Hospitality industry

“ The hotel was a small one. Dinner would be served for the hotel guests a trifle earlier, so that they might the sooner leave the way clear for me. This had been proposed by Madame Blet herself, the proprietress, and was intended no doubt for a fine piece of hospitality. For me the strict hotel rules were to be slackened; the fine democracy of hotel life, where one guest is as good as another, if he but pay his account, was to be overruled in my favor; for me the sun was to be advanced, and the moon set at a new pace in the heavens! ”

“ Both can present their best foot for three days when a stretch of three weeks would strain its tendons. In an inn food never seems skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent, because the guest never stays long enough to discover sordid secrets, nor long enough to have his own private affairs invaded. Company manners, the outward and visible sign of hospitality’s inward and spiritual grace, can prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that no matter how often one returns, exactly as often one departs. ”

“ Hotel managers, however, have been too prone to treat their business as housekeeping on a big scale. The transition from the small home industry with a few paying guests has been too rapid for adjustment to large scale method and standards. The attention of the hotel management, so far, has been directed toward standards of service to the public. It has only begun to think of standardization of conditions of employment for workers. ”

“ Young, welcomes the coming and speeds the parting guest in the old way of hospitality; takes a practical, helpful interest in his excursions, climbs, and scientific pursuits; and provides a menu that tastes like things one eats at home. Everything in the hotel, which can accommodate 150 guests, is orderly without being mechanical. ”

“ In serving the public, whether it be in the hospital, the college dormitory or the commercial restaurant, the aim should always be to have the food better than that to which the patrons are accustomed.
In almost any kind of food work, and especially in institutional food work, visiting trips to the best hotels, tea rooms, inns, cafeterias and restaurants are invaluable, since they impart a knowledge of the way things are done, which in turn creates a confidence and assurance that nothing else can give. ”

“ The trip of thirty-five miles has shaken breakfast clear down to the pilgrims’ boots. Out of the cars the hungry passengers tumble as frantically as they had clambered in and break for the hotels and restaurants. A dollar pays for a dinner more nearly first-class in price than in quality. The narrow hall leading to the dining-room is crammed with men—Person’s Hotel fed four-hundred a day—waiting their turn for vacant chairs at the tables. ”

“ It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practice-ground for these new social arts. ”

“ One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by its facility to those excesses of hospitality which are such a drain on English incomes; but again that is something of which an outsider can hardly venture to have an opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern hotel and restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are pushing the old-fashioned lodging as well as the old-fashioned hotel out of the general favor, and have already driven them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a level where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species. ”

“ Nowadays, either because the Hotels are more comfortable than in olden times or because the railway system has led to a style of life that calls for less hospitality for travellers, the guest house is more often let to bachelors, who find it easier and cheaper to maintain a small establishment of this sort than the bachelor messes or chummeries of Singapore and Penang. ”

“ We found the prices reasonable for the excellent service afforded, which was equal to that of any New York hotel. The dining-room, on the top of the house, was filled with well-dressed people, and we were glad that we had unpacked our dinner clothes, and appeared less like the usual tourist, in suits and blouses. It was frightfully hot during our two days’ stay. You go out to drive feeling clean and immaculate, and come in with smuts and soot on your face and clothes, looking like a foundry hand. ”

“ The little hotel of the town was a bright and sunny place, like the jovial face of the clean little woman who kept it, and who trotted about talking always—talking to the customers in the taproom, and to the maids in the kitchen, and to the passers-by when she could hail them from the windows; talking, as good-natured women with large mouths and small noses always do, in season and out. ”

“ It only means that the hotels are improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side, came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women should frequent that common entrance. ”

“ Home is the place where the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you are a document in a pigeon-hole—a number, not a person—an accident, not substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management. You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. ”

“ The idea of employing 510 men just to cook food and another 925 just to wait on table, finding need at the same time to call in an average of 3000 waiters a month to help out on banquets, requiring 380 chambermaids 5to make beds and so on, must strike one pretty much as indicative of doing business on a wholesale scale. ”

“ Many are the men-about-town who pride themselves upon their knowledge of the gastronomic art, and talk with loving reflections of the soups, entrées, and what-not, that they have eaten. Most of such men are what may be termed “hotel epicures.” They swallow the dishes served at the fashionable hotels—dishes to the liking of their own palates possibly—smack their lips, pay, and are satisfied. ”

“ Even a well-to-do diner does not always care to be entirely at the mercy of the head waiter in the making-up of his bill. But it is the multiplying of the brasseries that is chiefly responsible for the decline of the high-priced restaurants, and another dangerous [253] rival that has helped to bring it about is the palatial, up-to-date hotel. Some of these hotels employ as good chefs as the leading restaurants and offer as abundant opportunities for sumptuous and savory repasts, at prices tall enough to please the most reckless visitor from New York or Buenos Ayres. ”

“ There was no such thing as a restaurant; each one by turn must do his own cooking in the inn kitchen, open to all. We, of course, were expected to carry our own provisions and do our own culinary work like any other respectable travelers. This we had frequently done before where restaurants were not to be found. Many a time we would enter an inn with our arms filled with provisions, purchased at the neighboring bazaars, take possession of the oven and cooking utensils, and proceed to get up an American meal, while all the time a hundred eyes or more would be staring at us in blank amazement. ”

“ Last to be named, but by no means least in importance, the city has a number of fairly good hotels and restaurants, the latter much superior to the former. Hotels are not only a strong indication of the social refinement of a people, or of the want of it, but they are of great importance as regards the commercial prosperity of a large community. ”

“ Fashions in nomenclature linger long, and even now in old-established inns and hotels, the Coffee-room still exists, but has paradoxically come to mean a public combined dining- and [Pg 276] sitting-room for private guests, in contradistinction from the Commercial-room, to which commercial travellers resort, at a recognised lower tariff. ”

“ As we wend our way through the town, we pass dozens of miserable, filthy little hotels, in any of which we can procure a bad meal for a dollar. A palatable dinner in one of the more respectable hotels will cost us twice that amount. We shall be considerably amused at the queer and unique canvas signs nailed over the doors of some of the dirty little huts and shanties around us. ”

“ The following extract from a hotel manager’s pamphlet on the running of big hotels gives some idea of the problems of labor management: “The operation of a single metropolitan hotel is too complex an undertaking to be likened to a gigantic piece of housekeeping. When it comes to running a group of six of the largest hotels in the world ... the performance becomes of colossal size. ”

“ These bills of fare will be sown broadcast over the country in letters to friends and kept as souvenirs. If, instead of all this senseless superfluity, I were allowed to give a table d’hôte meal to-morrow, with the chef I have, I could provide an exquisite dinner, perfect in every detail, served at little tables as deftly and silently as in a private house. I could also discharge half of my waiters, and charge two dollars a day instead of five dollars, and the hotel would become (what it has never been yet) a paying investment, so great would he the saving. ”

“ As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d'hôte shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year's full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these Sittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship. One gets unsettled, depressed, and inclined to be querulous. ”

“ The style of work required for the American plan hotel with table d'hote meal, and that for the European plan hotel restaurant, where each article is sold for a separate price, has brought about a demand for a book with recipes and methods especially adapted for the preparation of bakery and pastry goods for individual sale. ”

“ Friends are remembered. The father and mother, brother and sister over the water are not forgotten; and likewise the maids are not forgotten by their employer. The dining-hall is wreathed in holly, the table is loaded with all the season's delicacies. Trade is dull in the hotel, and the time is given over to enjoyment. ”

“ Instead of three or four cheerless, barrack-like caravansaries with sodden cookery, there was a score of modern hotels, the proprietors of which vied with one another in their endeavors to lure patronage by costly and sumptuous innovations. There were comfortable and inviting restaurants. The slap-dash luncheon counter, with its display of pallid pie and one cadaverous chicken, was waning in the popular esteem, in favor of neat spas, at which the rush of patronage was alleviated by clean service and wholesome fare. ”

“ The hotel accommodation cannot be commended. The food one gets is simply execrable; but doubtless all this will soon be changed. I am told that a wealthy company has now obtained leases for hotels, and the public may hope next year to be better fed and better lodged than they have been in the past. The hotel charges at present are four dollars a day. ”

“ In a climate of this sort the jaded city-dweller, searching for health and rest, finds an ideal environment, and while the hotels are not the equals of the fashionable New York and London hostelries, they are comfortable and moderate in price ”

“ These are the real hotels of the country, where one lives bountifully for six to eight francs a day, and eats at the table d’hôte with an informative commercial traveller, or a keenly mindful small landholder of the country-side, who, if it is market-day, will as like as not be dressed in a black blouse. ”

“ It certainly is quieter and in some respects more comfortable than a hotel, but it goes against the grain for any one accustomed to the good breakfasts, the hearty lunch, and the excellent dinners of an American hotel of the better class, to have to pay for a drink of ice-water, and to be told that the landlady cannot give him soup and fish on the same day unless her pay is raised. ”

“ He should know that the best results are obtained from his help by kindness, and that good food and good beds mean better service.
The manager should realize that the working force of a hotel is like the mechanism of a clock: it has to be wound occasionally and set going. No novice can operate this wonderful piece of mechanism; it requires a skilled mechanic.
The proprietor of a hotel should be a good loser; for there are periods of the year when the employes outnumber the guests, and the balance-sheet shows a heavy loss. ”

“ The leading hotel, the Penn Harris, was turning away guests; so we were made very comfortable at the Senate. Here the café was miserable, but we went to the restaurant of the Penn Harris and had an excellent dinner at moderate prices. We have found that at the largest, best hotels the food was better cooked and much cheaper than at the smaller ones. Usually we had excellent club breakfasts from forty cents up, and club lunches, with an ample selection of good things to eat, for fifty or sixty cents. You may pay more for your room and bath, but you get more for your money, with better service. ”