By Danat Abdrakhmanov, Co-Founder, Nova Chef
Ask most hotel GMs which department quietly loses money, and food and beverage is on the shortlist. Rooms carry the P&L; the kitchen too often drags it. And 2026 has made the maths worse — the rise in employer National Insurance, another lift in the National Living Wage, and a chef shortage that shows no sign of easing have all landed on the same cost line. A growing number of hotels are no longer trimming around the edges. They’re asking a bigger question: how do we restructure the way we deliver food?
It’s the right question. The trouble is that the usual answers all ask you to trade quality for cost.
Every obvious fix costs you something a guest can taste
Trim the menu, and the offer narrows until guests stop bothering. Cut covers or shorten service hours, and room service and all-day dining quietly disappear — along with the revenue and the review scores that came with them. Hand the operation to a third party, and you inherit a different set of problems: quality that varies from week to week, an option that isn’t always available or even practical for your site, and revenue that leaks out of the hotel instead of staying on your own P&L. Or you do nothing, and simply carry the loss into next year’s budget.
Each of these shows up somewhere — in the guest experience, in the online reviews, or in the accounts. None of them actually fixes the problem, because none of them touches what’s really causing it.
The loss is in the model, not the menu
Here’s the reframe worth sitting with: a hotel’s F&B loss is rarely caused by serving good food. It’s caused by the model used to produce it.
A traditional kitchen runs a fixed brigade, cooking from raw, sized for your busiest service — the wedding, the Saturday, the conference. That capacity is a cost you carry seven days a week, whether the covers turn up or not. Hotel demand is peaky by nature; a fixed cost base sitting under peaky, unpredictable revenue is a structural loss waiting to happen. It’s a cost-shape problem, not a menu problem, and no amount of trimming the menu will solve a problem the menu didn’t create.
Which is why the interesting move isn’t to cut the food. It’s to change how the food is delivered.
Quality and simplicity — which usually pull against each other
The reason “restructure F&B” has always meant “accept worse food” is that quality and simplicity have historically been a trade-off. Restaurant-standard food needed a skilled brigade; take the brigade away and standards slipped. You could have one or the other.
That trade-off no longer holds. The model Nova Chef runs with over 60 UK hotels — from independent four-stars to recognised national brands — keeps the culinary skill where it belongs, in a central production kitchen, and moves only the finishing to the hotel. Chef-developed dishes are prepared centrally and finished to order on site by your existing team — no kitchen brigade, no chef on every shift, no skill bottleneck at the point of service. The food is developed by our Culinary Director, a Michelin Guide restaurateur and the founder of The Markets Group and Bisushima; the operation is SALSA-approved. What reaches the guest is genuinely restaurant-quality. What it takes to serve it is genuinely simple.
That combination is the whole point — quality and simplicity, rather than a choice between them.
What it does to the P&L
Take one hotel we work with — a busy, full-service property running breakfast, lunch and a bar-led evening. Its kitchen ran two shifts, 7am to 10pm — a chef team far larger than the food operation actually needed. Nova Chef kept the kitchen on for breakfast and handed everything from midday onward to the existing bar team, who now prepare and finish chef-developed dishes with no chef on site after 11am. Two shifts became one. Kitchen labour fell by 50%, the full lunch, bar and evening offer stayed on, and guest satisfaction held.
At a four-star, 30-room hotel in Scotland the same model went further still: a property that had let its entire kitchen team go — and had been reduced to serving guests cold sandwiches — restored a full hot-food offer run entirely by its front-of-house staff, with no chef back through the door.
The economics behind both are the same. At a cost of roughly £3.10 to £4.50 a cover, and without a chef required at service, a hotel can hold its gross-profit targets while materially reducing payroll — the single biggest line under F&B. And because service no longer depends on who turned up for the shift, the outlets most hotels quietly dropped — room service, all-day dining — become viable again without reopening the rota. The department that was losing money starts earning it.
Where to start
If F&B is a loss on your P&L, the most useful first step costs nothing: work out your true cost per cover — all of it, including the payroll, the agency cover and the vacancies — and put it next to what the same covers would cost delivered a different way. The number is usually a surprise.
The second step is simpler still: taste the food. Nova Chef works with hotels across the UK to do exactly that.