The Café
I’ve written earlier that unless a hotel is located within 500 metres of a concentrated office area, a restaurant is unlikely to be commercially viable.
In fact, I once joked that the hotel we were managing had just our owner’s office—and a bunch of monkeys on the surrounding coconut trees—as our prospective lunch and dinner customers!
I also previously touched on the complexity of offering multiple cuisines on a single menu. I’ve long stopped thinking of a café as a conventional profit centre. Instead, my thinking has shifted to:
How do we create a small 40–60-seater café that manages costs efficiently while offering an attractive menu—and doubling as a warm, informal space to close event sales.
Neuvo Café – The New Approach
The newly renovated Neuvo Café at The Everly Putrajaya is our response to that question. The design and operation now emphasise efficiency and appeal, allowing us to run the café with just 3–5 staff members.
Some key elements of our strategy:
• The menu was carefully curated to exclude dishes requiring a wok range—those need chefs with specialised skills. Instead, we focused on induction cooking, which is fast, safe, and staff-friendly.
• Most mise-en-place (preparation work) is done in the main production kitchen, streamlining café operations.
• We retained our famous wood-fired pizza concept, inspired by our successful setup in our Bintulu hotel, where our pizzas are well-loved in Sarawak.
But we didn’t stop there. We decided to differentiate ourselves with sourdough pizzas, something pizza chains rarely offer. However, a traditional wood-fired oven needs to stay hot all day, which isn’t energy-efficient. We even experimented with a multi-tiered wood-fired oven—a concept that works in theory but remains a work in progress.
Eventually, we settled on three stacked high-temperature pizza ovens, each capable of cooking a pizza in 3–5 minutes. The combined output of 36 pizzas per hour is actually overkill for our scale, but it’s worked beautifully since reopening.
We also elevated our coffee offering with a custom specialty blend from Miss Coco Café, which sources and roasts Colombian beans just for us. This adds a unique, artisanal element to our guest experience.
📌 Small cafés in hotels may not always be profit machines—but with the right strategy, they can still be cost-effective, brand-building, and even a sales tool for event business. Think smaller, smarter, and more differentiated.
