Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 7, 1993 TAG: 9304070149
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
HOTEL MANAGER HAS RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
Martin Smith was a teen-ager living with his parents and trying to figure out his future when he applied for a job as a surveyor in the copper mines of southern Africa.His father had worked in the industry for years, donning an asbestos suit and using an air tank to inspect and re-line the insides of copper smelters in Zambia and Botswana. Martin had accompanied him more than once on trips into the bowels of the earth.
Smith got the job. But one thing bothered him before he started: his memory of how he hated being below ground.
Martin decided to go down one last time before doing it for money. The farther he descended, the more his discomfort rose.
"I said, `Forget this!' " Smith, 28, exclaims. His father thereupon decreed that he should go to college.
Thus began the winding path that, in November, deposited the British-born rugby enthusiast at the Roanoke Airport Marriott for the second time in five years. His title this time is food and beverage manager, and his main mission is to mine the valley's populace for customers for its two restaurants, Remington's and Lily's, and its lounges, the quiet Whispers and the once lively Charades.
"Charades is the part we've got to build up," Smith says, frankly, with his British accent. After ranking as one of the valley's hottest nightspots only a few years ago, the lounge has grown chilly.
Remington's offers a different challenge. Up until now, "We had plodded along without an identity, and I didn't know what our focus was," Smith says.
(Actually, it did have an identity, as a dressy, upscale, special-occasion kind of place with prices to match.)
"What we're trying to do is re-position it as a restaurant that has very fine food but is not expensive, nor is it for special occasions only," says Herman Turk, the hotel's general manager.
To that end, Smith, his chef Kim Myers, and line cooks Charles Chopin and Matt Congleton are revamping the menu and the service. Once dotted with items French, Cajun and the like, it now features potato encrusted salmon with wild mushrooms ($17.95); talapia saffron, a seafood dish, ($16.95); tuna in fennel ($18.95); a couple of fettuccines and a veal chop (at $21.95, the highest price). Eventually, Smith hopes to offer four or five dishes regularly with that many specials each night.
The goal is "to bring new culinary things to the valley," he says. "We're a fresh house. Everything is fresh. Nothing is frozen."
Remington's doesn't have a dress code - never did, Turk says - and its waitpeople have been taken out of tuxedos and, for now, put into less dressy attire. Soon they will begin to sport some more casual outfits to reduce the seeming formality.
Success will be judged by the numbers. Remington's, with its seating capacity of 52, has been drawing in the teens on many weeknights and in the 30s on weekends. Smith wants the crowds to hit and stay at 40 to 50. That way, the atmosphere is enhanced, he says.
"It's a long, slow, building process."
Employee empowerment, a current buzz-phrase, is part of the strategy. One innovation: allowing waitpeople to resolve food and service problems at the table, without sending for the management.
The idea is to give "a good finish" to customers who've gotten off to a bad start.
The problem with Charades is more basic.
"Bars go in cycles," Smith says. "It got in a downward spiral. . . . It was not a relaxed atmosphere. The last thing you want to have is tension."
Turk expounds: "I think it wore itself out, and people just got tired of it and chose to find another spot to go to."
Some of those spots offer country music, the current rage. Charades lacks the big dance floor found at clubs like Valley Country ("To compete with them is suicide," Smith says), so it won't go fully into country. But in April, the club will begin to offer recorded uptown country music on Wednesday nights, plus individual dance instruction.
Happy hours also will get a boost, with improved food, weekly cash giveaways and a steady diet of classic rock 'n' roll, meaning music from Seger, Springsteen and other mainstays.
Friday nights from 6 to 9 already feature a celebrity deejay of sorts - Mac McCadden, a Roanoke City Councilman.
Smith and his staff have listened to suggestions for improving Charades from seven focus groups of potential customers, and they've learned a lot.
"You've got to try and do something," he says. "You've got to swing the bat to hit a home run."
With shoulders so broad they seem to fill his office in what used to be the Charades coatroom, he looks like he can reach the fence, if he connects. In any case, he is swinging hard and enjoying the effort.
Born near Newcastle in industrial England, Smith was reared in African mining towns and educated at boarding schools in Zimbabwe and England. He also traveled often with his family, which includes two older sisters still in Africa.
"Vacations were a big part of our life," he says. "I grew up living in hotels."
Among other places, they went to Mauritius, the Seychelles, South Africa and back to England. After his close call with a mining career, he enrolled at the University of Surrey in England and came to the United States as an exchange student at Michigan State University.
There he met Diana Bollas, the woman who became his wife. The daughter of a General Motors executive, she was a fellow traveler who had lived in Queens, N.Y., and Long Island, Detroit, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. She went to high school on Cyprus. Now, her parents are moving from Dubai to Florida. They also have a house at Smith Mountain Lake.
Smith graduated with honors in hotel and tourism management, and completed a one-year internship at the Boca Raton Hotel and Club. During his summers he worked for a catering company at international events such as Wimbledon, the Henley Regatta and the Royal Ascot horse races. He once managed the royal household bar at the Royal Ascot, serving the queen.
He came to Roanoke initially to be director of restaurants at the Marriott and, later, assistant food and beverage manager. He went on to become director of restaurants for the Albany, N.Y., Marriott and the Goodwin Hotel in Hartford, Conn.
When Turk, the Roanoke Marriott's resident manager during Smith's first stint, returned as general manager, he offered Smith his current job. Smith says he and his wife leapt at the chance. The area is super for bringing up their two boys, Corey Jason, 5, and Kyle Martin, 2. And Smith gets to travel and play with the Roanoke Rugby Club on weekends.
Well into his five-year personal advancement plan, he hopes to stimulate interest in the Marriott's food and beverage offerings and learn a bit about the room side of the business, too. His ultimate goal is to become a hotel's general manager, like Turk. But he is in no hurry to leave. Five years here, or more, sounds good to him - though, of course, Roanoke is far tamer than Africa was.
He remembers it as "wide, vast country" and a great place to grow up, with an abundance of outdoor diversions, such as water skiing, fishing and golf, and wildlife like elephants, springbok, pythons and baboons.
Plenty of adventure, too. Once, he and some friends were stranded when torrents of rain washed out the dirt roads. Oxcarts passed them regularly, but it was three days before a car came along to pull out their vehicle.
Now his great adventures are indoors, facing not wild animals but the ever-changing tastes and thirsts of the ever-fickle public.