Since 2006 Anthony Stewart has served as executive chef at Miami’s Pritikin Longevity Center, which focuses on daily exercise and natural, whole foods to help residents and visitors prevent or improve conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and certain cancers.
In today’s foodservice industry, everyone wants to be more environmentally friendly and the corporate dining team at Freddie Mac is no exception.
I believe the foodservice industry hasn’t completely taken advantage of the available pool of veterans in transition.
August is our DSR of the Year issue and it gives me a chance to relive one of my favorite nights of the year. Combing through the photos and deciding what to include as representative of the Dealer of the Year and Industry Awards Gala is a big job — but a rewarding one.
It’s exhilarating to watch good ideas take hold in an industry that has a reputation for being slow to change. But this issue of FE&S contains several great examples, and I hope that you enjoy reading it from cover to cover.
The latest venture from Chicago baker Rich Labriola, Labriola Ristorante & Café, opened this past May just off Chicago's Magnificent Mile. The 12,000-square-foot, mixed-use building features a full-service restaurant, a casual lunch and dinner café, a full-scale bakery, and a carry-out section. In the 300-seat restaurant, subway tiles, dark wood, and leather reside alongside gunmetal, jewel tones and marble to create an elegant-urban feel. A 60-seat sidewalk patio off the café will open this year.
Kurt Fleischfresser started cooking in the cafeteria kitchen of Oklahoma State University while attending college. He went on to become a widely renowned chef and restaurateur for 30 years. His resume reads like a history novel, with years of accolades after first training under fine-dining French master Chef Bernard Cretier at Le Vichyssois outside of Chicago as a young chef, and then working in various restaurants in Scottsdale, Dallas and Oklahoma City. He joined The Coach House in 1987 as head chef, taking ownership of the restaurant in 2004 and continuing its legacy, which will celebrate 30 years next month.
As part of my duties as a volunteer leader for the Foodservice Equipment Distributors Association, I was appointed to serve as assistant program chair for the 2015 annual convention. In this position, I had the opportunity to speak on any industry issue that stirred my passions. But what would be of interest to such a diverse group of foodservice equipment dealers and manufacturers?
A bout ten years ago our company, Taziki’s Mediterranean Café — a fast-casual concept with 48 locations — began to hire employees with special needs. This came about by pure happenstance. While on vacation, my wife and I met a fantastic educator from our hometown, who is an advocate for those with special needs. This person outlined the potential benefits of hiring someone with a disability to work in our restaurants.
Camp Howard, CEC, is a Culinary Institute of America graduate and chef-turned-foodservice director at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He joined the staff 18 years ago in 1997 as executive chef, earning the director role in 2008. Camp has watched the Vanderbilt college foodservice industry go through dramatic changes. Currently, Vanderbilt operates two main dining halls/serveries that seat 550 and 800 people respectively, along with several retail, convenience store/market, and coffee kiosk outlets around campus. Howard and his team have earned multiple awards for their innovative food, including a Chefs of Tomorrow Award (2012), presented by Olson Communications, and a Number 15 ranking out of 75 Best Colleges for Food (2014) by the Daily Meal.
I always love it when we are able to bring you stories of people within the equipment and supplies industry or the wider restaurant community who are finding ways to succeed. While doing well, they are at the same time helping others or doing good. Keith Richards (the other Keith Richards) provides us with a great example in his Parting Shot this month on page 92. Be sure to give it a look.
“Fatbergs” was the term used to refer to the masses of FOG (fats, oils and grease) found in the sanitary sewer lines surrounding the second oldest residential dining facility operated by the Housing Dining Services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Five years ago the University’s Facilities and Services department asked us: What are you going to do about it? The Housing Maintenance department already had a contractor jetting out the sanitary sewer ejector system with ever increasing frequency. But it wasn’t enough. We couldn’t allow the sanitary sewer system to back up into the dining and residence hall.
In the past foodservice consumers understood they might need to trade food quality for speed of service when visiting certain types of restaurants. Thanks to the still burgeoning fast-casual segment, though, today's consumers no longer have to choose between what they perceive as quality and speed of service. They can now have both in a comfortable and flexible environment.
For foodservice industry veterans, it can be easy to adopt a “been there, done that” attitude when it comes to training. If you have seen one fryer you have seen them all, right? Wrong.
Technology has transformed food safety efforts significantly in recent years. Today, we not only rely on specialized equipment to plant and farm, but we have very specific pieces of equipment that provide food safety reassurance. For example, the online international journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering recently published an article spotlighting engineers at the University of California-Berkeley who have developed a "3D smart-cap". The engineers demonstrated that the device can wirelessly monitor the freshness of milk. What a tremendous impact this cap could have!
Those of us who attend a lot of conferences have heard an awful lot about Gen-Y lately. These are the 18-to-25-year olds that marketers can’t seem to get enough of and the rest of us tend to talk about as if they are not in the room. Maybe it’s the headphones.
Chef Brandon Kida has returned to his hometown to helm the kitchen at the acclaimed Hinoki & the Bird. The restaurant, inconspicuously tucked into Los Angeles' Century City business district, opened in December 2012 as an "imaginative dining concept" by the growing restaurant group Culinary Lab. Raised by his Japanese-American parents in the heart of Los Angeles' Koreatown, Kida is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. He's cooked in the kitchens of L'Orangerie in Los Angeles and in New York City, at Lutèce, Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Smörgås Chef Restaurant Group's Blenheim Hill Farm and, most recently, Clement at The Peninsula Hotel.
There is a lot to be said for those of you managing college and university dining programs. You are surrounded by educators and forward-thinking people who seek, in their own way, to advance the world in which we live. The students you serve and sometimes employ are typically energetic and full of ideas. Some student workers approach things without any knowledge of “how it used to be done” while others always look for better ways to approach the task at hand. Many of your staff may be comfortable with how it has always been done, but you probably have other staff who continually seek opportunities for improvement. This mix of interests and skills puts you in the best possible place for innovation: an environment of opportunity, challenge and progress.
We’ve got beer, pizza, ?Hallmark and a story about a movement back to the days before large-scale frozen food distribution. We are one Ty Cobb story away from a Ken Burns documentary with this issue of FE&S. Interestingly enough, it’s all about what’s happening in foodservice today.
Ryan Conklin oversees culinary operations for Rex Healthcare's room service-style patient dining as well as two retail outlets, two extended care facilities, catering and special events, serving 4,800 meals daily. In March, Conklin won the Triangle competition.
