Ippel’s Wish List 2018

It’s time once again for the wish list of food editor at large Marjan Ippel. What does she hope to see—and what does she not want to encounter—in the hospitality industry in 2018? To quote season II of Netflix hit The Crown (fellow fans know what I’m referring to): 3 stops and 3 starts (+ 1 bonus) for the Dutch hospitality industry in 2018.

Stop

1. With concept restaurants
Soulless, calculated products from the drawing board where no guest truly feels at home or has actually asked to be. It only works if the food is dirt-cheap (there’s a public for it anyway) and attracts only the guests you don’t want at all. Not really.

2. With me-tooing (in the original meaning of the expression, namely copying)
If a vegan snack bar is successful, you can bet your life that sixty others will set up around it. Stupid and, above all, utterly uninteresting. Also stop saying ‘I missed this type of hospitality venue in the city, so I started one myself’, when there are already—as mentioned—60 of the same kind around you, all imagining themselves to be ‘the newest hotspot’. So no, no more burger joints, juice bars and shared-dining concepts.

3. With making things difficult
If you have to explain the purpose of your hospitality establishment, your menu, your shared-dining concept or your reservation system, you have a problem. And I can’t begin to explain what problem…

Ippel’s wish list 2018: no impossible-to-handle cutlery and tableware (bowls!)

Start

1. With thinking from the guest’s perspective (moi)
And not from your wallet or your portfolio (‘we didn’t yet have a vegan snack bar in our portfolio, hence’). The guest is your surest compass. They’re the one who picks up the bill.

2. With meeting a need, not a trend
And what does the guest need? A pleasant place, welcoming, characterful and knowledgeable service, freedom of choice, quality, flexibility. Not chairs you can’t sit on that happen to fit the interior concept so well; food that looks hip and instagrammable but doesn’t taste good, which happens to fit the food concept so well; impossible-to-handle cutlery and tableware (bowls!) that happen to fit the cutlery concept so well, et cetera…

3. With wanting to be the best in your class/category
Not the cheapest, not the trendiest, not the newest hotspot. Only day-to-day quality produces a satisfied guest and takes your establishment to the top. And brings me to your establishment.

Bonus

Come on now, with those tea houses/bars/salons/temples/toko’s/barracks/bazaars. Now that alcohol is increasingly becoming The New Sugar, and the coffee craze has ground to a creaking halt, it really is time for the tea revolution. With loose-leaf quality tea, of course. Make tea, not concepts.