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Cooking Up a Dream

By Joe Barks | March 18, 2011

Like many successful club chefs who have helped to raise their properties’ food-and-beverage profiles, Frank Mirabile, Executive Chef of Monroe Golf Club in Pittsford, N.Y., now finds himself challenged “with a relatively small kitchen [and] demand that has outgrown its layout and design.”

So when Mirabile saw the opportunity to submit a proposal for a “dream suite” of kitchen equipment through the contest sponsored last year by The Montague Company, it wasn’t hard for him to fantasize about all of the ideas he’d like to bring together in a dream-kitchen scenario.

“I designed a suite that follows the classic brigade system of fish, meat, two Entremetiers and Sous Chef/Expediter,” Mirabile says in describing his entry, which took top honors in the Clubs category. “The challenge with a club environment, however, is that you have both casual and fine dining items offered at the same time. Lunch service is another consideration, because it’s typically a one-man line.”

What special features did Mirabile and his partner, Michael Berard of Commercial Kitchen Consulting, LLC, include to try to help meet the needs of each cook, each service and each cuisine in such tight space? “We included drop-in sous vide wells that could provide a compact outlet for our progressive sous vide cooking, which is here to stay and an integral tool in my kitchen,” he says. “Another special piece was the plancha, which I was first exposed to while working for Roger Vergé in France in 1998.  At that time, I remember being amazed that almost all proteins, especially fish, were prepared on the plancha, and that there were no sauté pans. The uniformity of the heat, and the flat surface, made it a very productive piece of equipment.

“I also included a standard griddle top, as we serve a lot of classic sandwiches at lunch that require the toasting of bread,” Mirabile adds. “And the infrared, under-fire broiler would be perfect for the prime steaks and meat that I serve, giving me a quality tool to prepare the quality product that I work so hard to source.

Other features incorporated into the suite included a drop-in spoon well and drop-in 1/9 pan wells.  For special touches, Mirabile added a brass rail belly bar and a special handmade plate at the front of the suite, where his club’s logo could be displayed.

Such a cooking suite “would allow us to open up the kitchen with a Chef’s table and show off a little bit,” Mirabile says. “Because of our size constraints, we would need workhorse equipment that would allow the club to grow its a la carte offerings of both casual and fine dining cuisine, in terms of speed and total covers, well into the future.”

View Mirable’s rendering here.

About The Author

Joe Barks

Joe Barks contributes to Club & Resort Business magazine working out of Wayne, Pa. (suburban Philadelphia). He has been covering the club and resort industry since the launch of C&RB in April 2005 and during that time has written cover-story profiles of over 150 club and resort properties, as well as many additional articles about specific aspects of club management and profiles of leading club managers. Barks has been a writer and editor for specialized business publications for over 40 years, covering a wide variety of industries and professional disciplines over the course of his career. He is a four-time winner of Jesse H. Neal Awards from the American Business Press, known as the “Pulitzer Prizes” for industry trade publications. He has also been a freelance contributor to many leading national consumer and business publications, and served as Marketing Manager for the Hay Group, a leading worldwide management consulting firm. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

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