Food & Beverage : Menu engineering
When the tap is pulled at Marionett Craft Beer House , the puppets “ move around and do their thing .”
MarioNett Craft Beer House ,
Budapest Marriott Hotel
While local , relaxed and refined are among the latest buzzwords in hospitality , Marriott International ’ s Global Chef Brad Nelson says there is no magic bullet that makes a venue cool . So to find innovative new concepts for its hotels around the world , Marriott launched a project called Canvas to “ embrace and uncover and provide creative freedom to entrepreneurs around the world in food and beverage ,” Nelson says .
One of that project ’ s very new and “ hopefully very successful benchmarks ” is the Marionett Craft Beer House at the Budapest Marriott Hotel , which draws on the puppets and puppeteers that are huge slice of central Eastern European culture .
“ We actually kind of discovered this little troupe of puppeteers that were really into theater ,” Nelson says . “ They came up with the idea of doing craft beer in a former storage shed just off the street that was used for 10 years to store boxes . That has been converted on a shoestring budget , with us just giving them the freedom to go and build this .”
Nelson says Marriott “ streamlined the red tape and removed the hurdles that we in the industry often throw at ” third-party operators .
The result , a bar with beer taps that have puppet strings attached to them . When the tap is pulled , the puppets “ move around and do their thing .”
Marionett Craft Beer House has 18 craft beers – all on tap – matched with butcher ’ s choice Hungarian food . Menu items range from a pastrami sandwich or barbeque ribs to mangalica butt in garlicky mustard soak , deer stew or chicken sausage with thyme in tandoori Indian sauce with pfefferoni hot pepper .
Sixteen taps are the permanent selection of local Hungarian small-batch brews , while the other two have an oft-changing offer of import small-batch craft beers from Berlin , London , Prague and other beer capitals of the world .
“ It ’ s really a phenomenal example of how you provide the framework , provide the structure and some of the broader guidance that amazing ideas come to ,” Nelson says .
While this is just one idea , the Canvas program has 14 projects “ with a lot more to come ,” according to Nelson . Another project on tap , Nelson says , is a brick oven pizza restaurant in Baltimore with young woman who grew up in a bakery and then started a pizza trailer with a wood burning oven .
“ It ’ s really kind of a change in F & B mentality , to be less restrictive and to try new things – and be OK if they don ’ t work ,” Nelson says . “ We ’ ve opened 13 , closed three and re-concepted two .” www . hotelsmag . com November 2015 HOTELS 35