Executive Chef Chad Stein helped The Suburban Club in Pikesville, Md., expand its Seder feast to a club-wide event.
Seder, a ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish festival Passover, is typically celebrated by a community or multiple generations of a family. For clubs with Jewish members, that’s typically meant being prepared to host a number of small family events upon request during the holiday period.
That was often the case at The Suburban Club in Pikesville, Md., before Chad Stein became its Executive Chef five years ago. But now, the club also celebrates one big event for all members—and this year, Stein estimates that 400 of the club’s 700 members were in attendance.
THE GOAL: Turn Seder, the ritual feast that marks the beginning of Passover, into a club-wide event with a community feel at The Suburban Club. |
“The event has grown much more popular and has more of a community-type feel to it,” says Stein.
On April 22, the club served traditional Jewish fare, including matzo ball soup, brisket, chopped liver, roasted smoked wood chicken, tzimmes, latke, and side items like kugel. The Suburban Club’s food-and-beverage team makes everything in-house, including assorted dessert samplers of more than 1,200 individual pastries.
“The prep is all traditional fare, in which I use my mom’s and grandmother’s original recipes,” Stein reports. “Which means a lot to me, because they got me interested in cooking.”
In addition to the main event, The Suburban Club also accommodates small private parties and carryout orders for members who host Passover dinners at home. As an additional service, Stein notes, he and his crew will make dishes from recipes that members bring in that have been passed down through their own families.
INSTANT IDEA As clubs continue to grow their banquet businesses as the most profitable parts of their food-and-beverage operations, it becomes even more critical to ensure that the entire F&B staff is on the same page for setting up for banquet events properly and efficiently. Several clubs have taken steps to make sure nothing is left to chance, by issuing detailed instruction sheets and comprehensive manuals that can be used for initial staff training and then consulted as ongoing guides to all equipment and steps required for proper banquet setup. The Kansas City Country Club (Mission Hills, Kan.), with well over 1,000 functions per year, now uses posted setup sheets for all events that have greatly reduced the need to track down managers to determine specific serving requirements. The Country Club of Virginia (Richmond, Va.) has gone even further, preparing a “how-to” booklet for banquet set-ups that is full of visual aids to help both new and seasoned employees know exactly what’s required for all banquet stations, bars, beverage displays and seated-dinner settings. |
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