A Michelin-starred hotel chef says the layout of a resort can completely change how room service works

• Michelin-starred chef Massimo Falsini has worked in hotels for over 30 years.

• Falsini told BI that whether a hotel is vertical or horizontal completely changes your room service.

• Luxury vertical hotels, often in cities, can do beautiful presentations on expensive china.

When we think about room service, our questions tend to be whether we should get salad or fries on the side, treat ourselves to dessert, and how early is too early for a glass of bubbly.

However, when you're a hotel chef, many factors determine the ingredients, presentation, and delivery of a room-service dish. And a big one is whether the resort is vertical or horizontal.

In a recent sit-down interview with Business Insider, Michelin-starred chef Massimo Falsini — who has worked in the hospitality industry for over 30 years — explained how a hotel layout can completely change how room service works.

The secret strategy behind a room-service dish

Falsini, the director of culinary operations at Rosewood Miramar Beach in Montecito, California, told BI that running a kitchen in a hotel is completely different from running a kitchen in a restaurant.

While working at hotels such as Four Seasons Resort Hualalai and the Waldorf Astoria Orlando, Falsini had to learn how to manage the menus of multiple on-site restaurants, work on big banquets, and oversee room service.

"You have to be creative in how you create a buffet, you have to know how to make fun pool food, how to make an everlasting memory amenity for a VIP," Falsini said.

You also have to consider the layout of where you work. Falsini explained that in-room dining travels very differently in a high-rise hotel than in a sprawling resort.

"The city hotels are vertical, right? So the in-room dining will travel in a cart, and it goes on an elevator and into the room," he said.

"Normally, the resort is horizontal," Falsini added. "The in-room dining tray goes in a golf cart, then the golf cart goes somewhere else. You have to change what you do because the food doesn't move in the same way."

When room service is delivered via elevator, the chef can do "almost anything they want," Falsini said. An ultra-luxury hotel usually has beautiful decorations, elegant presentations, and the best crystal and china.

"You will find fragile service equipment like that in a vertical hotel because you can put them on a cart, and they travel on the carpet and go on an elevator, and nothing will break," Falsini said.

But a resort's layout is completely different. A single journey might involve getting past sloping golf courses, crowded pools, and rocky sidewalks.

"When you move horizontally, no matter what you do, the food will move," Falsini said. "Stuff breaks, and nothing travels well."

So, instead of worrying about decoration and presentation, the resort chef has to prioritize "simplicity and essentialism."

"The dish needs to focus on the high quality of every ingredient, and they have to travel well," Falsini added. "What I used to do was I would make the food and then go to the room and order the food and see how the food came out, just to make sure."

That doesn't mean you can't get a fragile dish — like, say, a poached egg on avocado toast — on a resort menu. But Falsini explained that the server will just place the egg on top of the toast once they get to the room, rather than risk breaking it mid-delivery.

These are just some of the tricks that Falsini has learned after three-plus decades of working in hotels all around the world.

Read the original article on Business Insider