F & B Summit
Events & Attractions A yearly Food Arts/CIA Greystone conference summons high volume movers and shakers to explore how they're keeping one step ahead of the present.
Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Posted: January 9, 2009
What's the newest movement, what's the hottest trend, what's the next big thing for food and beverage managers in the nearly one million eating places throughout the United States?
If you're like me and you're not in the foodservice business, you seldom give the question more than a glancing thought. Like me, that is, until I had the opportunity to attend a meeting addressing that subject at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena, California. At the CIA's imposing Napa Valley campus, a group of 52 top food and beverage managers, corporate and executive chefs, writers, architects, consultants, and experts in foodservice gathered for two and a half lively days of discussions, presentations, demos, meals, and tastings. The event, billed as "The Greystone Flavor Summit: The Art of Flavor in the World of High-Volume, High-Quality Dining," was jointly produced by Food Arts and the CIA at Greystone, an institution that has gained a well-deserved reputation for bringing together top-notch thinkers and doers in the many various aspects of food and drink.
The meeting in April was a first, however, in its focus on the high-volume end of the foodservice industry, with representatives from the likes of Aramark (international provider of foodservice for schools, universities, and health care facilities), Carnival Cruise Lines, Hilton Hotels, Applebee's (more than 1,600 outlets in the United States and abroad), major resorts such as Canyon Ranch, Meadowood Napa Valley, Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, Walt Disney World, and many others.
The occasion was simultaneously and successively hilarious (Ryan Magarian, mixologist from Portland, Oregon: "In 10 years the cocktail will be a pillar of the American culinary experience.") and sobering (kitchen designer Mark Stech-Novak: Restaurants are shockingly inefficient, "averaging only 12 percent effective in terms of energy used."), provocative (restaurant consultant Michael Whiteman: "Nobody gives a damn about meal structure. We're a nation with attention deficit disorder. We want it new and we want it now.") and reassuring (author and umami expert David Kasabian: "Ketchup is the perfect food—sweet, sour, salty, a little bit of bitter, and loaded with umami.")
Food should be the obvious focus of such a luminous gathering, shouldn't it? But if that's what you're thinking, think again. Oddly, for many of the speakers and commentators, food takes a back seat to other aspects of the restaurant experience. "Food isn't always the focus in my restaurants," admitted Todd English, award-winning chef/owner of high-class dining places around the nation and, indeed, the world. In a kick-off address he talked about his newest venture, Beso, in Los Angeles: "People come for two or three hours, not necessarily to eat but just to get away." Restaurants, he said, are less about dining and more about an agreeable social environment, especially for singles. "Their living room is the restaurant, the hotel lobby," he said. At Beso, he stresses "small plates with big flavors, taquitos, seviches, small salads, small bites so people in big groups can swap food and exchange thoughts."
Throughout the conference, other speakers confirmed the evolution of restaurants into something else, and of something else into restaurants: "We've transformed the lobby into a public square," said Dennis Kolodziejski from Orlando's World Center Marriott, "a place where people can meet, work, or eat. We call it The Great Room—it's got everything from fresh juice bars to kebab spots." No more do state-of-the-art hotels have two separate restaurants, one for fine dining and one for 24 hour service, Jason Lapin of Blau and Associates restaurant consultants pointed out: "All day dining is more and more apparent," he said. "It's a real blending of nightclub culture and restaurant culture."
Trend spotting like this was an important theme at the conference. One of the most provocative trend-spotters in the whole difficult business is the noted restaurant guru Michael Whiteman, president of the consulting firm Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company, who outlined challenging issues for the industry, including health and food safety concerns—but "selling health as an indulgence," he said, "rather than a restriction," through fresh natural antioxidant-rich flavors like mango, açai berries from Brazil, and goji berries from China. The emphasis on world flavors like these comes at least in part from the fact that Americans are traveling more widely and building their travels around food. It's what Whiteman calls "the experience economy—collecting experiences, looking for involvement, for authenticity and connoisseurship." For restaurants, he said, getting customers involved, especially younger customers, is key. "Look at Starbucks, where they've put the consumer in charge of the process: 'I'll have a latte with a double shot of espresso with skim milk and caramel flavor.' Or look at Whole Foods and the dozens of niches for food experiences there—maybe a wine bar, a trattoria, a raw foods cafe, an espresso/dessert bar, a noodle bar, et cetera." You can like them or not, but Starbucks and Whole Foods alike have built success on responding to what customers are looking for.
Mixology was another key trend that was highly visible at the conference. It was one that had me flummoxed from the start. Mixology? Isn't that a fancy word for tending bar? But mixologists (bartenders) were prominent at the meeting, and everyone was discussing the cocktail phenomenon. John Rothstein, beverage manager at Buddakan in New York City, offers "healthy" cocktails made from freshly pressed juices from organic fruits. "It's my job," he said, "to make sure every cocktail comes out with soul." Magarian, on the other hand, is into a mixology based on personal inventions such as horseradish-infused Tequila and syrupy sugar snap pea brews as the base of cocktails. Honestly, I have to confess that I just don't get the appeal of sweet mixed drinks that recall nothing so much as wedding reception punch. But I'm in the minority, for sure. Pichet Ong, chef/owner of P*ong and Batch in New York City, deliberately puts the pastry station and the bar next to each other as a way, presumably, of sharing ideas and flavors, while restaurant designer Bob Puccini reemphasized the importance of cocktails. "We're seeing a real resurgence, with bars that look like places you really want to be."
But the most important trend discussed throughout the conference was surely the least surprising given that the green movement has become a national phenomenon covering everything from cars to lipstick to television sets. Sustainability and the environment are hot-button subjects, intimately joined in the minds of most consumers. "Those who do not embrace it are going to lose it," said Fernando Salazar from Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, speaking of the whole green concept. "We have established a green council to address the issue. The latest problem to come up? Plastic bottles." It's a universal phenomenon, Puccini added, "mostly in its infancy, but you have to follow it step by step." Andreas Kisler and Shawn Murphy, executive chef and food and beverage director at The Peabody Memphis hotel, respectively, confirmed it. "Increasingly," they agreed, "meeting planners want to know how green we are." Often, they said, they even have to fill out an application for an event, detailing their green practices.
A corollary to all that is the emphasis on regional, local, natural, fresh, organic, and sustainable, all buzz words that resonate powerfully with the public at large. Rick Powers, director of food and beverage of The Coeur d'Alene Resort in Idaho said his group does "anything we can to infuse the flavors of the region, from Idaho huckleberries to wild rice and lentils to Washington lamb and Copper River salmon. We put Idaho on the plate and in the glass. But it's taken us from 1993 to the present to put this in place. We've been working one farmer at a time. You have to put the name of the farmer on the table. And you have to not give up—it is doable."
Whether any or all of this would actually be done, of course, is up to the individual attendees at the symposium. In a phone conversation some months later, Sue Morgan, vice president of franchise food & beverage with InterContinental Hotels Group, says she continued to be "very impressed" with several aspects of the meetings—the diversity of attendees, the program content, and what she called "very translatable strategies." InterContinental has recently launched what Morgan called a "boutique concept" hotel chain called Indigo, with 11 properties at the moment but expected to go to 20 by the end of this year. "There was relevance for most of our properties at the conference but particularly for Indigo, with its seasonally changing menus and its free-flowing design," with dining areas seen as extensions of the lobbies and vice versa.
Mai Pham, chef/owner of Lemon Grass Restaurant in Sacramento, responded to the discussion of Asian influences coming into standard American dining rooms with a demonstration of "four really good sauces for you to work from," including a Thai peanut sauce with curry paste and coconut milk, and intensely flavorful Vietnamese raw sauces, to be used, for instance, with grilled fish—cilantro/lime soy and ginger/lime combinations that add an Asian touch to a straightforward grilled meat or seafood.
The irrepressible Magarian topped it all off with his demo of a cocktail he calls uva bella, made from grapes muddled in gin to which he added elderflower liqueur ("it's like an angel came up and spit in your mouth"), lemon juice, simple syrup, and a couple of dashes of bitters. "If Jesus was coming back to drink Pinot Grigio," he said, "I would serve him this instead."
After Karen McNeil's quick tour of Spanish wines (a tour, she admitted, usually takes her at least two days in her wine classes at Greystone), Domenick Cerrone, an instructor at the CIA's Hyde Park (New York) campus, did a Spanish take on that old stand-by Buffalo chicken wings, turning them into a star of the tapas menu when he deep-fried chicken drumettes in pimentón-sparked oil, then served them with a startling sauce made from intensely blue Cabrales cheese melted into aged Sherry vinegar and Pedro Ximénez vinegar.
At the conference's close, David Sonzogni, director of foodservice at the influential Texas-based supermarket chain called Central Market, was bursting with enthusiasm: "I'm going home with 30 pages of notes. I'm going to leave here and bingo! I'll be working with my team in what I call my sandbox. And next year I'll be back here to challenge them: What have you done with what you've learned?"
Nancy Harmon Jenkins writes about the food of Italy and the Mediterranean. She is the author of a number of books, including the forthcoming New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.
