International hotel giants "harvest" time-honored catering brands

Recently, Marriott International has completed two consecutive food and beverage partnerships in the Chinese market, one with the 90-year-old Guangzhou Restaurant and the other with the 130-year-old Guangzhou Lianxianglou. Since 2025, international hotel giants have seemingly made a coordinated move to partner with time-honored Chinese catering brands: Hilton invited a century-old noodle shop from Suzhou into its Shanghai property, while Kempinski featured Jinan-style braised delicacies in its buffet area. Exactly how do these global hotel groups plan to develop their Chinese food offerings?

Marriott Secures Two Iconic Guangzhou Time-Honored Brands in Succession

Recently, Marriott International has launched consecutive food and beverage collaborations with two long-established Guangzhou brands. In late May, the Marriott Chinese Restaurant under Marriott Bonvoy reached a partnership with Guangzhou Restaurant. The two sides are collaborating on Cantonese menu co-creation, product R&D, quality control and operational support, rolling out the initial "Cantonese Cuisine" co-developed menu, with plans to expand this offering across all Marriott Chinese Restaurants nationwide within the year.

In June, Courtyard by Marriott under Marriott Bonvoy signed a cooperation agreement with century-old time-honored brand Lianxianglou, extending the partnership scope to multiple consumption scenarios including standardized breakfast development, exclusive guest privileges, in-room dining, all-day dining innovation, and F&B retail product development.

In a short period of time, two of Guangzhou's most representative time-honored brands have joined the Marriott system one after another, which is clearly far more than an ordinary brand co-branding campaign. Judging from the partnership content, the two sides are no longer just discussing a signature dish or a seasonal limited menu, but are directly integrating into the hotel's entire F&B operation system.

The collaboration between Guangzhou Restaurant and Marriott Chinese Restaurant focuses on menu R&D, quality management and operational support. This co-created menu has established a three-tier system of Black Label, Gold Label and Green Label based on the operating positioning of different outlets. Black Label restaurants emphasize distinctive dishes and immersive experiences, Gold Label restaurants feature a standardized signature dish system, while Green Label restaurants focus on the Cantonese dim sum consumption scenario.

The partnership between Lianxianglou and Courtyard by Marriott delves deeper into the hotel consumption chain, covering four major segments: standardized upgrade of hotel breakfast, optimization of exclusive guest privileges, enhanced in-room dining services, all-day dining product innovation, and joint development of Lianxianglou's characteristic F&B retail products. This means the time-honored brand is no longer just entering a single restaurant, but the entire hotel scene.

It is worth noting that Marriott International is no stranger to the Chinese food sector. In 1989, its first Chinese restaurant debuted under the name "Marriott Xuan"; in 2019, it launched the "Marriott Chinese Restaurant MAN HO" brand system, establishing the brand philosophy of "rooted in craftsmanship, refined over time, and cherished in heart" with the positioning of "Authentic Cantonese Cuisine Creator". To date, this brand has expanded to cover over 60 restaurants across 58 destinations.

For a long time in the past, international hotels' understanding of Chinese cuisine largely remained at the "self-operated" level: building their own kitchens, training their own chef teams, and establishing their own production standards. This was the long-adopted development path for international hotels in China's F&B market. However, Marriott International's successive introduction of Guangzhou Restaurant and Lianxianglou is more like an external integration of catering capabilities. International hotels are no longer attempting to fully deliver Chinese food experiences relying solely on their internal systems, but are actively introducing brand resources that truly represent local food culture.

As international hotels begin to actively "borrow flavor" from time-honored brands, and local catering enterprises integrate into hotel standard systems, new transformations focused on hotel F&B are unfolding.

The Chinese Cuisine Logic of International Hotels Has Shifted

If Marriott International's partnerships with Guangzhou Restaurant and Lianxianglou could still be regarded as isolated cases, a broader perspective reveals that collaborations between international hotels and time-honored catering brands are clearly on the rise. Over the past two years, such partnerships have frequently emerged across different cities and hotel brands.

At the start of 2025, Jinan time-honored brand Luweizhai reached a partnership with Kempinski, introducing traditional Shandong-style braised products into the hotel's F&B scene. A fresh food counter was set up in the hotel's buffet area, making local specialties such as braised pork trotters and spicy duck heads part of the hotel's dining offerings.

In April of the same year, the century-old Suzhou state guesthouse brand Yan Yang Lou officially entered Hilton Shanghai Hongqiao, opening its first Shanghai outlet within the hotel premises. Traditional Suzhou-style noodles and Jiangnan flavors were introduced into the international hotel environment.

Entering 2026, this trend of collaboration has further accelerated. In February, the second restaurant jointly operated by Accor Group and Tang Palace Group opened at Pullman Shanghai South. In March, the two parties signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly explore business models integrating catering and hospitality. Subsequently, Marriott Chinese Restaurant launched menu co-creation with Guangzhou Restaurant, and Courtyard by Marriott reached an F&B partnership with Lianxianglou.

In just over a year, multiple international hotel groups have established partnerships with local time-honored brands or regional catering enterprises. From Cantonese cuisine, Suzhou-style dishes to Shandong cuisine, from high-end restaurants to hotel breakfasts, from single-outlet collaborations to strategic partnerships, international hotels are re-embracing local catering resources at an unprecedented pace.

Looking further back in history, this transformation did not happen abruptly. The development of Chinese cuisine offerings by international hotels in the Chinese market has roughly gone through three stages.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as international hotel brands gradually entered the Chinese market, hotel F&B primarily served a hospitality function. At that time, international hotels exported a complete Western hotel system. All-day dining restaurants, buffet breakfasts, bars, and executive lounges formed the core of hotel F&B. While Chinese restaurants existed, they were mainly designed to meet local market demands. During this period, the greatest advantage of international hotels was standardization.

Around the year 2000, as China's high-end consumer market grew rapidly, international hotels gradually realized that Chinese cuisine was not a mere supporting facility, but a critical component of competition among high-end hotels. This ushered in the second stage. International hotels began to build their own Chinese restaurant brands: InterContinental launched Fengze Lou, Shangri-La created Shang Palace, The Peninsula Hotels featured Jia Lin Tang, Mandarin Oriental had Man Wah, and Marriott International continued to refine its Marriott Chinese Restaurant system...

These Chinese restaurants gradually became the signature of their hotels, and even iconic dining landmarks in their cities. Many consumers visited hotels not for accommodation, but specifically for their Chinese restaurants. Properties like The Peninsula Shanghai's Jia Lin Tang, Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong's Man Wah, and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Beijing Clubhouse once served as prominent representatives of high-end Chinese cuisine, making Chinese dining an integral part of hotel brand value. However, as these systems expanded, problems emerged: product homogenization across different cities became evident, local cultural expression was insufficient, and standardized menus could not carry the collective food memories of local communities.

The third stage soon followed, which can be called the "Era of Integrated Leverage". International hotels no longer attempt to become time-honored brands themselves, but directly integrate established time-honored enterprises and mature local catering resources. Partnerships take diverse forms: some involve brand entry, such as Yan Yang Lou joining Hilton; some are counter collaborations, like Luweizhai setting up a fresh food counter in Kempinski's buffet area; others feature menu co-creation and systematic cooperation, such as Marriott Chinese Restaurant's in-depth collaboration with Guangzhou Restaurant across four dimensions; and some are strategic alliances, such as Accor's long-term partnership agreement with Tang Palace Group... The scope of cooperation has also expanded from a single restaurant to the entire F&B chain, including breakfast, in-room dining, all-day dining, and retail product development.

From an industry perspective, this indicates that international hotels are transforming from catering operators to catering integrators. They are beginning to realize that relying solely on standardized systems can no longer create new competitive advantages. What is truly scarce, instead, are the catering resources that represent local culture, urban memories, and unique lifestyles.

In this process, time-honored brands have re-entered the radar of international hotels. Among all local catering brands, time-honored enterprises possess three core capabilities that international hotels urgently need. The first is cultural recognition: a mooncake from Lianxianglou or a basket of shrimp dumplings from Guangzhou Restaurant are themselves carriers of urban collective memory. The second is consistent product quality: after decades or even centuries of market validation, time-honored brands have established mature product systems. The third is standardization capability: what can truly be replicated across a national hotel network is not a fleeting viral internet-famous restaurant, but a brand that can deliver stable, consistent experiences.

Therefore, international hotels' choice to partner with time-honored brands is not driven by sentiment, but by capability matching. When internal standardization systems can no longer create sufficient competitive differentiation, external local catering capabilities become a new competitive variable. From this perspective, Marriott International's consecutive moves in Guangzhou represent a concentrated manifestation of this industry trend.

Hotel F&B Is Facing Mounting Pressures

While international hotels are accelerating the integration of local catering resources, the other side of the industry shows that the overall hotel F&B sector is in a period of continuous adjustment and operational pressure. Data from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics shows that in the first half of 2025, the operating revenue of 1,613 above-quota accommodation legal entities in Beijing decreased by 7.3% year-on-year, with total profits falling by 92.9% year-on-year, translating to an average half-year profit of less than 40,000 RMB per hotel.

Under operational pressure, hotel F&B has experienced a noticeable shift in strategies. In the first half of 2025, five-star hotels in core cities set up street stalls to sell food to the public. In Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Jinan, star-rated chefs set up roadside stalls selling fried noodles, roasted chicken, duck necks, durian pastries, Dongpo pork, egg tarts, and steamed buns at prices as low as a dozen RMB. Social media feeds were flooded with check-in photos, queues stretched for over half an hour, and myths of daily revenue reaching 100,000 RMB spread widely.

By the summer of 2026, those once-bustling outdoor stalls of five-star hotels had disappeared. Meanwhile, executive lounges in high-end hotels are being phased out on a large scale: Courtyard by Marriott Hangzhou Qianjiang New Town announced the permanent closure of its executive lounge, and many other five-star hotels across the country have made the same decision. Once a standard feature of luxury hotels, designed to provide exclusive dining and social spaces for guests staying on executive floors, executive lounges are now being eliminated by numerous properties, exposing the underlying challenges facing hotel F&B.

The first issue is severe homogenization, making it increasingly difficult for hotel F&B to establish differentiation. For a long time, hotel F&B primarily served as a supporting facility for accommodation rather than an independent business, leading many hotel dining operations to fall into extreme similarity. Whether it is breakfast systems, business set menus, or Chinese restaurant offerings, the differences between brands are shrinking, and F&B is gradually losing its unique identity. When products lack distinctiveness, hotel F&B struggles to build premium pricing power, let alone become a reason for consumers to make a special trip to the hotel.

Secondly, the sector is trapped in a "price war" quagmire. In the past, hotels had inherent scene advantages, but the rise of food delivery, group buying, and other consumption models has increased price transparency, continuously eroding the original scene premium of hotel F&B. Over the past two years, initiatives from low-priced buffets to the collective outdoor stall operations of five-star hotels have all been attempts by hotel F&B to find new growth drivers. However, practice has proven that low prices can bring short-term foot traffic, but cannot foster long-term repeat patronage. For example, the complimentary breakfast offered by almost every hotel has become one of the most difficult services to balance: eliminating it would harm guest experience and platform ratings, but continuing to offer it means bearing the continuously rising costs of ingredients, labor, and operations, making it a "chicken rib" dilemma for many hotel operators.

Furthermore, few consumers will choose a hotel specifically for one dish. The vision of "visiting a hotel for a single dish" has been repeatedly emphasized by the hospitality industry, but real-world data does not support this: the proportion of consumers who select a hotel specifically for its restaurant is extremely low. Most guests dine at hotel restaurants because they need a convenient meal while traveling for business, are staying at the hotel and want a casual meal, or have purchased a discounted group buying voucher. Only a handful of restaurants can independently act as traffic drivers. As consumers increasingly pursue "distinctive dining experiences", while hotels continue to offer standardized products, the mismatch between supply and demand is becoming more pronounced.

Products are becoming more alike, prices are increasingly competitive, and customer acquisition is growing more difficult—these form the shared anxiety plaguing today's hotel F&B sector. The era when hotels could rely on standardization and supporting facilities to meet market demands is over. How to make dining an integral part of the hotel experience rather than a cost burden has become a key question for more and more hotels to reconsider. Against this backdrop, international hotels' renewed partnership with time-honored brands is essentially a search for a new differentiated solution.

There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Answer for Hotel F&B

In fact, whether hotel groups are "integrating" time-honored catering brands or adopting a "lightweight" approach to F&B, many investors and hotel owners are beginning to rethink the value of dining. Do hotels need to revitalize their F&B operations? Could catering become a new growth curve? Addressing these industry discussions, the report from Space Insight suggests that rather than blindly following trends, it is more important to first clarify three key points.

First, not every hotel needs to excel at F&B, but every hotel should offer dining services that align with its brand positioning. For luxury, mid-tier, and economy hotels, F&B is not a universally applicable requirement. For high-end hotels and resort properties, dining is an inherent part of the guest experience, a critical component of brand value, and an important entry point to attract local customers—making it a service worthy of sustained investment.

However, for upper-mid-tier, mid-tier business hotels, especially economy hotels, high efficiency and lightweight operations are their competitive edge. After all, the target audience of these hotels does not require an all-day dining restaurant offering both Chinese and Western cuisines; the vast majority of guests simply want a good night's sleep. Some brands in the industry have already recognized this: for example, Hyatt Place, which was recently introduced to the Chinese market, concentrates resources on high-frequency needs such as guest rooms, breakfast, fitness, and self-service convenience facilities, prioritizing operational efficiency while delivering strong performance in these high-demand areas. In the future, hotel F&B will not follow a single model, but will become increasingly diversified. What truly matters is not whether a hotel has a restaurant, but whether its F&B offerings serve its brand positioning.

Second, F&B cannot rely on low prices to attract customers, but must retain customers through value. As mentioned earlier, consumers drawn by low prices will arrive for the discounts and leave once the promotions end, making it difficult to build genuine repeat patronage. What truly motivates people to "travel across a city for a dish" or "rebook the same hotel for its restaurant" is consistently quality and experience, not low prices.

For example, after the Chinese restaurant "Tea House" at Park Hyatt Sanya Sunny Bay Resort was selected as a Black Pearl Restaurant, its appeal increased significantly. In July 2025, the restaurant's sales on Meituan Travel grew by nearly 90% year-on-year, with new customers accounting for 88% of its patronage, and a high proportion of out-of-town visitors from first-tier cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing. Meanwhile, "Li Xuan"—the Black Pearl Chinese Restaurant at The Ritz-Carlton, Guangzhou—recorded a 73% year-on-year sales increase in the first 10 months of 2025. A review from a tourist in Beijing captures this perfectly: "Every time I visit Guangzhou, I make a point of dining at Li Xuan. The free-range chickens raised on Qingyuan farms are incredibly tender and juicy. The hand-painted patterns on the teacups are distinctly Lingnan-style, and the guzheng performance during the meal creates an incredibly immersive atmosphere."

Third, no matter how advanced AI becomes, hotel F&B will ultimately win through the "human element". Technology is indeed transforming the efficiency boundaries of hotel dining: BTG Homeinns has launched noodle-cooking robots that operate 24/7, while JD.com has introduced the "7Fresh Mini Kitchen" model, using AI and robots to revitalize underutilized hotel kitchen spaces. Service robots can take over food delivery and in-room dining tasks, effectively reducing pressure on restaurant staff during peak hours. However, these are just tools. While efficiency may be one competitive advantage for hotel F&B, it is not the core competitive edge. The core competitiveness of hotel dining lies in the experience, the warmth, and the irreplaceable human touch.

A smiling server, a dish with a compelling story, and a dining experience that exceeds expectations—these are elements that AI cannot deliver. Cooking robots can ensure consistent flavor, but cannot replicate the distinctive "wok hei" breath of fire. Food delivery robots can improve efficiency, but cannot provide genuine human warmth. Self-ordering systems can reduce labor costs, but cannot replace personalized recommendations and interactive communication. This is arguably a key reason why international hotels choose to partner with time-honored brands. What they value is not just standardized production, but also the irreplicable craftsmanship, cultural heritage, and brand accumulation of these long-standing enterprises. In the future, AI will certainly reshape the back-end