Sarah Goddard of the University Club of Missouri staff serves club-made New England clam chowder to Connor Cole, a member of the Phi Kappa Theta house that now gets its meals catered by the club. |
Sometimes, the best opportunities for new business can be found literally in your backyard. After the University Club of Missouri in Columbia, Mo. tapped a lucrative new revenue source by landing a contract to provide catering for the stadium suites at Mizzou football games (“Getting the Tigers By the Tail,” C&RB, April 2008), the club’s staff, led by General Manager John LaRocca and Daniel Pliska, found another great source of nearby, ever-hungry mouths to feed.
This past summer, the long-time manager of the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity house on campus suffered a medical condition that would not allow him to continue to operate the kitchen that prepares meals for the 90 or so fraternity brothers who live and eat there. The fraternity director asked a local kitchen supply company for any suggestions on how the void could be filled, and the supplier, knowing that Pliska knew and had trained most of the culinary talent in town, suggested that “Chef P.” be given a call.
When Pliska was contacted about the situation, he immediately told the Phi Kappa Theta manager of the success the club was having with offsite catering at the football stadium and other venues, and suggested that the best solution might be for the club to turn the fraternity house kitchen into another satellite operation. In the next two weeks, LaRocca and Pliska put together a plan for how existing menus could be cross-utilized to provide the meals that the fraternity would need, and how the house’s kitchen would be staffed to prepare and serve them.
Everything was worked out in time for the first day of the fall term, and the University Club now serves three meals a day at the house on Mondays through Thursdays, plus lunch on Fridays, using a four-week menu rotation that each day features three to four entrees, a soup and a variety of desserts (see menu file). All of the menu items are prepared weekly in the club’s main kitchen and then transferred to the house. A full-time cook and dishwasher assistant have been assigned to the house for the nine months of the school season.
“We should realize about $150,000 in revenue for the season, plus spinoff business from etiquette classes and other things we can offer,” says Pliska. “From a cost standpoint it’s a win-win for everyone, because of the volume purchasing that we can do in combination with our other operations. Plus it defers some of our fixed costs, and opens the door for more fraternity houses and sororities, and other venues on campus, to come on line.”
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