Workhorse combi-ovens and a successful partnership with their manufacturer have helped the culinary team at The Union League of Philadelphia keep pace with the club’s impressive growth in F&B.
Among all of the impressive success stories that attest to the dining resurgence within the club industry, few are as eye-opening as the growth experienced by The Union League of Philadelphia.
As described in March 2013 by the club’s General Manager, Jeff McFadden, CCM, in his keynote address to Club & Resort Business’ Chef to Chef Conference in Denver, The Union League’s total food-and-beverage receipts grew from $3 million in 2000 to over $15 million last year, with both a la carte (up from $1.5 million to $5 million-plus) and banquet service (up from $3.1 million to over $10 million) expanding at an equally impressive pace.
The food-and-beverage revival at “The League” has contributed directly to overall profits, McFadden added, as well as to a near-doubling of the club’s membership (to now over 3,450). It also helped build up capital reserves that have allowed the club to move forward with aggressive growth plans including major improvements to its classic downtown Philadelphia building (pictured at left) as well as the recent purchase of a golf course in Philadelphia and the opening at the end of May of a new restaurant in the New Jersey shore town of Stone Harbor.
In fact, at that same Denver conference, McFadden described plans for a $12 million renovation and expansion of the Union League’s main kitchen that would start in July 2013—and at that time, Executive Chef Martin Hamann, who also presented at the Conference, was starting to plan for new equipment purchases that would be made as part of that project.
With such a high-volume and fast-growing operation, Hamann had a very clear idea of the qualities he would be seeking in whatever he bought for the Union League’s renovated kitchen: ease of operation, consistent quality and most of all, reliability for keeping up with a non-stop pace.
“With all that we were taking on, and all that we were going to be doing both during and after the renovation, I needed to know that all of the new equipment would be dependable,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t going to have time to deal with any [performance] issues once it was all put in place,”
When it came to combi-ovens, which he knew were going to be put into heavy and constant use for both a la carte and banquet service, Hamann hadn’t been especially happy with previous models used at The League. But when he struck up a conversation in Denver with two corporate chefs from Alto-Shaam, the Menomonee Falls, Wis.-based manufacturer that was one of the Conference’s sponsors, Hamann immediately liked what he began to not only see and hear, but also feel.
“It was nice to have realistic, laid-back conversations with chefs who clearly knew what I was dealing with and understood how I needed to have their equipment help me get things done,” Hamann says of his initial discussions with Robert Simmelink and Andy Mayeshiba of Alto-Shaam. “There was no b.s.—just ‘Here’s what our [ovens] can do and how we can [provide] support to help you get the most out of them.’ ”
Front and Center
The Union League’s kitchen renovation was completed in March of this year, unveiling a host of impressive new features that include a butcher shop and chocolate shop. And now in the center of the action, directly across from Martin Hamann’s new office, are two new Alto-Shaam stacked combi-oven units, a 7.14 ESG/CT/SK and a 20.20 ESG/CT. They are joined in the setup by a 10-year-old, stacked Alto-Shaam 7.14 ML combi-oven unit that Hamann had repositioned from The Union League’s pre-renovation bake shop—he plans to eventually replace that unit with Alto-Shaam’s new stacked CTP 7.20G combi model, but it’s proving hard to part with because of the yeoman duty it continues to perform.
The new, and older, Alto-Shaam units immediately proved their worth during the renovation, Hamann reports, when the Union League culinary team “didn’t miss a beat” in serving the club’s three dining rooms and 14 banquet and meeting spaces, despite it “looking like a bomb went off” in the back of the house. Now that construction has ended, the Alto-Shaam equipment has steadily turned out consistent quality for a wide variety of cooking uses, ranging from roasting bones to start sauces for a la carte menus, to steaming vegetables and braising meats for high-volume banquets that can serve as many as 800 for Easter and Mother’s Day and 3,000 for the club’s New Year’s Day extravaganza (the club has the best location in the city for watching Philadelphia’s Mummer’s Day parade).
“[The Alto-Shaam ovens] have been very, very consistent,” says Matt DiGiovanni, who has taken on primary responsibility for their operation as the club’s Banquet Sous Chef. “That’s especially important because we have a lot of different people using them. But the controls are easy for anyone to learn to use, and the self-cleaning features also make sure they’re easy to keep in good working order.”
DiGiovanni also cites the value of having Dan Pino, Corporate Chef for BSE Keystone, Alto-Shaam’s manufacturers rep in nearby Brooklawn, N.J., available from the start for training and ongoing support.
“Whenever anything might come up about the equipment, we can just call Dan and usually he’ll solve it by saying, ‘Try this,’ ” DiGiovanni says. “He’s also quick to get us parts or other support if needed, either from machines he has at his location, or by getting quick response from [Alto-Shaam] tech services in Wisconsin.
“But for the most part,” DiGiovanni adds, “we rolled them right in and turned them on, and they’ve just kept cooking great for us.”
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