Who I help · Hotels and guest houses
Help with the food and drink side of small hotels and inns
Country inns with rooms, boutique hotels, and guest houses with a dining room. If your restaurant, bar, breakfast, or functions are not paying their way, that is my trade.
In-person sessions are booked at least ten working days ahead.
How can a small hotel make its food and drink pay?
Treat the restaurant and bar as businesses in their own right, not as amenities that come with the rooms. Cost every dish, keep the menu to what the kitchen can cook well for the covers you actually do, and staff to the real pattern of the day: a busy breakfast, a quiet lunch, and a dinner that depends on who is staying. Win local guests who are not staying the night, price packages so the food and drink earns its share, and know what each function makes before you agree to it.
Atelier Sawyer works with small hotels, inns, and guest houses across the UK on their food and drink.
What I do, and what I do not
I have spent more than 30 years running restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs, and nightclubs. I have run a hotel only once, for a week, as emergency cover while I was working for Mitchells & Butlers, so I will not pretend to be a hotelier.
What I bring to a hotel is everything that happens in its restaurant, bar, breakfast room, and function space: the menu, the margins, the team, the service, and the marketing. If your problem is room rates, occupancy, or how you sell rooms online, you need a hotel revenue specialist, and I will tell you so.
What I see in hotel restaurants and bars
- A dining room for residents only: full when the hotel is full, empty when it is not, and invisible to the town around it.
- Breakfast labour: a team rostered for a full house on a half-full morning.
- A menu built for a restaurant ten times the size: long, ambitious, and wasteful for twenty covers a night.
- A bar that only serves guests: a lovely room that locals have never heard of.
- Packages priced on guesswork: dinner, bed, and breakfast offers where nobody knows what the dinner actually costs.
- Functions that look busy and earn little: weddings and parties priced to win the booking, not to make money.
- Chefs: hard to find, hard to keep, and harder still in a rural kitchen.
How I help hotels and inns
| If you… | Start with |
|---|---|
| Know the food and drink is not paying, but cannot see why | A Hospitality Health Check, £495 |
| Need help fixing it, month by month | Run, £795 a month |
| Are opening or relaunching a restaurant or bar in your hotel | Plan, £495 a month, or a Pre-Opening Diagnostic, £695 |
| Want locals to know your restaurant and bar exist | Promote, £745 a month |
| Are fighting your till or your table bookings | Digitise, from £2,950 |
| Need a website for your restaurant, bar, and events | Websites, from £3,250 |
Food and drink that earns its keep
The most underused asset in many small hotels is the dining room on a night when the hotel is quiet. Local guests do not need a room to eat in your restaurant or drink in your bar; they need a reason, and to know you are there.
A worked example: twenty extra local covers on a Friday night, at £35 a head, is £700 a night, or more than £36,000 a year from one evening a week. That is not a promise, but it shows why non-resident trade matters.
The rest is the same discipline as any restaurant: a menu sized to your real covers, every dish costed, cash margin at the top of the wine list, a team rostered to the actual pattern of the day, and functions priced to make money, not just to fill the diary.
Frequently asked questions
Our hotel restaurant loses money. Should we close it to non-residents?
Usually the opposite. A dining room that serves only residents is full when the hotel is full and empty when it is not, and the empty nights still need a chef. Opening to locals is what fills the quiet nights. If it still cannot earn its keep with them, consider a shorter menu, fewer evenings, or a strong breakfast and an arrangement with a good restaurant nearby.
How do I get local people to eat in my hotel restaurant?
Make it feel like a restaurant, not a hotel dining room: its own name or identity, its own entrance if you can, a menu people want to talk about, and marketing aimed at the town rather than your residents. A website and a Google profile for the restaurant itself help locals find it, and a regular local night gives them a reason to come back.
Can you help with room rates and occupancy?
No. That is the work of a hotel revenue specialist, and I will say so rather than guess. I work on everything to do with food and drink: the restaurant, the bar, breakfast, and functions. If the food and drink is losing money, I can help with that. If the rooms are, I will point you to someone who knows rooms better than I do.
Talk it through
A free 30-minute call will tell us both whether I can help, and where to start. If what you need is a hotel specialist, I will tell you that too.
In-person sessions are booked at least ten working days ahead.