High-Speed Cooking: High-speed equipment takes the pressure off in the hotel kitchen

BELLAGIO With close to 4,000 rooms, the Bellagio in Las Vegas is like a small city. It has 10,000 employees, of which 900 are hourly cooks, not counting chefs and sous chefs, working in almost 20 food outlets. “It gets insane,” says Mark Mellinger, executive chef of the Bellagio’s main kitchen, the primary production outlet for the hotel.

Mellinger says he stays on top of things by taking advantage of today’s newest technology, such as combi ovens. Those ovens let Mellinger save time numerous ways. “For example, we make our own sausage,” he says. “The butcher shop bangs it out, sends it up here, and I do it at extremely high heat—maybe 500 degrees with 60 percent moisture in the combi oven and it just blanches it.” The sausage is cooled in a blast chiller and later seared on the Jade Range flat top for finishing. “This way I get a good product and it’s much quicker.” On average, the resort goes through 3,000 sausage links a day—just a small glimpse of the vast quantities of food prepared daily.

The main kitchen is responsible for about 60 percent of the food for the buffet and 60 percent of food for the employee dining room. In addition, the kitchen sends food to most of the resort’s food outlets. Every day, the main kitchen handles the roasted garlic, caramelized onion, chicken stock, demi glace, and sautéed spinach for Todd English’s Olives Restaurant. It makes the soups and sauces for the entire hotel. It’s difficult to get an exact count, but Mellinger figures that between the buffet and employee dining he handles around 10,000 to 14,000 covers daily.

Mellinger relies on a Groen steamjacketed kettle system from Jackson, Mississippi-based Unified Brands for soups and sauces. He has one 120-gallon kettle, two 200-gallon kettles, and three 100-gallon kettles. “Our kettles go 24 hours a day,” he says.

Mellinger has a blast chiller that holds 200 sheet pans and a tumble chiller from CapKold, another division of Unified Brands, where cryovaced soups and sauces are immersed in cold water “kind of like a washing machine ... It takes my soup from boiling to under 36 degrees in less than an hour.” The unit can cool down 60 two-gallon bags at a time.

Without these systems, says Mellinger, “I’d need more labor ... I almost couldn’t imagine doing it without this equipment.”

BROADMOOR Dave Platzer, executive sous chef of the 700-room Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, says the hotel just bought Rational combi ovens for four of the hotel’s 18 kitchens. “It has definitely increased our banquet capability,” he says of the hotel, which was recently remodeled, adding an additional 60,000 square feet of meeting space. “We not only do dry roast but use steam injection in our roasting methods. What’s nice about these [Rational] is that they’re six-foot-tall units we’re able to wheel entire racks in … fire off all of our products, pull them right out of the ovens, and roll them into specially designed hot boxes so there’s no need to manipulate sheet trays and pans.”

Platzer is partial to Rational, noting the company has a good reputation. “It’s European built, and they’ve worked the kinks out of it. We’ve had minimal issues with it. They’re pretty much indestructible … some of our equipment runs 24 hours a day.”

The Broadmoor, which opened in 1891 as a gambling casino, features much older equipment, gradually being upgraded. It now has enough space to do a sit-down dinner for up to 4,400 people—although Platzer says the largest dinner he has handled thus far was for 2,000.

ISLAND HOTEL “I actually think we went backwards a bit in time when it comes to equipment and technology,” says Bill Bracken, executive chef of the five-diamond, 295-room Island Hotel in Newport Beach, California.

“In the past, this hotel used a lot more machinery such as buffalo choppers, dicing machines, etc. I think two things have happened to change that. First and foremost, our style of cooking and approach to big events has changed drastically over the years, with much more of a creative restaurant approach to events, thus making certain typical banquet equipment obsolete. Second, I feel that with the ability to buy almost anything cut and prepped to your specifications we do not need to rely on so much technology. A large produce company can more efficiently prepare large volumes of diced or turned vegetables, thus making our need for technology obsolete.”

That being said, Bracken stresses he definitely is looking at cook/chill equipment and combi ovens “which let you cook, chill, reheat, and serve large quantities of food much more consistently and faster.”

He relies heavily on local produce companies to prep fresh vegetables to order, whether it’s turning baby carrots or peeling potatoes—something that comes in handy when you’re doing mashed potatoes for 600 people. “What I want to stress is that it’s not prepackaged, processed foods ... I’m just not paying someone $16 an hour to turn vegetables.”

As another money and time saver he works with local butchers to provide meats like racks of lamb. “They’re already cleaned out, boned, and Frenched, and all we have to do is portion them as opposed to getting a whole saddle and clean it ourselves. We make decisions based on the cost and the price and the benefit of ordering it.”

Bracken is looking at combi ovens but notes, “I’m not completely sold on them yet ... When you roll in a rack that has a hundred plates of food that’s been cooked the day before and you’re rolling it into an oven to reheat it, it’s obviously all about convenience ... I would rather be cooking it fresh and a la minute, relying on not necessarily technology but our produce company to provide us with the things we need.”

The Island Hotel has handled banquets up to 1,000 people. Bracken says if he can be convinced of the merits of combi ovens he will introduce the technology to the hotel. “I don’t want to sacrifice quality for the sake of ease of production,” he says, “but we may end up saying ‘wow this is the way to go for banquets for the future, no last minute rushes, worrying about timing and plate up, we can cook it in the morning, chill it, plate it when it’s cold, and ... we can retherm it.’”

—Beth Rogers