2 weeks Ago By Chris Chamberlain
The first week of September was traumatic for Hathorne owner John Stephenson. The ex-chef at Fido and The Family Wash announced on Tuesday of that week that he would shutter his Sylvan Park restaurant after Saturday night service, citing rising costs and staffing issues as the reasons for the closure. The previous week the restaurant had to close temporarily when several members of his staff contracted COVID.
He was operating his business on the razor’s edge. The reservation books immediately filled up for the final planned services, and on that Thursday night Hathorne served 220 guests. “We didn’t want to wither away,” Stephenson recalls.
“We wanted to end on a high note. We saw so many old faces. It was a great night!” Unfortunately, circumstances conspired to make opening for the final weekend impossible.
“We were short in the kitchen, and we can’t run without a dishwasher and a line cook,” he explains. “I had to take care of the health and safety of my employees.” Attracting employees was an ongoing problem.
“We had been looking for line cooks for six to eight months. I figured we’d get 60 candidates and schedule 30 to 40 interviews. Two people showed up for interviews, and one of them flaked before the first shift.
That was the final straw when I decided we couldn’t continue.” That’s the environment many smaller independent restaurants find themselves in during the current hospitality-labor climate. But there are several massive culinary operations in town that most diners never think about, and these businesses continue to thrive in the face of the same competitive staffing situation.
Organizations like Metro Nashville Public Schools, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Music City Center manage to serve thousands of meals every week in a situation where failure is not an option. Students, patients and conventioneers must be fed. MNPS essentially operates roughly 150 restaurants, and VUMC cooks and distributes 2,000 meals a day to patients.
On the MCC’s busiest day, 22,000 Southern Baptist Convention attendees were in the building for multiple sitdown meals, buffets, coffee breaks and box lunches. If being down a couple of employees can bring down a popular independent restaurant, how do these enormous operations pull it off? We went to the people in charge to find out. The cafeteria staff at Madison Middle School Spencer Taylor is a 30-year veteran of food service with 12 years of experience with MNPS.
He’s the executive director of nutrition services and also a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he serves as nutrition and dietetics consultant to the Army’s surgeon general.
He knows that “an army marches on its stomach,” and so does a school. Taylor oversees a staff of 600-plus food service employees within the public school system, serving breakfast and lunch at about 150 cafeteria locations. All MNPS meals are free to students, because the majority of schools fall below the family income threshold of the federal Community Eligibility Provision for total meal reimbursement.
The Metro Council has chosen to cover the expenses for the eight Metro schools that do not qualify for CEP. Even with this support, Taylor must work within the reimbursement figure of $2 per meal in raw food costs, with labor doubling the total price to about $4. “We’re dealing with pennies, not dollars,” he explains.
Almost every school prepares food on site, with the exception of a few small alternative schools where food comes from larger nearby cafeteria kitchens. The entire MNPS system is responsible for 70,000 meals per day, including accommodating special dietary needs, allergies and medical issues like diabetes. Forecasting is a crucial part of Taylor’s job.
Not every student eats every meal, with some preferring to bring food from home — or maybe they just don’t like what is being offered that day. The key tracking metric within the system is participation. “Menu planning is a major component, and I can look at the participation rate daily and interpret it monthly,” says Taylor.
Taylor points to Andrea “DeeDee” Stratton, nutrition services manager at Madison Middle School, as a real success story. “Madison has a good team and manager,” Taylor says of Stratton. “[She’s] a manager who can retire any time she wants, and she’s serving 90 percent of her kids, which is amazing for a school.
DeeDee has the ‘secret sauce’ that we need to duplicate within our system. The difference is how our customers react to the program and how important that program is to them on a daily basis. I’m just so proud of all our schools, but she is definitely one of our shining stars as an example of what we want to do.
” Taylor’s biggest job is labor management. With space for 670 employees, MNPS cafeterias usually teeter between 620 and 630 workers, but occasionally the system will find itself as many as 100 employees short. Forget the outmoded stereotype of “lunch ladies” — these are professional culinary workers, and Taylor constantly works to maintain and upgrade his workforce.
“We’ve got some hiring advantages,” he explains. “People know that MNPS is a large-scale employer, and we get excellent word-of-mouth from current employees. I feel like we pay better than most local restaurants.
” But that wasn’t always the case. The starting wage was only about $10 to $11 per hour prior to then-Mayor John Cooper’s initiative to raise the low-end rate to $15 in 2020, and $18 two years later. “Now we’re at about $19 an hour, which I figure is above market,” says Taylor.
The administrator also reacts to new desires from his prospective workforce: “You have to figure out what encourages this generation to stay. It used to be good working hours or benefits and insurance, and possibly a pension. Those things don’t draw in younger folks now.
“They want to be at a place where they get flexibility and there’s joy in coming to work and they’re able to be expressive,” Taylor continues. “We offer a 35-hour week for most employees, a 10-month calendar, full Metro benefits and eligibility for our retirement system. You’ll never work on weekends, and our hours are better than most.
If you work from 7 a.m. until 2 p.
m., you can enjoy more family time or even take on an additional job.” Nurturing his workforce is critical, because MNPS rarely uses temp services.
“All our employees have to pass a background check, so that means no felonies on your record,” says Taylor. “That’s probably not true at many restaurants in Nashville.” Taylor wants Nashville to know how hard his department works for the children of the city.
“A lot of thought and care goes into the work we do,” he says. “We sometimes find it a challenge to compete in the new food environment because we have to work with a rulebook,” he shares. “We are preparing food every day with care to make it taste good, and we’re trying to help meet a certain health profile for your student.
” Vanderbilt University Medical Center kitchen Right: The public areas at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are attractive and immaculate — but the basement level is more utilitarian, almost dungeon-like, and probably a good five-minute walk to sunlight. The industrial cinder-block corridors are constantly busy with carts filled with meals being wheeled from the 20,000-square-foot kitchen to patient rooms on any of 30 floors of VUMC’s massive campus. Anyone walking the halls has to be alert for motorized Cushman carts zipping by on their way to deliver meals to the Round Wing annex almost half a mile from the subterranean kitchen.
A new kitchen is under construction, so space in the current production area is crowded with racks of No. 10 cans stacked high, and four walk-in coolers and freezers turn over most of their inventory daily to make room for the 16 to 18 pallets of food delivered four times a week. The new kitchen will actually be a little smaller, but it promises more streamlined production that will allow VUMC to switch to a room-service model where patients will be able to order from a more varied menu and expect delivery within 45 minutes.
Walt McClure is the client executive for Sodexo, the food service management company that works with Vanderbilt employees to feed the hospital. McClure oversees about 225 employees, including 33 cooks, 35 workers in sanitation and 138 production/procurement employees. The logistics and complications of meal service in a hospital are daunting.
Only about 40 percent of patient orders that come into the kitchen’s call center are standard. The remainder are modified due to medical and dietary requests. Each order is entered into a tracking system, and every tray is scanned before it leaves the kitchen — because doctor requests can change between ordering and delivery, or patients can actually be discharged before the meal arrives.
Menus are different every day within a weekly rotation, and the average patient’s length of stay at VUMC is four days, so they shouldn’t see repeats. (McClure does recommend sticking around for Wednesday — that’s fried chicken day, and he’s really proud of that dish.) Menu planning and ingredient management are the core of what McClure and his head chef Calvin Spencer spend their time on.
“Every meal will have a center plate with a starch, vegetable and the entree,” says Spencer. “Then there will also be a side salad, a beverage, dessert and a roll.” VUMC’s cost per meal, exclusive of labor, is a remarkable $2.
75 averaged across breakfast, lunch and dinner. The logistics of a single meal delivery are complex. Trays are loaded by floor, 30 at a time so nurses can schedule medication protocols around meal times.
Plates are placed atop induction pads to keep them hot on their journey from the kitchen, while salads are plated on frozen bases to keep the cold side cold. McClure’s staff makes all the deliveries to rooms, with the exception of patients in isolation. The culinary staff’s interaction is an important part of patient care, and a focus of McClure’s management.
The dedicated staff knows what they signed up for with a career at a hospital, and McClure makes it clear to every employee. “The hospital runs 24/7, 365 days a year,” he says. “Whether it’s sunny or 10 degrees and icy outside, we have to be here.
We tell them that’s a benefit when things like COVID come around, because your employment’s secured here. The flip side is there is no waking up and looking outside, and saying, ‘It’s icy out. I’m not going in.
’ You gotta come in!” Where does McClure find employees? “The labor climate is tough, like everywhere in the country,” he admits. “We’re competing for the same staff with hotels, restaurants and bars. Vanderbilt has its own temp service, which is crucial because it might take several weeks to get a background clearance on a potential employee, and they’re not getting paid during that time.
They could be working the next day somewhere else, so if they have two interviews going on, the other people are probably going to win that one.” Still, McClure is proud that VUMC maintains, he says, a 70 percent employee retention rate versus the national average of 45 to 50 percent. “I attribute that to Vanderbilt being competitive with their benefits and wages.
And the other big piece of it, I think, is the culture and the climate we try to create down here. Just treat people the way they want to be treated and be transparent and fair with everyone. I think those are the big things.
” He admits that the job isn’t for everyone. “It’s kind of like a culture shock,” McClure says. “Restaurants don’t have as much structure as we do.
They don’t necessarily have the HR policies and procedures in place that hospitals do, but I’ll tell you what [employees] do love. They do love the work-life balance when they come to health care. They realize, ‘I’m not working every weekend and every holiday.
I’m working every other weekend, and I know what time I’m gonna start and basically what time I’m gonna leave.’ So no more missed birthday parties for their kids.” McClure also addresses the elephant in the room: the disparaging attitude toward hospital food.
“Yeah, that’s right up there with airplane food,” he says with a chuckle. “But our food’s good. It looks good, and it tastes good.
And we’re cooking it for 600 or 700 people!” Music City Center Kitchen Left: Max Knoepfel Chef Max Knoepfel is a legend within the local culinary community. Not only does the Swiss-born chef execute the largest meals in town in his role as the executive chef at the Music City Center — he has also trained a generation of culinary workers. By his estimate, more than 1,000 employees have worked for him at the MCC during his 11 years there, including a current staff of close to 400 full-time and part-time cooks, stewards and wait staff that represent more than 50 nationalities.
This massive operation serves the 2.1 million square feet of convention space out of a 10,000-square-foot kitchen where the busy staff prepares multiple plates for various meals and services at the same time. Each meal can offer seven to eight menus to address allergies and dietary preferences, and prep work for big meals often starts days before the actual event.
Walking through the kitchen, Knoepfel proudly shares the stories of each staff member he introduces, especially beaming over a hardworking cook named Rosa who has just completed cooking 175 trays of bacon as part of the day’s schedule, which included 2,900 meals. Along the way, Knoepfel is always teaching, both cooking techniques and hospitality. The chef’s traditional French brigade system encourages everyone to embrace their role within the team.
MCC CEO Charles Starks understands the importance of recruiting and retaining such a large and talented staff to run the culinary operations at the convention center. “We have some advantages,” says Starks. “Just in sheer numbers, if two people call out, we have 25 ready to step in for them.
We just have more resources to pull from.” Starks gives most of the credit to his chef. “I think I think it all starts with the culture, and I think it’s what you do for folks, how you take care of them, how you reward them, both financially and emotionally,” he says.
“You get the right people to be their leaders, and certainly Max has done a phenomenal job at leading this for 11 years now. Through that, you build a place where people want to be.” In addition to competitive compensation and benefits that Starks benchmarks through periodic pay studies, the variety of work also attracts employees.
“One day we may be doing 5,000 of this or 2,000 of that, and tomorrow we’re doing something different,” says Starks. “And if we’re not bringing up tomorrow’s culinarians or tomorrow’s salespeople or tomorrow’s finance people or communications people, then shame on us. We want this to be a teaching kitchen.
” Chef Knoepfel is passionately invested in education, serving as an adviser and instructor at The Randy Rayburn School of Culinary Arts at Nashville State Community College. In addition to daily instruction of his own staff, Knoepfel encourages them to take advantage of an online training program called Lobster Ink with a curriculum designed by the Culinary Institute of America. He blames popular culture for making his job harder.
“Food Network screwed it up for our profession by making it look easy,” Knoepfel says. “At the same time, we created this interest about the chef and the chef being obviously the superstar.” Knoepfel enjoys teaching students about the realities of the commercial kitchen.
“I had two students come in here for a week to see how we do things,” he says. “We had to do ratatouille for 2,600 people, and I had two-and-a-half skids of zucchini to get cut. I took one case out and showed them how I wanted them cut and put on sheet pans so we could roast them.
I came back after 10 minutes, and they’ve done about a third of the case, so they’re all happy. I told everyone to take a break for five minutes, and then we walked into the fridge. There are two-and-a-half skids of zucchini.
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. They’re looking at me going, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘That’s the zucchini we need to cut for the ratatouille, and the last one has to look exactly like the first one!’” Knoepfel sees himself and his staff as ambassadors for Nashville. He wants to be a good steward for the community, sourcing locally whenever possible and holding his kitchen to the highest standards.
He constantly reminds himself of his role. “I go to bed every night and I ask myself, ‘What did I teach, what did I learn, and what can I do tomorrow?’” Music City Center Kitchen.
