Extra Virgin
Whoever heard of hiring an airport clubhouse for a party? The Virgin Atlantic food and beverage (F&B) team were certainly caught off guard when, at the opening of their newest Upper Class clubhouse, several local guests made enquiries about booking it. What perhaps makes the request stranger is that the airport serves San Francisco - a city that's hardly short of trendy restaurants and party venues.
What makes it understandable, however, is that this is not a mushroom-coloured, hushed tones, airport lounge-type of clubhouse; it's a $2.8m (£1.9m), designer, pink, mauve, electric blue (left) and bright red one. More importantly, it serves restaurant-style food. In short, it's a product of the airline industry's fight for first-class passengers.
San Francisco is host to Virgin Atlantic's tenth clubhouse, designed to support the £37m overhaul of its Upper Class aircraft cabins, which began a year ago. Like other clubhouses, Virgin Atlantic's are free to first-class passengers, offering IT services, shower facilities and beauty treatments. They are the value-added extra that helps justify an Upper Class return ticket price of as much as £6,000 from Heathrow to San Francisco. More importantly, they help seduce customers away from other airlines.
"The money is made in the front of the aeroplane," explains Clare Bacchus, Virgin Atlantic's clubhouse F&B executive. "Clubhouses build customer loyalty. It's a tight market. People fly with us because of things like this."
Even so, there's stiff competition from airlines such as BA and Cathay Pacific. In a bid to differentiate its clubhouses, and woo passengers who can clearly afford to eat in top restaurants, Virgin Atlantic made a decision two years ago to focus on food. That's where Bacchus comes in - her background as a chef and her appointment, along with that of her boss, Upper Class development manager Steve Pette, who also has a hospitality background, reflects this. Together, they handle the £5m budget for ground catering.
"Virgin Atlantic realised that it needed to look for more hospitality-based professionals from the industry, which is why I was recruited and thus brought Clare in," says Pette. "We couldn't run an airport, but we are specialised in food."
The food at the San Francisco clubhouse bears this out. In devising the menu, Bacchus spent months visiting local restaurants. She also worked closely with Restaurant Associates, a division of Compass, which was awarded the $350,000 (£218,000)-a-year cost-plus catering contract. Initially running for a year, this contract marks the first time that Virgin Atlantic has used a commercial rather than an in-flight caterer at a clubhouse outside the UK (where Baxter & Platts holds the contract). It was a conscious move, again reflecting the airline's new-found faith in restaurant expertise.
Bacchus's criterion is that the food should be good enough to win awards. It also has to hold its own against the food in airport restaurants such as Shanghai Qi, created by the founders of several well-known Californian hotspots, including the Long Life Noodle Company. The resulting menu mirrors ‘Frisco tastes and so is lighter and healthier than at Heathrow. Among the six small-plate options is the clubhouse's signature dish, Dungeness crab and shiitake spring rolls with miso honey and lime sauce. The four large-plate offerings include roasted duck on corn fritters, balanced with a scallion slaw. Ingredients are locally sourced and, where possible, organic, and the dishes themselves are fashionably presented - which means tall.
Compared with Virgin Atlantic's other clubhouses, the budget of £16-£18 per head at San Francisco is relatively high. This is because there's only one flight a day in the winter, rising to two in the summer, so the maximum number of customers is unlikely to climb beyond 100. At Heathrow, which sees 500 passengers a day, the budget is £4-£5 a head. It's $13 (£9) at JFK in New York and £3 in Tokyo.
Regardless of the budget, culinary brilliance in airport kitchens is inevitably hampered by safety restrictions. At San Francisco there are, for instance, rules against cooking with full flames, and all the crockery, cutlery and glassware had to be approved by the US government's Food and Drug Administration.
Similarly, San Francisco airport is no different from any other in that rents are hefty and space is at a premium. Despite this, the kitchen in the new clubhouse is better equipped than that at Heathrow, where Baxter & Platts staff wrestle with two microwaves and a toaster. The kitchen is still small, but it was designed so that the three chefs can work side-by-side. Ironically, though, the need to keep costs down meant that Bacchus opted for an on-site cooling system, further sacrificing space. As a result, most of the food has to be prepared offsite and finished in the kitchen. On the plus side, turnaround time is five to eight minutes. "We are looking at dishes we can regenerate, but we don't compromise quality for variety," says Bacchus.
As all the food and drink is free, there's no bottom line, nor tangible profit. This makes it difficult for Bacchus, with her roots in hospitality, to gauge success. One good sign, she reckons, is that regular travellers are turning up an hour or so before they need to check in. She also points out that long-haul passengers seem to prefer to eat on the ground and sleep in the air. This trend has gathered momentum throughout all the clubhouses since the introduction last year of reclining beds and Freedom dining, whereby passengers on board can order food whenever they feel like it. Ultimately, it will help to reduce in-flight food wastage (see below). "Take-up [in the clubhouse] is dictated by flight times, but consumption is much higher than expected," says Bacchus.
She is confident that Virgin Atlantic is ahead of the competition at the moment, "Other airlines, such as BA, do the Freedom feeding but don't continue it on the ground," she says. "BA has a small à la carte menu, and Cathay does it, but only in Hong Kong. We have a full back-of-house kitchen and a full front of house with house cocktails. You are walking into a restaurant."
Initial impressions of the clubhouse are certainly dramatic. First, there's the bar - a bank of electric-blue glass - and then there's the room itself, which on a sunny day is bathed in light. While heat-gain could have made this a problem, the designers turned it to their advantage by covering the room-length windows with sheets of tinted glass in blues, lavenders and pinks that throw shafts of multicoloured light across the floor. The glass is movable, which means that these tricks of light can be changed when the bar staff get bored. And, in deference to the fact that San Francisco records as many as 15 earth tremors a week, it's seismically engineered - as, in fact, is the entire airport.
The design, which will be refreshed in three years' time and redone after six, is in sync with both liberal, creative San Francisco and the cool, successful media and film types who travel on Virgin Atlantic. It also reflects the service style, which is friendly rather than formal.
Not all is perfect, however. Limited space at the airport means that the clubhouse is situated landside, so passengers must leave time to clear themselves through airport security. Space considerations, along with fewer flights, also mean that there are fewer facilities in the San Francisco clubhouse compared with, say, Heathrow. So, technology is low key, with just two PCs available, and compared with the 18 showers at Heathrow's arrivals clubhouse, Revivals, San Francisco's three might seem rather scant.
What may have been a poor deal, however, has turned into a good one. It's likely, for instance, that because of the lack of cheap space other airlines will find it more economic to pay to use the Virgin clubhouse for their passengers. Virgin, meanwhile, can exploit the fact that it is landside and also use the facilities as an arrivals lounge.
As for whether the team will consider hiring the clubhouse out, Bacchus is circumspect. She points out that there would be problems if, for instance, a flight was delayed when a party was booked. On the other hand, as there's currently only one Virgin Atlantic flight a day into San Francisco from Heathrow, she's clearly warming to the fact that the extra business would be a welcome as well as unexpected potential source of income.
As she concedes: "It's a £2.8m venue that only 50 people see a day."
In-flight Upper Class service
Virgin Atlantic's in-flight Freedom service, whereby Upper Class passengers can order from a comprehensive menu whenever they want, has been running for just over a year. Stewardesses cook the pre-prepped food to order in convection steam ovens and then plate it. A "skateboard", or extra work surface, in the galley even gives them enough space to re-create the "tall" dishes currently served in fashionable restaurants.
However, take-up on board has dropped as passengers realise that they can eat on land in the restaurant-style clubhouses and then snooze their way across the Atlantic on the aircraft's new reclining seats.
In the long run, Bacchus reckons that this trend could help reduce food wastage on flights, which runs at about 25%. Any food that goes on to an aircraft has to be ditched at the other end if it is not eaten, but Bacchus reckons that by investing in clubhouse kitchens and qualified staff, Virgin Atlantic will be able to entice more passengers to eat before they board. This will make it easier to reduce in-flight take-up and cut wastage.
"We need to control [waste] and monitor costs," says Bacchus. "We need to look at the way menus are engineered and what is selling and not selling."
FACTS
Virgin Atlantic San Francisco clubhouse
Design
VA design manager: Dee Cooper
VA designer: Hilary Clark
Architect: Eight inc, San Francisco
Kitchen consultant: Muller Design Associates, Burlingame, California
Cost: $2.8m (budget, $3.1m)
Opened: January 2001
Food
Upper Class development manager: Steve Pette
Clubhouse food and beverage executive: Clare Bacchus
Catering: Restaurant Associates
Contract value: $350,000 (£218,000) a year
Budget: £16-£18 a head
Customer numbers: 50 in winter (one flight a day); 100 in summer (two flights)
San Francisco airport
81% of the city's annual 4.2 million visitors arrive by air.
The median age of visitors to San Francisco is 37.
44% of visitors come for leisure purposes, the rest are on business.
SFO is the ninth-busiest airport in the world, and the number of international passengers is expected to increase from. seven million in 1999 to 12 million in 2006.
Journey time from San Francisco to the airport, via Bay Area Rapid Transit, is just 29 minutes.
SFO is the only airport in the USA to be accredited as a museum by the American Association of Museums.
The clubhouse bar (above) and lounge (below)
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 15-21 March 2001
