Last April when British Columbia’s
culinary elite gathered for a night of serious feasting
and to welcome a new batch of inductees into the British Columbia
Restaurant Hall of Fame, they didn’t choose a luxury hotel or one
of this foodie city’s high-profile restaurants for the gala dinner.
Instead, they headed to the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition
Centre, where they dined on delectables such as pan-seared foie
gras with apple relish, smoked trout with leek vinaigrette, and
osso bucco with fresh morels.
“There was definitely some performance
anxiety backstage in the kitchen that night, because that was an
intimidating group,” says Andrew Pollard, director of food and
beverage for the VCEC. He needn’t have worried. The group was so
impressed by Pollard’s culinary prowess, they plan on returning
next year.
Remember when hotel dining was the kiss
of death, before headliner chefs began popping up in hotel dining
rooms and rolling out signature restaurants? Well, convention
center dining, that bastion of mediocrity, is undergoing a similar
transformation that is certain to banish those industrywide
rubber-chicken jokes.
“Bulk food production has always gotten
a bad rap, so people don’t expect much from convention centers,”
says Pollard. “But they should. People are often shocked at the
quality we are able to put on the plate for large numbers of
people.”
Flip this food
It might have been a long time coming,
but the food and beverage trends emerging at convention centers
across North America, as well as the new injection of culinary
talent, will have meeting planners downright eager to dive into
planning their event menus.
* Lights, camera, drum
roll. From preparing Asian noodles to tossing customized
salads and grilling skewered meats, the art of culinary
showmanship, delivered tableside, is now thrilling legions of
diners at convention centers. “People want to see the chefs, so we
are taking them out of the kitchen and bringing them up front and
making them part of the event. It’s performance theater, like
Iron Chef,” says Richard Toscano, vice president of event
planning for Spartanburg, S.C.-based Centerplate, a catering,
concessions and management firm counting among its clients 130
convention centers, arenas and sports venues, including the
convention centers in Dallas and San Diego. “When the chef prepares
the food in front of you, the meal takes on a whole new dimension.
You almost don’t need to have any other entertainment, he
adds.”
* Family-style dining.
The typical scenario for a plated meal is this: Wait patiently for
everyone at your table to be served before digging into that
course, now gone cold, then repeat the process for the next course.
“We have begun taking a family-style restaurant approach to meals
by placing a selection of platters in the center of the table,”
says Bennett Fass, executive chef and director of culinary
standards at Philadelphia-based Aramark Convention Center &
Cultural Attractions, which manages food operations at more than 50
convention centers, museums, zoos and science centers across the
country. “Not only aren’t people waiting around for their food,”
Fass continues, “it becomes very interactive. One person turns to
the next person and says, ‘This is delicious. What did you try?’
”
No out-saucing: Connecticut Convention
Center’s Roger Morgan
* Made fresh daily.
“Where do you buy your soup?” It might seem like an innocuous
enough question for a client to ask of a convention center’s chef,
but it makes Roger Morgan at the Connecticut Convention Center in
Hartford bristle. “I make my own soup, my own seasonings and
sauces, because I am a perfectionist. We don’t take shortcuts
here,” says Morgan, the CCC’s executive chef, who has pushed this
relatively new center, open less than three years, to take an
ambitious attitude toward its food-service operation.
Morgan’s background explains a lot. He
had never worked at a convention center before and came to the CCC
following more than a dozen years at Bally’s casino hotel in
Atlantic City, where he acknowledges the aggressive competition
among chefs for consumer recognition and media ink can be
ferocious. “I am accustomed to creating and serving four-star
quality food. It’s the only type of food I know,” says Morgan, one
of the few executive chefs in the convention center industry. “Now,
I am competing against myself and pushing my team to do that
here.”
To ensure that his handpicked team of
10 buys into and perpetuates his demanding standards, Morgan
includes them in tastings, actively solicits their feedback and
shares praise from clients. “They have eaten every meal I’ve made,
because they need to know what they are serving and be proud of
it,” he says. And when the accolades come through the kitchen’s
swing doors, Morgan makes sure they fall on the most deserving
ears. “I absolutely share them with my team,” he notes. “I don’t
hold onto compliments for myself.”
“People are often shocked atthe quality weare able to put on the plate.”-- Andrew Pollard, Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Center
* Keeping it local.
Andrew Pollard’s steadfast motto is: “Know where your food comes
from and how it was handled.” At the Vancouver Convention &
Exhibition Centre, he emphasizes local and fresh. “I will not fly a
tomato halfway across the world because it carries an organic
stamp. That doesn’t seem too environmentally friendly to me,” he
says. “Give me fresh, local products from my backyard any day.”
It’s not that Pollard doesn’t believe
in organic, fair trade or any other food movements. In fact, he is
a big proponent. Earlier this year when negotiating with a vendor
for the purchase of 4,000 tons of coffee beans -- an amount
typically consumed by the center annually -- not only did he pick
beans that carried the fair trade label, Pollard insisted the
coffee supplier provide the documentation to substantiate the
claim.
“We are putting a lot of trust in
suppliers when they tell us something is organic or fairly traded,”
says Pollard. “They only way I will make that same claim to our
clients about our food products is if I know I can truly prove
it.”
In fact, Pollard regularly visits local
farms and fisheries to sample their products and encourages them to
work with him. In 2006, the VCEC purchased 12,000 heads of locally
grown hothouse butter lettuce, more than a ton of various mushrooms
and several hundred pounds of British Columbia smoked sal-mon, and
served 18,000 bottles of wine, all exclusively from local Canadian
wineries. “Fresh and local is just better. There is such a
tremendous difference in flavor,” says Pollard.
* Just like a
restaurant. When planners start their menu-planning
process at convention centers, the responses they typically get
from catering sound like this: “Sorry, we can’t do that for several
hundred,” “You want to serve what?” or “We don’t have that item on
our ban-quet menus.”
Those excuses won’t fly at the St.
Charles Convention Center in Missouri, another relative newcomer.
Alvaro Beltranena, the 2-year-old center’s director of food and
beverage, thrives on crafting what he calls a “restaurant approach
to serving the masses.” Crab-stuffed prawn topped with a signature
sauce or a 10-ounce Chateaubriand paired with shrimp are some of
his recent creations.
“When we have food tastings for
clients, I hear, ‘Wow! This is not your traditional convention
center food. I’d expect to get this at a restaurant in downtown St.
Louis.’ Well, that’s exactly what I’m shooting for,” says
Beltranena, who hails from an extensive catering background at
luxury hotel chains, including the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co.
But it’s not just the food that has to
look and taste like it was delivered out of a restaurant kitchen,
the entire dining experience has to fill the role, says Beltranena,
who eschews the likes of traditional banquet table skirting and
cheap, mass-produced china and stemware in favor of more high-end
table linens and serving pieces. “To deliver the restaurant
experience, you have to deliver the whole package, from food
presentation to quality of service,” he says. “You have to create
an exceptional experience.”
A new approach
From customizing menus to wooing
planners with extravagant wine-paired tastings, some convention
center food operations departments are taking a fresh approach to
the art of selling a center’s second-largest revenue maker after
exhibit space -- its food.
Family-style fare:
Aramark’s culinary czar,
Bennett Fass
* May we suggest? The
toughest part when it comes to planning a meal for thousands, says
Bennett Fass of Aramark, is that one or two planners have the job
of picking out a meal for thousands. “We are really starting to
push that we are the experts, and we try to make recommendations,”
says Fass, who adds that all too often planners come in with
ill-conceived ideas of what they can get for their budget. “What
they don’t seem to understand is they don’t have to serve the same
tired old salad and chicken.”
* Taste tests.
According to Richard Toscano of Centerplate, clients are more food
savvy, thanks in large part to the myriad television food shows and
the popularity of celebrity chefs. And that new breed of client has
nudged centers to hold more elaborate and out-of-the-box tastings
to really strut their stuff. “It’s as if the American palate has
evolved,” says Toscano. “Planners are coming in and asking for a
certain type of lamb. And even if they have a budget of only $22 a
plate, they want choices, and they want it to be tasteful and
elegant, too.”
* Customized menus. It
comes as a surprise to most planners when Roger Morgan of the
Connecticut Convention Center sits down with a planner and tells
them he doesn’t have a standard in-house event menu, because he
builds every menu to the client’s needs. “They are definitely not
used to hearing that,” says Morgan, who makes a point of asking
about attendee dietary needs, including potential allergies. He
says he doesn’t see small budgets as a problem, but rather a
creative challenge he and his team can rise to. “I’ll make a
suggestion, and they’ll go, ‘I didn’t know I could substitute that
for that and it won’t cost more.’ I love it, because it shows we
care about what we are doing.”