There is a particular kind of hotel restaurant that you will recognise the moment you walk in. The name is evocative. The logo is beautifully considered. The lighting is exceptional. There are candles in unexpected places and the menu is printed on something that feels like it was rescued from an archive.

And then you sit down. And you realise that nobody has thought very hard about who you are.

I have spent nearly thirty years in exceptional hospitality. I have opened restaurants, developed F&B concepts, watched them land well and watched them fail. I am not cynical about hotel concepts. Done properly, a strong F&B concept is one of the most powerful commercial tools a property has. It creates a reason to visit beyond the room rate. It builds a local audience. It gives the hotel a story that travels.

But something has gone wrong with how the industry thinks about them. And it usually comes down to one question that never gets asked.

Who is this for?

When the concept arrives first

The most visible failure mode is the one where the name, the story and the Instagram aesthetic are all decided before anyone has thought seriously about the food.

The hotel speakeasy is the clearest example. Hidden bar, accessed through a bookcase. Cocktails with prohibition-era names. Atmospheric, instagrammable, occasionally very well executed. Also, in most cases, completely disconnected from where it actually exists. The hotel opened in 2019. It is in Edinburgh or Warsaw or the Cotswolds. The story was written by an agency and approved in a boardroom.

Guests who visit once find it charming. Guests who come back begin to feel the seams.

This is not a problem with concepts. It is a problem with borrowed stories — identity assembled from a mood board rather than drawn from something real.

When the food arrives first

The second failure mode is less discussed and in some ways more honest. The hotel decides what it wants to serve. A steakhouse. A sushi bar. Modern Cantonese. Something international, something considered, something that signals ambition.

The food is thought about seriously. The sourcing is right. The chef is good. The execution is there.

But nobody asked whether this restaurant belongs in this hotel, for these guests, in this place.

A steakhouse is a fine thing. But a steakhouse in a spa hotel built around stillness and restoration is a category confusion. A modern Cantonese restaurant is extraordinary in the right context — and completely adrift in a rural lodge whose entire identity is rooted in the landscape outside the window.

The cuisine was chosen because someone liked it, or because it seemed to work somewhere else, or because it ticked an international box on a development checklist. Not because it answered the question.

When nobody asks the question at all

Both failure modes share the same root. The hotel itself does not have a clear enough identity to anchor the decision.

A property that knows who it is — what it stands for, who it is built for, what experience it is genuinely trying to create — makes F&B decisions from that centre outward. The concept emerges from the identity. The cuisine reflects the landscape or the guest or the obsessions of the person who built the place. The restaurant feels like a resident, not a tenant.

A property that does not know who it is reaches for concepts to fill the gap. And no concept, however beautifully executed, can substitute for the thinking that should have come first.

This is not an argument against ambition

I love a strong F&B concept. I have spent years developing them, arguing for them, defending them to owners who wanted something safer. When they land well they change a business entirely.

But the question is never: what should we serve? Or: what should we call it? Or: what does the logo look like?

The question is always: who is this for? And does this — the food, the story, the atmosphere, the name — answer that question honestly?

In that order. Always in that order.

Laurence Wall is the founder of Studio Cicely, a brand and digital studio for exceptional hospitality properties. He has spent nearly thirty years conceiving, shaping and operating hotels, restaurants and F&B concepts across the UK and beyond.