Out to lunch

A standard canteen or cafeteria is no longer good enough for the owners and managers of office buildings. The pressure from the competition and increasingly demanding tenants is leading them to open elegant restaurants, fitted like exclusive eateries, in their premises

The time has long passed when staff restaurants were just a place to have a meal. Today they are often the setting for business meetings or the social activities of employees.

Tomasz Kurdziel, Impel Catering’s director for buffets and restaurants, believes that: “This sets a restaurant operator additional tasks, that is the need to ensure a suitable interior décor and layout to avoid any possibility of being mistaken for a typical workers’ canteen.”

Maciej Skórski, Sodexho Polska development’s director, adds that: “This new image of a staff restaurant reflects current market trends and also concerns such things as branding, signing, colour patterns, wall prints, uniforms and – first and foremost – what the menu has to offer.”

Know what you eat

The requirements of tenants who pay rents to the tune of EUR 25 per sqm are extensive, not only for office layouts and the provision of parking and security systems, but there is also the expectation that catering should be of the highest quality. Meals concocted from semi-finished products or delivered exclusively from external sources are no longer acceptable in ‘A’-class office buildings. Meals are cooked on the spot, often in front of the customers.

Grzegorz Rybarski, the non-aviation sales director of LOT Catering, remarks that: “Operators frequently organize special campaigns to attract customers, for instance by holding Asian or French cuisine weeks, during which more exotic dishes are on offer as well as standard meals. And customers are able to not only select a dish, but can also serve it themselves and choose the size of helping they prefer.”

Going the whole hog

 Increasingly exclusive staff restaurants are also appearing in easily accessible places in multi-tenant office buildings and also in restricted access buildings where only a single company operates. The ‘Szklarnia’ (Greenhouse) restaurant in the Topaz building on ul. Domaniewska in Warsaw is Sodexho’s flagship eatery, and which takes its name from the building’s regular rectangular shape and the vegetation inside it.

Maciej Skórski of Sodexho describes the restaurant in more detail: “Apart from that, the restaurant has posters on its walls with green leaves, pot plants and a salad bar offering a multitude of dishes. When we created ‘Szklarnia’, we were guided by the modern-but-comfortable lounge trend.”

The same company manages ‘Stratosfera’ in the nearby Cirrus building on ul. Marynarska, in which the trendy interior design evokes unlimited stratospheric space, while simultaneously encouraging guests to drag themselves away from humdrum daily matters. The walls are decorated with photographs of clouds and airplanes, while the menu and information boards use airport language. LOT Catering also manages general-access exclusive restaurants in the Saski Crescent and Saski Point buildings, among others.

Steep prices

 The question is, however, how much more expensive is it to provide such exclusive restaurants rather than traditional cafeterias.

Tomasz Kurdziel of Impel Catering estimates that it could cost as much as PLN 250,000 to PLN 300,000 once the contract is concluded, reflecting the need to equip the kitchen facilities. The cost of the interior design depends solely on what the designer has in mind and on the size of the operator’s purse.

Grzegorz Rybarski of LOT Catering, while estimating the cost of such a project to be approximately 30 to 40 pct greater, is of the opinion that “the tendency is, when creating such interiors, to move away from ‘cool’ steel and plastic elements to increasingly expensive ‘warm’ wood, often combined with the use of stone.”

Dividing the costs for providing a restaurant between the building manager and catering operator is often a sticking point in their negotiations. The manager usually demands that the catering operator finances the whole cost of adapting the restaurant together with the assembly of the fittings and exclusive interior design and, of course, that it should regularly pay a substantial rent. The operator, of course, frowns at such expenses, the more so as there is usually no competition in such an office building, and so most customers have to come to him for lunch anyway.

Let the level of exclusiveness not be exaggerated

 It seems that such staff eateries will increasingly become similar to exclusive restaurants, with the profitability of the investment being the only restriction on interior designers’ fantasies. So in what direction are staff restaurants going to evolve? What organizational changes will be made? Should waiters be employed? Grzegorz Rybarski of LOT Catering thinks the presence of waiters would slow down the speed of service since the average lunch break for a normal customer is a mere half an hour. And employers surely look unkindly upon those who tend to turn lunch into a kind of festivity – the worker should feel comfortable, but not too comfortable.

Maciej Skórski of Sodexho feels that: “The expectations of customers today are greater and more refined than in the early 1990s. The concept of eating in the workplace grew together with the development of the concept of office buildings which are becoming increasingly ‘smart’. And there is surely not going to be any return to the typical workers’ canteen. We may also expect staff restaurants to become places where diners will start demanding more refined concepts, such as attractive surroundings and health food.”