My only rule is that restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad, which fits with your theory. If they have some built-in customer base they don’t have to work as hard at being good.
Yeah. A random mid-range Marriott probably has an utterly boring hotel restaurant serving fairly mid-range mostly boring fare. You get up to the high-end and you're much more likely to get restaurants that don't really seem like hotel restaurants at all.
I remember reading an article that had the theory that Thai restaurants in hotels were usually very authentic under the assumption that the parents were immigrants who wanted the child to inherit the business, but the kid wanted to run a restaurant instead. It would certainly explain why you get Thai restaurants attached to random hotels in the middle of nowhere, at least.
The Thai government practices gastro-diplomacy, they have a program where you set a Thai restaurant up in a foreign country, you can pick from three different packages for size or fanciness of restaurant. It's why you see a lot of the same decorations and similarities between differently owned Thai restaurants, or occasionally a family will own a number in a metro area.
> The Department of Export Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Commerce offers potential restaurateurs plans for three different "master restaurant" types—from fast food to elegant—which investors can choose as a prefabricated restaurant plan.
> restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad
This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)
In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.
On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
