When the Restaurant Started Paying the Rent

For most of casino history, food was a subsidy. You fed people cheaply so they stayed on the floor. The archive records the point at which that stopped being true, and — more usefully — what it did to the plan.

The change, stated by the people who made it

The industry roundtable in The Brave New World of Design and Construction contains the causal claim: Hip boutique hotels and restaurants with celebrity chefs have been the impetus for this change. And the timescale, from the same panel: In the past 10 to 15 years in Las Vegas we have seen an increase in the high-profile retail venue and celebrity chef restaurant.

Read as a design statement rather than a market one, that means food and beverage stopped being an internal amenity and became a reason to come to the building — which immediately changes where it can go.

The plan consequence: F&B leaves the basement

The boldest example in the archive is the Cosmopolitan, in Metro-Gaming: Most daring was the plan to put the Cosmopolitan's signature restaurants on the third floor of the podium, an element that flew in the face of conventional Las Vegas wisdom.

Conventional wisdom put restaurants where they would intercept a guest already on the gaming floor. Putting them three levels up assumes the restaurant generates its own trip — vertical circulation, its own service route, its own identity from the street. That is a different building.

The counter-case is just as instructive. Tough Decisions describes a restaurant in the Bellagio retail corridor, next to the valet entrance, whose patio flaunt[s] the establishment's unfair advantage of overlooking the Fountains at Bellagio — an obvious driver of traffic. Location still wins when the location is that good.

Three formats, three sets of drawings

• The signature restaurant. Named chef, own front door where possible, own brand. Bergman Walls & Associates' portfolio lists signature restaurants such as Guy Savoy, Rao's and Trader Vic's alongside nightclubs — the same practice, the same building, a completely different design standard from the buffet.
• The buffet and food court. Still the volume business at regional properties. Let It Rock records a VIP players lounge, a buffet restaurant and food court, with kitchens in both the 400-seat buffet restaurant and food court fitted with up-to-date culinary equipment. Four hundred seats is a back-of-house problem before it is a dining-room problem.
• The resort draw. At the top of the market F&B sits alongside the attractions. The Art of the Resort, on Marina Bay Sands, notes that beyond SkyPark and the ArtScience Museum, the celebrity chef restaurants, events center and theater have been tremendous draws — and that as a MICE-led integrated resort, there is so much more to Marina Bay Sands than just the gaming aspect.

What the archive says about getting it wrong

Asian Appeal reduces the decision to a single instruction in a list of planning questions: Decide whether your next restaurant should feature a celebrity chef. It is a cost question. A named chef brings a fee, a fit-out standard, a kitchen specification and a brand agreement, and repays it in covers and in the property's ability to be written about.

The failure mode appears in Finding an Alternate Path, framed as a market-sizing question: Are there enough parking garages and food court venues to satisfy the market? A regional property that copies a resort F&B programme builds capacity it cannot fill, and capacity in food is expensive: kitchens, grease, ventilation, loading, cold storage and staff.

The back of house is the real project

Every one of the shifts above lands on the same set of drawings. A signature restaurant on an upper floor needs a dedicated service lift and a route that never crosses a guest. A 400-seat buffet needs a kitchen sized for peak, not average. A patio overlooking a water feature needs weather strategy, acoustics and an outdoor service point. None of this is visible in the photograph that sells the project, and all of it is set before the interior designer starts.

That is the actual lesson of fourteen stories: when food and beverage became a draw, the hardest part of casino design moved from the gaming floor to the corridor behind it. More at Design Index: food hall and in Hotel & Hospitality.