How hotels are reimagining event dining
By Elsbeth W. Russell
For decades, hotel event dining followed a predictable playbook: Abundance-driven buffets, plated entrées designed for speed, and service that prioritized logistics over experience. That model no longer holds.
Today’s event guests – whether corporate attendees, association members, or wedding guests – arrive with higher expectations, broader culinary exposure, and a sharper awareness of sustainability, wellness, and personalization.
At the same time, hotels are navigating rising food and labor costs, tighter margins, staffing shortages, and increased regulatory and environmental pressure. The result is a fundamental shift in how hotels approach event dining. Not as a support function, but as a core experience driver and revenue differentiator.
Across the industry, hotels are reimagining event dining through more expressive menus, flexible service formats, local storytelling, interactive moments, and smarter use of technology. The goal is clear: Deliver dining experiences that feel intentional, memorable, and operationally sound.
Competing in a Restaurant-First World
One of the most powerful forces driving change is competition. Hotels are no longer competing only with each other – they are competing with restaurants, experiential venues, and independent caterers that guests actively choose.
“Hotel food and beverage has to compete with local restaurants now,” said Alexis Moniello, experience project manager at RealFood Hospitality, Strategy & Design. “We don’t have travelers who are going to the hotel and staying in the hotel. And even with hotel events, they’re now competing with independent venues and caterers and even restaurants that are doing those caterings.”
That reality has raised expectations across the board. “The food needs to be good,” Moniello said. “Banquet food is not exciting nor wanted anymore. It’s no longer just sliced meat with mashed potatoes and gravy… Gone are the days.”
Guests increasingly associate traditional banquet formats with institutional dining – an experience they actively avoid.
“People feel viscerally about the senior living center style of dining,” she explained. “And with hotels, with golf clubs, even with senior living facilities, they’re [saying], we have to get away from this.”
Even the concept of fine dining has evolved – our definition has changed. “You don’t need a white tablecloth to be fine dining,” Moniello said. “A white tablecloth is now the first thing that makes you feel like, oh, we’re just in a banquet hall.”
As expectations change, service styles are shifting accordingly. One of the most visible evolutions Moniello has seen when crafting menus for hotels and in event dining is the move away from rigid plated meals toward more relaxed, communal formats.
“Instead of individually plating things, it’s more of a family style,” Moniello said. “Here’s a really beautifully composed plate and everyone can serve themselves.”
The appeal is both emotional and practical. “It saves clutter on the table, it gives people the elbow room they need,” she said. “But it’s a way to really present well-made food. And that informality feels a lot nicer to people and actually is starting to feel more formal to people.”
Small plates remain popular, particularly for receptions and networking events, but they’re increasingly served in that shared, family-style format. And service itself is becoming less intrusive and more relational.
“People like high-touch service, but with that personality,” Moniello said. “I don’t need you to change the plate in front of me a thousand times while I’m here… I would rather have my server’s personality.”
Trending Now: Experience, Wellness, and Flexibility
From a broader industry perspective, these changes reflect a shift away from one-size-fits-all catering toward experience-led dining. According to Nashir Zahir, founder and president of NZ Hospitality, hotels are increasingly designing event dining to be multisensory and socially engaging, layering lighting, sound, and ambiance into the experience rather than treating food as a standalone component.
Zahir pointed to a rise in plant-forward menus, customizable bowl and station formats, and global flavor profiles that feel familiar yet elevated. Rather than prioritizing excess, hotels are focusing on intentionality – menus that balance wellness, indulgence, and inclusivity. Flexible formats such as grazing tables, shared plates, and progressive dining experiences are gaining traction because they encourage movement, conversation, and connection without interrupting event flow.
Importantly, dietary inclusivity is no longer treated as an accommodation. It is embedded into menu design from the start, with restricted options expected to be just as flavorful and thoughtfully presented as everything else.
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in how hotels handle dietary needs. What was once an exception is now baseline.
“Having a kitchen itself that is designed to be flexible for dietary customization and baking it into the menu” is critical, Moniello said. For example, a fryer could always be gluten-free. “If there is a fried thing, there is no gluten there. You don’t even have to worry about it.”
Designing systems – not workarounds – is what allows hotels to scale inclusivity. “Building the systems that make things allergen and dietary restriction friendly…makes guests know that they’re safe and being taken care of,” she added.
Technology increasingly supports this effort. According to Iain Saxton, SVP, on-property solutions, hospitality at Amadeus, “Personalization is now the baseline – menus must accommodate a growing range of dietary needs, cultural and regional preferences, and wellness trends.”
To manage that complexity, hotels are leaning on technology. Amedeus’ Delphi platform, for example, “provides a centralized database that manages every stage of the event – from initial inquiry to final execution – ensuring that menu selections, dietary preferences, and special requests are captured and communicated,” Saxton explained.
He added, “Its single source of truth across locations gives planners and catering teams real-time visibility, enabling accurate dietary tracking and compliance for every guest.”
Local Sourcing as Storytelling
Sustainability remains a powerful motivator for both planners and attendees, but hotels are learning that sourcing decisions also shape experience. Travelers increasingly want context and connection. To attract today’s event guests and entice them with food and beverage, Moniello recommended hotels act more like local restaurants and champion local purveyors.
Moniello, for example, frequently travels for work. When she lands in a new city, she wants to know about the area and its signature cuisine.
“Getting that locality and pulling it into your hotel… it’s not just eating a meal. It’s an experience,” she said.
Calling out local farms, producers, and artisans reinforces sustainability while adding narrative value. “Millennials and Gen Z want sustainability. It is important to them,” Moniello said. “And locality is a way to show sustainability.”
Importantly, local sourcing doesn’t require abandoning national procurement. “If you’re a large group, you have access to national procurement discounts, so use those,” she advised. “But for the smaller things, get them locally… maybe you’re getting 80 percent of the mushrooms from your national procurement, but 20 percent of the mushrooms are from your local vendor and you can call that out.”
Waste Reduction Becomes a Strategic Priority
As menus become more intentional, hotels are also under pressure to reduce food waste – particularly in event dining, where attendance is unpredictable and overproduction is common.
According to Ignacio Ramirez, managing director, Americas at Winnow, catering and events create some of the most complex waste environments in hotels. Industry-wide, commercial kitchens waste between 5 percent and 15 percent of food purchased, with event operations typically at the higher end.
That waste is costly. Hotels using Winnow, an artificial intelligence powered tool that tracks food waste, are collectively saving more than $100 million annually while reducing environmental impact. Globally, buffet-led hotels waste around 0.34 pounds per cover at baseline; sites using Winnow see an average 42 percent reduction in the first six months.
Winnow’s system combines connected scales with image recognition trained on more than 500 million images of food waste. “Users simply discard food as usual, and the AI does the rest,” Ramirez explained, providing real-time insight into what’s being wasted and why.
Data is influencing not just purchasing, but menu design itself. One example Ramirez highlighted involved a hotel serving whole tenderstem broccoli at a networking event. “When guests are standing, items requiring both a knife and fork simply go untouched.” By redesigning the dish into a one-hand-friendly format, the team reduced waste without diminishing the guest experience.
Other strategies include prepping for 90 percent of expected guests, batch cooking the remainder, using shallower buffet trays, and focusing on fewer, better-executed dishes.
The results are measurable. Naples Grande Beach Resort reduced food waste by 58 percent in four months, saving $50,000. Four Seasons New Orleans cut waste by 48 percent, saved $65,000 annually, and rescued 27,000 meals – all by adapting prep and menu planning based on data.
Technology That Supports Hospitality
While technology plays an increasing role in operations, guest-facing tech requires a thoughtful approach.
“We’re in this age of AI, and people are working from home and on social media all the time,” Moniello said. “A luxury is human interaction.”
She cautioned against overusing QR codes and self-service at events. “It doesn’t feel high-end,” she said. “If we’re at an event where someone is trying to impress you… real service with a maitre d’ and someone who is taking care of you – that’s what people are impressed by.”
Behind the scenes, however, technology is essential. Saxton noted that “Delphi provides a unified platform that centralizes communication and updates in real time, so every change – from BEO adjustments, to guest counts, menu changes, or room set-ups – is instantly stored and visible across teams, reducing miscommunication and delays.”
Beyond the meal itself, hotels are increasingly programming participatory moments that feel time-specific and memorable. Guests especially appreciate options to build-their-own food or beverage and the chance to interact, Moniello said.
From craft-your-own margaritas to cookies-and-milk hours or s’mores storytelling, these moments create anticipation. “It’s like, ‘Oh, wait, before dinner, we should make sure we do this,’” she explained.
These experiences mirror what guests increasingly seek in weddings and personal celebrations – customized, social, and memorable – and hotels are beginning to program them proactively.
The Future of Event Dining
Event dining is no longer about feeding people efficiently. It’s about storytelling, sustainability, personalization, and precision execution.
Hotels that succeed are those that treat food and beverage as a strategic asset – supported by data, enabled by technology, and delivered through genuine human hospitality. As Moniello put it, “It happens at every layer. It’s not just that front end, front of house piece. We’re starting from every layer of how we execute the operation.”
In a competitive landscape where guests have endless choices, reimagining event dining is no longer optional. It’s the difference between being a venue of convenience and a destination of choice.
Image: fotosr52/stock.adobe.com
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