Food Fight

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Gone is the era when a meal in a department store meant a scoop of chicken salad on a plastic tray in a room reminiscent of your grandmother's conservatory. These days, shoppers at Peter Jones in London are feasting on warm squid and green chilli salad. At Selfridges one can tuck into a plate of salmon ravioli at the Premier restaurant, which has a view over bustling Oxford Street. At Harrods, the clientele in the Georgian Restaurant is nibbling terrine of foie gras with cèpes, fillet of red mullet and wild game pudding whipped up by a chef who used to work at London's The Ivy. Even the most discerning Parisian diners have been reserving tables at Le Chênevert, Galeries Lafayette's chic venue that opened last September to rave reviews.

Gourmet dining is the newest trend in Europe's luxury department stores, and the menus are as cutting-edge as the fashions around them. Though designers like Armani, Courrèges, Ventillo, Lanvin, Barbara Bui and Nicole Farhi realized years ago that the chicest store accessory is a stylish café bearing your label, major retailers are just now choosing to create and run their own restaurants rather than depending on outside concessionaires. "It is a completely new era for restaurants and retail," says Jean Paul Barat, general manager of food operations at Selfridges. "Food is now a driving force for bringing customers into stores."

In an effort to keep pace with the competition, Peter Jones recently opened The Top Floor, a sleek, fully licensed café with seating for 270 and an espresso bar overlooking Belgravia. Joe Teixeira, head of catering, says the new venue caters not just to the ladies who lunch and their offspring, but a whole new market. "We get the stylish shopper eating here too," says Teixeira, adding that a second restaurant with a café-society theme opens next year. "The store is modernizing its retail and it made good business sense to do the same with the food." In March Harrods replaced Wok Wok — one of only three concessions out of an astounding 22 in-store restaurants — with Mo's, a Harrods-run American diner targeted at trendy teens. Selfridges in the last year has refurbished its Food Hall and added two new restaurants — the Gallery, a stylish café overlooking the Prada, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Fendi boutiques, and the Base Bar, a hip sandwich eatery in the basement music department — to its existing 15 (three are concessions). The recently renovated Liberty store on Regent Street now features a high-end restaurant called Arthur's.

In Paris, Galeries Lafayette has refurbished its food department, Lafayette Gourmet, to include not just Le Chênevert, but also Le Bar Rouge, a bistro with stainless steel communal tables and a blackboard menu offering grilled fish, sausages, salads and hearty soups. Not to be outdone, rival Le Printemps has introduced several new restaurants, including The World Bar, decorated by designer Paul Smith. "If there is a good restaurant, customers will stay and eat rather than leave the store," says Tim Zagat of Zagat Survey, which publishes a series of restaurant guidebooks.

Harvey Nichols, a store that is often credited with starting the current dining trend, is completely renovating its 10-year-old Fifth Floor Restaurant and Bar, overlooking London's Knightsbridge. "We have to stay ahead of the times," says Dominic Ford, Harvey Nichols' restaurant and food retail director. "When we created this floor I wanted a restaurant that happened to be on top of a department store, not vice versa. It had to be high-caliber enough to bring people in, and that is why we have been successful." So successful, in fact, that Harvey Nicks now owns two out-of-store restaurants in London, the Oxo Tower and Prism, and has spun off a separate company to manage them.

The fact that retailers are dedicating more and more precious floor space to restaurants suggests that they are tasty money-makers. Selfridges says that 8.5% of its overall revenues of $558 million last year came from food and restaurant sales. Emad Estafanous, manager of the restaurants at privately owned Harrods, says that restaurants bring in roughly 5% (not including sales in the famous Food Halls) of the store's total revenue. Harvey Nichols' food and restaurant division grossed $24.9 million last year, 14% of the store's overall sales.

These respectable but hardly astounding numbers underplay a few other retail realities. One: a good restaurant will not only draw customers to the store, but will also keep them there — maybe long enough to shop for something more substantial than a plate of tuna carpaccio. "Each of our restaurants has a regular clientele who come back again and again for the Harrods experience," says Estafanous. Two: the opportunities for cross-promotion are plentiful. "We're doing a promotion of foods from France's Languedoc region, so I plan to put some of the cheeses on the menu in the Bar Fromage, offer a selection of charcuterie in the Tapas Bar and showcase the regional ham in Harrods Famous Deli," says Estafanous.

Bruno Quenioux, a manager at Galeries Lafayette's Le Chênevert, says the wine and food departments have already benefited from the 11-month-old restaurant. "We have a six-page wine list, so I make a point of encouraging clients to try a new wine. Usually they buy it before leaving the store," he says. "The menu is seasonal with only the freshest ingredients from our Food Hall, so people want to take the ingredients home and try to make it themselves."

That's the business; how's the food? For the most part, both ambitious and good. But restaurant critics have pretty much ignored this in-store phenomenon — Le Chênevert, which has been awarded high marks by reviewers, and Harvey Nichols' Fifth Floor being the exceptions. Harrods chef Chris Allen, who learned his trade in some of London's most prestigious eateries, can't get anyone to review his Georgian Restaurant. "We're doing an incredibly high level of food," he says, as he gently stirs a lobster sauce for a salmon en croute dish. "Critics just don't think about reviewing big store restaurants."

According to publisher Peter Harden, of Harden's Guides, writing up department store eateries can be tricky. "We have reviewed only one department store restaurant, Harvey Nichols," he says. "When we gave them a bad review they refused to carry our books. That kind of behavior can make reviewing these restaurants a delicate situation." Harvey Nichols' Dominic Ford points out that the store carries only two restaurant guidebooks, including the Zagat Survey, which gave his restaurant a mixed review. "I would not refuse to stock a book based on a bad review," says Ford. "I have just chosen not to sell all the guidebooks." Harden and Zagat both acknowledge that for a restaurant to be reviewed it has to be mentioned by the people who fill out their surveys. "Harrods' and Selfridges' in-store restaurants hardly ever come up, even though I am sure they have good food," says Harden.

Still, for Harrods executive chef Stephen Wheeler, who oversees a culinary team of 155 from the basement kitchens and prepares 4,000 meals each day, it can be frustrating not to be better-known in the world of cuisine. He is resigned: "What is most important is that we know we are preparing the highest quality of food." And making a certain fashion statement at the same time.