Provisions: Cultivating Opportunities with a Wine by the Glass Program
Wine by the glass offerings can be a strong contributor to a private club’s food and beverage program, creating a fun social environment for
Provisions: How to Handle Special Orders
A well-known bit of fact in Club food and beverage service is that special order requests occur every day, multiple times a day. Special requests often create friction and stress between service staff and back of house, and can bring unintentional discomfort to members and guests who may feel that their request is seen as an inconvenience. Since special requests occur with such frequency, preparing for the inevitable would be a good course in managing them. Chefs never want t
Provisions: Are Your Ducks In a Row?
The Practice of Mise en Place “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail”, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, is an admonition keenly appropriate to foodservice operations. Lacking preparation in mindset and method in the kitchen and in the dining room can create a chaos that is painful to experience and uncomfortable to witness. The old military training adage--Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance--also has tremendous relevance in food and beverage, and failing t
Provisions: Perfect Plant, Perfect Place, Perfect Time
“You have to look for them like this,” whispers Clint, a robust, strapping mushroom forager as he crouches over one knee in the reception space at the Visitors Center and Chamber of Commerce of McCall, Idaho. He earnestly peers over the floor, waving one hand gently over the imaginary pine needles before him, pivoting slowly, gingerly. “You’ve got to be patient, because you have to LOOK, under the twigs, SLOWLY…and then…you see one! And then another! I found about forty just
Provisions: Let's Talk About The Importance of Pre-Shift Meetings
We often find ourselves talking a lot about timing when it comes to food and beverage service. Each player on the team from the host/hostess to the servers, cooks, and managers are responsible for keeping the dining room flowing and managing the timing of the table. However, the most important time in any food and beverage operation is the 15 minutes before each shift begins: the pre-shift meeting. Photo by Paul Sarlas Call it the warm-up, sound-check, or preflight run-throug
Provisions: The Pineapple-Agave Shrub
Hello there, and Happy Friday to all! This is a weekend to be celebrating, because with Daylight Savings time beginning this Sunday (don't forget to set your clocks forward!) spring is surely right around the corner. To celebrate, Chef Mary Howley made the great sacrifice of experimenting in her kitchen with the finest of rums (and other ingredients) to come up with the perfect cocktail appropriate for the celebration of spring and hospitality itself with the heavy use of pin
Kitchen Culture: The Search for Chef Talent (Part 1)
Where are all the chefs? The seeming lack of hirable chef talent was a hot topic of discussion at the most recent meeting of the DC chapter of the Women Chefs & Restaurateurs Association (WCR), according to RCS Hospitality Group culinary consultant Chef Mary Howley. This concern is reflected nationwide in the pages and pages of executive chef employment listings on many BOH-focused website and CMAA Careers pages. Why is this so? A widely circulated Huffington Post article fro
Provisions: Cake & Politics
Source Unknown Not far from the nation’s capital where governmental transitions and hand-offs are in full swing--preparing moving vans and measuring drapes--is a place where another political cake is being baked. Smith Island, Maryland’s only inhabited island in the Chesapeake Bay, is located 12 miles west of the mainland near Crisfield, Maryland. The 4.5 square mile island, accessible only by boat or ferry, has a total population of just under 300 people living on the barely
