Hospitality Consulting

 Brand & Business Development for the Hospitality Industry

We've been seriously doing the business for our hospitality industry clients in recent years. Clients include Adventure Bars, All Star Lanes, Big Easy, Bill's, Brigadiers, Brighton Pier Company, Camino, City Pub Company, Charlotte’s, Cubitt House, Davy’s, Drake & Morgan, Drafthouse, Darwin & Wallace, Electric Star Pubs, The Groucho Club, I AM DöNER, Iberica, Inception Group, Incipio, InterContinental Hotels, JKS Restaurants, Jolly Fine Pub Co, Kolamba, Laine Pub Co, Market Taverns, Mash Pubs, Mber, Mosaic Pubs & Dining, Nice Bars, Neverland, Temper, Nuala, Old Spot Pub Co., Plonk!, Remarkable Pubs, Rosa’s Thai, Starbucks, Tell Your Friends, Tom Simmons, Thai Leisure Group, Tomahawk Steakhouse, PubLove, Rum Kitchen, Urban Pubs, Urban Village Pubs, Wright & Bell and Whitbread. Our recent focus has been brand story and customer acquisition via face-to-face and digital campaigns that recruit loyal corporate, public sector and residential customers, using the Lunar Lemon Tell Your Story™ method. Campaigns that do the business for our clients, building sales and repeat business across buyouts, group bookings and footfall.

“I’m a big supporter of what you do and how you do it.”

Marketing Director - Rosa’s Thai

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A Foodie One Day

by Craig Melvin

It’s fair to say that food writers mean a lot to me. I was a chef, mentored by Albert Roux, and am now a restaurant consultant and novelist on the fringes of the restaurant literati. My debut novel, ‘The Belle Hotel’ was inspired by AA Gill’s ‘The Ivy’ book. I loved how that book essayed the food I was trained to cook, the people I worked with and served, over the course of twenty-four hours. My novel’s a salty romance set between a listing Brighton hotel and the great restaurants of London, from the seventies until the present day, run by a family with a remarkable resemblance to the Roux dynasty. Michel Roux has given the book his blessing. It’s a foodie ‘One Day’. Fay Maschler recently said this to Nigella Lawson about it:

‘If you are missing restaurants… this is ideal lockdown reading to take you to the soul of one. The agony, the ecstasy, the sauciness. Recognisable characters too. A roman à chef.’

I thought, that’s high praise from Fay. Beautifully put, too. That’s the secret thing restaurant reviewers don’t really get the recognition for… crafting the words. Sure, reportage on the food and ambience is important, street food to multi-site bricks-and-mortar, box-kit and delivery sidelines, blah de blah, but it’s the writing for me, all the way.

In true AA Gill style, I’ve digressed for a couple of paras and will now get to the meat of my piece, a day in my life as a restaurant consultant. It’s a gig I fell into and I’ve worked for pretty much everyone in the hospitality industry… Beefeater, Bill’s, Big Easy, Brigadiers, Brighton Pier… from Soho down to Brighton, I must’ve played ‘em all. That’s just the B’s.  Around the UK, too, for an amazing Thai street food chain and a kind of of inner-city all-day lounge joint. I do Michelin star to backstreet boozers, eating out professionally eight times a week, which makes restaurant reviewing look easy.

Easy, until you consider doing it. Eating a meal and writing a rollicking piece that entertains and offers some sort of critique on the experience, that’s hard. I was born with a serving spoon in my mouth, conceived in the linen cupboard on the third floor of The Grand Hotel, Harrogate. My mum the receptionist, dad, the bell boy. It’s in the blood.  I’ve done thirty years at the coal face of catering, some of them good, some of them bad. Years like days. How about about one perfect day, not long ago…

I got up late and Vespa’d to Bill’s Brighton for breakfast before the ten o’clock train to London, the Larry Olivier special. That’s in my novel, as is the eggs benny I had for breakfast at Bill’s. Soft, crisp-edged muffin, chef-made hollandaise, hand-cut ham and a sprinkling of chives to top it off. Terminating at Charing Cross, I hot-footed it to Kolamba, the Sri Lankan restaurant in Soho and a client, for lunch with Fay.

Lunch with Fay.

It’s not even the first time. That was Quo Vadis, back in the summer, for their fabled smoked eel sarnie. Sitting with Fay, gossiping about the past half-century of an industry I love, relishing the horseradish and pickled pink shallot zing on my tongue. Second time around, I’m becoming blasé about the ripple of anxiety that follows Fay into a dining room. The Kolamba lunch is just for fun, but I know very well what Fay’s written about the place in the past and am just waiting for her take on my favourite dish of theirs, hot butter cuttlefish. Jay and Grace raved about it in their reviews, Fay had mentioned that Kolamba was ‘homestyle’ in a travel piece on Sri Lanka and London’s Sri Lankan restaurant scene. She’d eaten at Kolamba in its opening months and it’d been a shambles. The ‘homestyle’ thing had possibly come to Fay, via a competitor and was perhaps meant in a slightly pejorative way. I was learning that every word matters.

The cuttlefish arrived.

“There’s lime for squeezing over the top, to up the acidity.” I said to Fay, having nicked the line from Jay. What did I think about this dish? It goes on my list of one-plate stop-offs along with Brigadiers’ butter chicken wings and the pastrami, pickles, mustard + dill at Smokestak. Why? Spicing, they import their own smoked curry powder; texture, when cuttlefish is cooked right, it has a squid-gamey bite; touch, I know that head chef Deelipa trained under chef Publis at Mount Lavinia in Colombo, once a chef…

After Fay had left the building, I had a chat with the owners about box kit sales. I’d been recommended to them as a business development consultant by the head of marketing at Dishoom. Corporates, Public Sector, Local Residents, Influencers and Five Star Hotel Concierge activation had all gone well. The roaring Clefs d’Or dinner in the downstairs bar, a golden moment for this son of a bell boy. Kolamba at Home had boomed during lockdown, but I’d not found a shill to shift it in any meaningful way since. An ex-chef of theirs was in the upcoming MasterChef the Professionals. Eureka, maybe that’d do the trick. give me a hook…

Over to The Savoy for a nap in my favourite armchair. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m practically part of the furniture. They probably put up with me because, once in a while, Lunar Lemon take over the Savoy kitchens for Master Chef private events - Gregg Wallace as host and Gordon Ramsay’s head chef teaching the guests to cook.

Then, refreshed, time for a cuppa at the Groucho, where I organise the club’s chef’s dinners. The last two were Nieves Barragan of Sabor and David Carter of Smokestak. It’s thrilling, inviting the chef to cook the event and then seeing them turn up, smelling of lunchtime service, with a bread crate full of prepped bits for the dinner. After Grouchos, a half of vitamin G at The French. Neil Bothwick’s food is… if I had another hundred words, I’d tell you. Then, the last seat in the house for the preview of Cabaret, before a Bleecker double cheeseburger, best London burger, to go and a cold can of Brooklyn Lager for the midnight train home. Life is a cabaret old chum… on this one perfect foodie day.

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Business Development needs great Brand Story.....

We've storied all of the above clients, invented a fictional character for a chain of celeb chef restaurants, written a narrative for Britain's wildest county and London's oldest borough, come up with a concept for a best-selling self-help book and conjured up a poem for a major property development.

Clients include a trillion dollar bank, a penny-a-share NHS spin-out, a Brighton pub company, London’s most successful restaurant group, a global five-star hotel group and a celebrity foodie. 

Brand story is also an integral part of every event and business development campaign we undertake. Craig has recently published a novel set in the hospitality industry. ‘The Belle Hotel’ is the story of three generations at a legendary Brighton hotel. ‘Fantastic Story’ - Gregg Wallace