The Anchor Effect – Hotels Used to Compete on Rooms. Now They Compete on Restaurants.

For decades, F&B inside hotels was infrastructure. A tick-box amenity. Something guests tolerated before leaving to find somewhere worth eating.

That era is over.

In Dubai, Singapore, Sydney and London, the on-site restaurant is no longer the support act. It has become the cultural anchor of the entire asset. The thing people book for, return for, and tell others about.

Through our work building and running Table For, the F&B creative studio developed with Accor Pacific, the shift is unambiguous: the hotels that define the next decade will not be remembered for thread count or lobby finishes. They will be remembered for the gravitational pull of what happens downstairs.

From ROI to ROE

For most of hospitality’s history, the logic was clean. More heads in beds equaled more revenue. Occupancy, ADR, RevPAR. The metrics were universally understood.

Those metrics still matter. But the better question now is: what is the Return on Experience?

ROE reframes F&B from cost centre to value driver. The proof is concrete: 60% of high-end travellers now prioritise dining quality when choosing a hotel, correlating directly with a 40% lift in positive reviews and measurable ADR growth. A restaurant that carries a genuine point of view doesn’t just fill seats. It enhances the perceived value of every room above it. A dining destination that draws locals also stabilises revenue, insulating the asset against economic, geopolitical and seasonal volatility that hotels relying solely on transient tourism remain exposed to. 

Return on Experience is emotional capital translated into financial value. A restaurant with soul drives earned media, builds community, and shapes how a property is perceived from the outside. 

A restaurant without one simply occupies square metres.

Designing for Meaningful Friction

We are living through what might fairly be called the Anti-Social Century. Algorithms flatten experience. Technology has made life smoother and quietly eroded the unplanned moments that create genuine connection.

The opportunity for hotel owners is not to become a better third space. It is to become a modern village centre. This requires intentional social design: a listening bar with a devoted music following, a café anchored by a running club, a dining room synonymous with a particular creative cohort. Communal tables, visible kitchens, service rituals designed to be seen. These create Meaningful Friction. Moments a frictionless algorithm can never anticipate and never replicate.

Belonging outlasts novelty every time.

The Specificity Mandate

The age of anonymous all-day dining is behind us.

Audiences can identify generic from the street. They want to feel a place was made for them, not assembled for everyone. In our work, this means we don’t build concepts. We build narratives. Not “Italian restaurant in a hotel lobby.” But: what precise cultural moment are we inhabiting?

At Bar Allora in Sydney, the creative direction centred on post-war Milanese optimism: Italian Futurism, the velocity of 1950s espresso culture, a city rebuilding itself and believing in its future. At El Vista, the lens was 1960s Acapulco glamour: jet-set nostalgia, champagne sunsets, a very specific kind of beautiful recklessness. These references informed not only the menus but the music, the lighting, the service choreography, the uniforms, the storytelling.

The best operators in Europe are doing the same. Broadwick Soho’s Dear Jackie collides the opulent dolce vita of 1950s Italy with the gritty underground theatricality of 1970s Soho. NoMad London’s Side Hustle weaponises the tension between stiff British heritage architecture and the agave-fuelled energy of a cantina. In Dubai, Krasota inside the Address Downtown built a 20-seat gastro-theatre where every course is a chapter in a meticulously constructed narrative, synchronised with 360-degree digital storytelling. Each of these venues succeeded because they chose a cultural position and committed to it. Without compromise.

Specificity generates memorability. In a market where a brand must either operate with ruthless efficiency or deliver genuine cultural value, neutrality is the fastest route to irrelevance. 

Scale Meets Insurgent Creativity

Traditional hotel F&B structures default toward compromise. Multiple stakeholders, committee-driven decisions, a brief designed to offend no one. The result is a venue that resonates with no one either.

The model that works pairs corporate scale with insurgent creativity. In the Table For model, independent operators with established cultural capital collaborate with institutional hospitality groups. Accor provides the infrastructure and scale; creative partners bring authorship, credibility, and communities that already exist. Hotels with culturally relevant dining consistently see an 18.6% boost in RevPAR growth. Our launch of Flaminia with Giovanni Pilu at Pullman Quay Grand Sydney demonstrated the principle directly: working with operators who already carry a local following removes the cold-start risk and guarantees an audience before the doors open.

The goal is to launch a market-leading destination that happens to be inside a hotel. Not another hotel restaurant that happens to have a name. 

The Invisible Concierge

The Anchor Effect now extends well beyond the physical venue.

We are shifting from Search Engine Optimisation to Agent Engine Optimisation. The next generation of guests will not search “best restaurants in Bangkok.” They will instruct an AI agent to plan a dinner for three that feels like 1970s Paris but uses local Thai ingredients. The agent will surface venues with the narrative richness to satisfy that brief, and ignore every generic venue that cannot. 

Generic is invisible to the algorithm. A venue’s digital presence must be as distinctive as its physical one. This demands structured storytelling: the venue’s ethos, the chef’s philosophy, the cultural references, the sourcing decisions. We call this Narrative Seeding, ensuring the AI recalls and recommends your specific story, not a category description. 

The transaction must also evolve. Technology should deepen personal connection, not flatten it. An AI-triggered invitation for a guest’s favourite wine vintage. A playlist sent the morning after dinner. These are not gimmicks. They are the difference between a transaction and a relationship. 

The Pull

Hotels that will define the next era measure atmosphere as carefully as they measure occupancy. They invest in chefs as strategic partners, not tenants. They understand that the dining room is not a service. It is a position.

In a market saturated with beautifully designed bedrooms, the differentiator is no longer thread count. It is cultural gravity.

The future of hotels will not be defined by the pillow.

It will be defined by the pull.