It's dinnertime, and Daraspreet Kainth stands in the Florence Moore dining hall weighing his options. There's chicken or vegetable stir-fry; a do-it-yourself baked potato bar; spinach, tomato or chipotle-chili tortillas wrapped around a beef, veggie or chicken filling (your choice); turkey-and-rice soup; black bean soup; penne pasta with squash; steamed broccoli; fresh-baked bread; a full salad bar. He had the pasta yesterday, so Kainth decides on a chicken-spinach wrap. When asked to comment on Stanford's dorm food, he shrugs. "You can't complain. It could be worse."
If the freshman is blasè, the chefs and managers behind the scenes are anything but. They started thrashing out the menu for this September evening almost five months in advance. Just after students left campus for summer vacation, they planned the September grocery list, which includes 14,520 chicken breasts, 2,333 pounds of broccoli and 9,164 pounds of rice -- arborio, basmati, brown, jasmine, long grain, medium grain, parboiled and wild. And they figured out the logistics of serving 19 meals a week to 3,800 students in seven different dining halls -- a massive endeavor that costs the University more than $6 million a year on food alone.
Advance planning is nice, but any large food operation must do that to run smoothly. Stanford's Dining Service has a loftier ambition: to reinvent its dining halls as restaurants.
It's a scorching June afternoon. About a dozen chefs and dining hall managers, led by executive chef Rafi Taherian, convene in a stuffy conference room in the Dining Services offices to mull the likes and dislikes of college diners. They're here to create menus for the first 11 weeks of school.
Taherian has a captive clientele -- students living in the dorms must purchase a food plan -- but he still takes a competitive approach to customer satisfaction. A gregarious man who worked as a general manager for Marriott Food Service before coming to Stanford four years ago, Taherian wants to shatter the stereotype of traditional dorm food. "Students go to the shopping centers or to downtown Palo Alto to eat. They compare us to those guys. They're not comparing us to other universities," Taherian says. "It's an apples-to-oranges comparison, but that's their expectation and we need to meet that."
Students' tastes today are more sophisticated than ever, refined through travel, exposure to different cultures and a trend among busy families to eat out more often. Trying to satisfy changing tastes while controlling costs led the food service to streamline operations in the fall of 1998. Until then, each dining hall created its own menu. The new program aimed to coordinate purchasing and establish a uniform nutritional program.
But first, dining hall managers had to agree on a common menu. To do that, they pooled all the menus from each dining hall and collected two years' worth of student comment cards. Meals that scored well went into a computer database. Among the survey results: Stanford students still love pizza and burgers (14,180 patties consumed monthly), but requests are growing for vegetarian offerings. About a quarter of student diners now describe themselves as vegan (a regimen that excludes meat and all other animal-based foods such as dairy products) or vegetarian.
Oodles of noodles
Planning dinner for 150? Don't sweat it; Stanford chefs do it all the time. Most dining halls prepare beef stroganoff once every five weeks. Here's how:
Beef Stroganoff
150 servings/cooking time 1 hour
12 pounds medium egg noodles, boiled and lightly oiled
45 pounds beef ball tip sirloin, sliced in strips while half frozen
4 pounds butter
3 cups minced onions
2 1/4 gallons beef broth
3 tablespoons chopped garlic
1.31 liters chablis
18 pounds quartered mushrooms
1 1/2 gallons sour cream
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 tablespoons salt
1 1/4 tablespoons seasoned salt
2 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg
1. Melt one-third of the butter and sautè onions. Add beef strips and sautè quickly until evenly browned. Put meat and onions in baking pans. Pour in beef stock and simmer until meat is tender.
2. Melt remaining butter and sautè chopped garlic. Add wine and allow alcohol to cook off. Add mushrooms and sautè. Pour mushroom mixture over beef.
3. Blend sour cream with flour. Just before serving, add sour cream mixture to beef and mushrooms. Cook until thickened.
4. Add seasonings and serve over noodles.
The dining service launched a new approach to food preparation, too. "We tried to create restaurant-quality food and to get out of institutional food altogether," Taherian says. That required training staff "to come out of that paradigm of 'cook the food and park it in the warmer,'" he explains. Many of the dining halls now set up carving stations, grills and woks to provide more "demonstration" areas where students can see their food being prepared.
All this has meant more planning, quicker turnaround and better scheduling of the 120 full-time production staff and 200 part-time employees. Much of the preparation is done farther in advance so that food can be cooked quickly -- in many cases, on the spot. Lunch prep begins at 6 a.m, and the evening crew checks in at midday. Workers are trained to do more small-batch cooking so that certain dishes, particularly sautès, stir-fries and pastas, will be eaten right away. Some dishes that require longer cooking times, such as lasagna, are still made in advance and kept warm.
Although the feedback on the new system has been mainly positive, Taherian and his staff are trying to get the food out even faster. It's not easy. "When you're cooking for 300 students and trying to prepare at the last minute, sometimes there is some waiting," Taherian says. "If you are getting restaurant-quality food, then you will have to exercise restaurant-quality patience. But that is not the mentality of students in a cafeteria. We are expected to produce food the minute they walk into the facility. And sometimes that can be very difficult."
Taped to the wall in the room where Taherian's team has gathered today for fall menu planning, a giant grid displays a week's worth of lunches and dinners from last year. The chefs and managers crane their necks and squint at the lineup of food items as they chatter animatedly. Their mission: to choose three entrees -- meat, vegetarian and vegan -- plus two vegetables, one starch, two soups, one bean dish and one rice dish for each day of the week. They'll also pencil in roast chicken, turkey, beef or pork to be served at the carving stations, as well as "just-in-time" dishes like Thai stir-fry, shrimp-and-vegetable alfredo and a teriyaki bowl.
Each seven-day week is considered a cycle. For each quarter, the team comes up with two sets -- one for lunch and one for dinner -- of five cycles. Once Cycle 5 has been completed, Cycle 1 runs again, on the assumption that students won't remember, or care, what they ate five weeks before. Each hall is responsible for its own breakfast offerings.
Mulling over student feedback and consumption trends, the group decides to make some adjustments to the menus. Changes are made democratically, with each member of the vocal group chiming in with his or her comments. Monday's corn side dish gets changed to gingered carrots after someone points out that the vegan chili that day also contains corn. Tuesday's pizza potato skins -- chock-full of fat -- are deemed nutritionally lacking and are replaced with healthier calzones. Wednesday's hummus-and-feta pita sandwiches are similarly axed -- they got a thumbs-down from students last year. But what to substitute? Bruce Biron, chef at Manzanita, offers his recipe for falafel, which spurs a debate about the best technique for making the Mediterranean staple. The falafel balls must be shaped, fried and then slipped into the pita bread, explains Taherian, who spent years working in restaurants in Northern Italy while studying architecture in college. (He turned his side job into a career after acquiring formal training in New York City at the Culinary Institute of America.)
The group lobbies to change Monday's lunch entrèe of chicken pasta with pesto to a grilled chicken sandwich. But Taherian questions whether that's too many chicken sandwiches for one week, with a grilled one on Monday, a chicken patty on Wednesday and a barbecue chicken gyro on Friday. Greg Graves, production manager at Lagunita Court, notes that chicken sandwiches are a hit among students -- and that's enough to keep two of them on the menu. But Taherian insists on swapping Friday's chicken gyro with the chicken-and-vegetable tamale pie slated for the following week's menu.
Such maneuvering is often necessary to maintain the right mix of dishes, says Graves. He likens the process to playing Pick-up Sticks: "When you move one, the rest move."
Joline McQuillan diligently records all the changes during the menu review sessions, punching new recipes, ingredients and numbers of servings into her laptop computer. As the dining service's purchasing manager, she will check the meal plan for subtle glitches.
What's for breakfast?
Tastes change in a century. Consider these breakfast offerings from 1891 and 2000 -- in which the only survivor is that old standby, oatmeal.
Encina Hall, 1891
oatmeal mush and milk
hot rolls
cornbread
plain bread
ham
beefsteak
boiled or fried eggs
shoofly and boiled potatoes
Ricker Dining Center, 2000
hot oatmeal
fresh Izzy's bagels
sour cream coffee cake
make-your-own waffles with toppings
assorted melons
vegan tofu scramble
huevos rancheros
Tater Tots
Sources: The Stanford Century; Stanford Dining Services
"I know the menus pretty well -- I know whether we've had a dish or not," says McQuillan, a trained dietitian. "When we look at the menu, we want to make sure that all the food items aren't the same color, the same texture and the same appearance." Moreover, dishes should be complementary but able to stand on their own, and there should be a good balance between protein and veggie items, she says. But despite everyone's best efforts to keep all those variables in mind, "sometimes we look at a menu and say, 'What happened there?'" she laughs. McQuillan remembers one day when almost all the dishes were a shade of brown -- oven-baked chicken, browned potatoes and brown rice pilaf.
Her electronic database contains some 1,600 recipes collected over the years from past and current Stanford chefs. A powerful computer program projects how much food the dorms will need and estimates the cost. It also keeps track of how many cartons of milk, pounds of beef and bushels of fruits and vegetables are left in the pantry. The program allows dining hall managers to submit orders electronically to various vendors, including the standard monthly request for 292 cases of orange juice, 83,880 eggs and 576,000 table napkins.
To ensure freshness, managers order frequent deliveries. Six days a week, Royal Produce trucks rumble through the campus dropping off 210 pounds of lettuce at various kitchens. Three times a week, Sysco delivers fresh and frozen meats. Loaf and sliced bread comes five times a week, milk and dairy products four times.
Using the core menus as guidelines, dining hall managers seem to enjoy catering to the tastes of their particular students. Jeanette Hayden of Lagunita, for instance, serves roast beef more often for her relatively carnivorous residents; Priscilla Raymond creates more bean and veggie dishes for the large vegetarian population at Flo Mo; and Wilbur's Bernice Woo whips up mashed potatoes and roast turkey for freshmen craving "comfort" food.
And yet, perhaps inevitably, students complain. Sophomore Valerie Seymour says the food at Manzanita is "too salty" and lacks variety for vegetarians like herself. Her friend, sophomore Priya Venkatesan, says cheese is overused in the vegetarian dishes there. At Lakeside, "the hamburgers are terrible," moans freshman Matt Craft. "It's nice that they try to mix up the cuisine, but they usually fail pretty miserably." Freshman Grant Chambers, while admitting to a fondness for the Thai chicken curry at Lakeside, says, "I don't like the fact that they always run out of wheat bread. And the oranges are terrible; I get better oranges in St. Louis."
After 15 years of feeding Stanford students, McQuillan says she's learned to take such remarks in stride. She compares the work to being a mom: "It's a role that's taken for granted."
They've come a long way from mystery meatloaf -- but some things may never change.
Sherri Eng is editorial coordinator for the San Francisco Giants.
