Facing a second indoor-dining shutdown in November, US executive chef Thomas Lents was back to square one trying to figure out how to keep his Detroit restaurant, the Apparatus Room, afloat. The rooms director at the affiliated Detroit Foundation Hotel was similarly worried.
The two commiserated. "We're going to have an empty restaurant and an empty hotel again," Lents said. And then inspiration struck. "It was kind of that chocolate and peanut butter moment: 'Wait a minute, we can maybe make this work.'"
It's the kind of necessity-driven idea that hotels around the world have been weighing for nearly a year as the pandemic slashed holidays and business trips and emptied rooms that would have otherwise been filled with travellers. Hotel occupancy in the United States plummeted to 44 per cent in 2020, a record low, according to travel research firm STR.