hotel or meeting debt repayment schedules. The volatility of currencies can no longer be a surprise to anyone. Yet an executive responsible for marketing strategies including pricing in a country subject to currency softness frequently faces a maze of conflicting interests. Ultimately, revenue must grow at a rate which matches or exceeds the increasing needs of foreign currency to fund imported food, beverage and spare parts. Achievement of such revenue growth has to be each executive’s goal. A plethora of banking structures will face the hotel executive, ranging from the electronic wizardry of computerization to the overly bureaucratic bank and exchange control procedures. The hotel executive has to be able to respond, whatever the situation. Governments have ambivalent attitudes to the hotel industry. Some see it as a necessary precur-
169-17Oi964 0
027B-4319/84$3.00 + 0.00 1984 Pergamon Press Ltd
Maps, gaps and guides Christopher
Driver
Editor ofThe Good Food Guide from 1970 to 1982; author of The British at Table 1940- 1980 If you edit a book for a long time, you risl k becoming blind to its gaps. In terminal cases, people stop telling you what they are, because they know you will take no notice. But one kind of gap has been obvious in every edition of the Good Food Guide since 1952 - the first that carried any kind of map of Britain. It affronts even the editor when, like a sensible person, he refers to the Guide before planning a holiday, choosing a school, undertaking an assignment, or casting around for an eventide home. What is the use, he asks, of a map with so much white space on it.
Even the maps of France in the French hotel and restaurant guides exhibit similar gaps if you are looking for restaurants of quality - say near the main road from the Pas de Calais to Paris, or in the Limousin, which President Mitterrand has called ‘la France profonde’. But few readers of these pages will find it in their hearts to pity the French for any gaps found in their pattern of ‘restauration’. In addressing the British problem, it ought to be possible to learn something by setting districts which are favoured with plenty of sound hotels and restaurants, or both, against comparable districts which conspicuously lack them. For instance, in the first category, try listing the obvious and less obvious factors that may help to explain the commanding position held in all the major British guides by two rural regions Devon/Somerset and the Lake District. Northumberland and the Welsh Borders may be fair representatives of comparable areas of natural beauty severely neglected by the restaurateurs.
Take a look at that Pictish tract, actually some of the best unspoilt touring country in Britain, between Alnwick on the east coast north of Newcastle and the Isle of Arran on what used to be Ayrshire in the west of Scotland. Or look at the D.H. Lawrence country north of Nottingham where there ought to be enough thesis writers to fill a decent restaurant nightly. Or in London itself, look at the barren boroughs like Hackney, Hornsey and Twickenham. There is not much distributive justice in British eating out. Some will say - not all of them because they are paid to say it, as tourist board officials and the like that I am posing an entirely artificial problem: that there are restaurants and hotels everywhere, all run by lovely people; that it is the snobbishness or indolence of Guide correspondents and inspectors which passes them by. I would be more inclined to believe this if I did not myself live in a district of London that is privileged by almost every measure, but relatively deficient in restaurants, good, bad or indifferent. Others will say (as they have been saying on and off for as long as I can remember, and certainly well back into Raymond Postgate’s time as editor of the Guide) that in the white space areas on the map the Guide is too fussy, and should admit places it knows or suspects are below its standards, in the hope that some benighted traveller will be grateful for them, and that exposure to a higher class of criticism will improve their standards. Int.J.HospitalityManagementVol.3No.4pp. PrintedinGreatBritaln
167-169
Firstly, Devon and Somerset (and especially the latter) and the Lake District enjoy - or endure a long tourist season from Easter to October. With the offer of winter weekends and other devices, many hotels and restaurants are able to stay open and retain their best staff for most of the year. Secondly, these areas lie no more than 150 miles, or three hours motoring, from big conurbations from which people like to escape at weekends if they can. 167
027%4319/84$3.00 + 0.00 fQ 1984Pergamon Press Ltd
Viewpoint
They are popular parts retirement of business and who will often have enjoyed district. This is an important leisure trade.
of England for the professional people holidays in the same source of year-round
Their agricultural tradition is one of mixed farming on a relatively small and human scale. This tradition includes farmhouse cooking and the tourist has, or feels he has, ready access to it through the purchase of ‘edible souvenirs’ such as clotted cream and rum butter in local cafes and shops. The countryside is well sprinkled with properties, the houses of merchants and gentry long since passed on, that can be readily revived as hotels (and for few other economic purposes). Houses of this kind enable semi-amateur caterers to live in a style they could not otherwise afford, as ‘fallen down earls or jumped up wing commanders’, to quote a colleague’s apt characterisation of the type. The Welsh Borders and Northumberland suffer from their failure to satisfy most of these conditions. Amongst urban districts, a similar contrast can be drawn between Manchester and Birmingham; and in the London suburbs, between Golders Green/Hampstead and Highgate/Muswell Hill. In the 1984 edition of the Guide, Greater Manchester had eighteen entries and Birmingham only seven; Hampstead/Golders Green had six entries and HighgatelMuswell Hill only one. Obviously relevant factors, some favourable and some not, which are shared between Manchester and Birmingham include: a manufacturing and commercial centre large enough to make the city a magnet for businessmen from home and abroad; rents and rates which are inevitably high in the city centre but are undercut by unreconstructed cheap property in streets not far away. Most residents work too far from home to return for lunch - which also means, however, that it may be too far to come back into the city centre for dinner. Compared with London, whatever the expense account myths may say, there is little tradition of transacting business in these cities over a meal and a bottle of wine at lunch-time. Nor is there a strong native tradition of catering and service above the teashop and chip-shop level. But both conurbations have high immigrant populations which tend to supply this deficiency. Obviously relevant factors shared between HampsteadiGolders Green and Highgate/Muswell Hill include the fact that both are built on adjacent hills near fine London parks with cultural features
(Kenwood House, Keats’s house, etc.} which bring visitors from all over London, In both districts, stable households of prosperous, upwardly mobile professional people predominate, and there are large shifting populations of young bed-sitter dwellers whose need of meeting places is only partially satisfied by the pubs. These general resemblances are so striking that the presence of interestingly diversified restaurants in one of each pair of localities, and its absence in the other, deserves the attention of social geographers. For instance, how much is attributable to special factors, such as the following: Manchester since the mid-19th century, and Hampstead since the 1930s have both had a strong German/Austrian Jewish element in their culture, which seems to predispose people towards an interest in cooking and a taste for cafe society. Secondly, Lancashire and Cheshire, the counties around Manchester, are dairy-farming areas which have given their names to two famous cheeses. Baking (with Eccles and Chorley cakes) and offal (tripe, chitterlings and black puddings) are also celebrated in the region. Birmingham has no obvious counterparts to these products. Also relevant perhaps is the fact that Lancashire’s tradition is Catholic, Birmingham’s Protestant. Gastronomically, Birmingham’s character, as set out in David Allen’s seminal work, British Tastes, stresses the convenience foods which permit both sexes to make money as fast as possible, consoled by their marked taste for malt vinegar and bottled sauces. The reason for this regional penchant is unknown, though perhaps in pre-freezer days the surpluses or by-products of the horticultural district around Worcester and the brewing district around Burton combined to give the entire Midland region a taste for pickles which is now anachronistic, as well as inimical to serious cooking. In all this, I may have paid insufficient attention to the sheer chances of human settlement and exogamy, which have made Ripon, Eastbourne, Pembroke and Abergavenny, among other towns, places of gastronomic pilgrimage in their time. There is also a clearly established law of economic geography to the effect that two restaurants do better than one, and a cluster do better than two: not many prospective restaurateurs think of opening their own competition down the street even before they have got themselves properly established, but logically that is what they should do when they are colonising a district in which their kind of catering is unfamiliar and alarming. Readers who have been patient so far may care to extend this game to localities large or small with which they are themselves familiar. Oddly, in
169
Viewpoint
Britain very little systematic effort is made by regional tourist boards, local ,town halls or even local newspapers to identify and if necessary correct some of the factors which make it quite certain that foreign or native visitors will be sadly disappointed by the food and drink they consume on their holidays and business trips, and by the edible souvenirs they can take home. Visitors to Britain are expected to rest content with the scenery and culture of the region they select.
Challenges facing the executive a hotel corporation operating in developing countries
of
Ian Graham Sheraton Management Corporation, Denham Place, Village Road, Denham, Uxbridge, Middlesex, U.K.
Are the organisational, marketing, financial and human resource management skills of a hotel manager essentially the same throughout the world, or do these skills differ in both their aspect and emphasis when we look at developing countries? This article will review how political, socioeconomic and human resource factors affect hotel operations in developing countries. It will suggest that the diversity of challenges facing the executive employed in this field should be thoroughly understood at the executive selection stage and that supervision of the executive, together with performance evaluation parameters should continue to recognize these particular factors. Furthermore, hotel management training and development programmes, both at school and corporate levels, must address these issues if the executive is to be equipped to respond appropriately to each situation. Ultimate financial viability and other challenges In many countries hotels have been built as a result of pressure from special interest groups, such as state-owned airline companies and aspiring politicians. Indeed, in some countries we see the hotel industry being used to convert ‘black’ currency into legitimate (‘white’) currency. Elsewhere foreign aid injections may be tied to construction and equipping contracts for infrastructure, including hotel projects. In such circumstances the r&son d’&tre for the hotel will not be to serve any inherent market forces, Int.J.HospitalityManagementVol.3No.4pp. Printed in Great Britain
Nothing can give Wales a rich scatter of 18th century houses, or seduce Manchester’s large Cantonese population away to Birmingham. But what are public promotional organisations for if they cannot help avert the deterioration or disappearance of a local cheese, and make it easier for a really promising restaurateur to open up near a garden or a library or picture collection of national importance, or in an area of outstanding natural beauty?
Thus, all too frequently, hotel executives are assigned to hotels whose ultimate financial viability has never been seriously questioned. Yet it will be to the hotel manager that banks financing the operation will first turn when there are the inevitable shortfalls in debt servicing. Techniques for management of cash flows are seldom addressed by executive development programmes. Procedures to minimize credit and reduce inventories may appear to have little to do with providing an acceptable guest experience, but will be necessary if the next guest is to be able to walk into the lobby. Even when the projected hotel satisfies a perceived need, often over-ambitious construction timetables result in accommodation arriving on the marketplace at the wrong time. Delayed construction can also lead to an exhaustion of initial equity and debt financing with a consequential scramble for expensive bridging funds or cutbacks in specifications. The simplest area to cut back on may be spare-part inventories and backup facilities in the back of the house. The hotel executive will then be forced to prioritize between spending spare funds on completing the hotel or meeting debt repayment schedules. The volatility of currencies can no longer be a surprise to anyone. Yet an executive responsible for marketing strategies including pricing in a country subject to currency softness frequently faces a maze of conflicting interests. Ultimately, revenue must grow at a rate which matches or exceeds the increasing needs of foreign currency to fund imported food, beverage and spare parts. Achievement of such revenue growth has to be each executive’s goal. A plethora of banking structures will face the hotel executive, ranging from the electronic wizardry of computerization to the overly bureaucratic bank and exchange control procedures. The hotel executive has to be able to respond, whatever the situation. Governments have ambivalent attitudes to the hotel industry. Some see it as a necessary precur-
169-17Oi964 0
027B-4319/84$3.00 + 0.00 1984 Pergamon Press Ltd