Fine Dining Operations

By Laura Doty -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 2/1/2002

Upscale menus and very special service programs are designed to pamper aria-lovers at NYC's Lincoln Center Metropolitan Opera House. FE&S went behind the scenes to learn how Restaurant Associates uses E&S to orchestrate its fine-dining operations at the opera.

New York City's Metropolitan Opera, located at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, is acknowledged to be one of the world's premier opera companies. A night at NYC's Metropolitan Opera House becomes even more special for patrons who choose to dine on-site at The Restaurant on the Vilar Grand Tier, which occupies one of the sweeping balconies overlooking the opera house's grand lobby staircase. New York City-based Restaurant Associates, which has held a contract with Lincoln Center to provide opera house dining since 1986, presents pre-theater, intermission and Saturday matinee meal programs during the opera's season, which runs from early fall through late spring. A highly structured method of preparation and service, and a recently upgraded menu, help to ensure that a dining experience at the opera house is as memorable as the artistry exhibited onstage.

Back-of-the-house kitchen operations at the Met are constantly evolving to support the upscale menus at the Vilar Grand Tier, as well as other foodservices at this cultural institution. A large kitchen located on the sixth floor of the opera house was part of the original Lincoln Center building, which opened 30 years ago. At its opening, the opera's dining room was located adjacent to this upstairs kitchen, which, at the time, was configured as a serving kitchen. However, the time constraints of moving patrons in and out of this upstairs dining room before and during performances made the location impractical, and the dining venue was eventually moved downstairs to the Grand Tier balcony location, where an extra expediting kitchen was added.

The Restaurant on the Vilar Grand Tier can seat 225 diners, and tables and seating arrangements are broken down every evening and reconstructed the next afternoon before the facility opens for pre-theater supper, two hours before curtain time. This schedule helps staff accommodate specific patrons' reservations and, also, illustrates the ingenious way that The Restaurant on the Grand Tier is created from the interior architecture of Lincoln Center's opera house as needed for opera dining and other special functions. The original design for the Grand Tier dining room, including the large, comfortable curved leather banquettes, was provided for RA by noted restaurant designer Adam Tihany, and was refurbished two years ago by Connecticut-based Fred Brush.

The large sixth-floor kitchen now functions as a prep kitchen for the Grand Tier's pre-theater and intermission dining programs, as well as for all specially catered banquets and for the Metropolitan Opera's new employee cafeteria, which opened in the Met's basement at the end of August. The central portion of the prep kitchen is dominated by a 30-foot hot line and parallel steel expediting island. Hot-line equipment includes a double-stack convection oven, two 60-gallon kettles, a tilting skillet, fryer, four-burner range with a center eye and a broiler. The bustling center portion of the prep kitchen also is home to walk-in refrigeration storage and wheeled metal carts that are loaded with stacks of prepared foods in preparation for transport to other parts of the facility.

The back portion of the prep kitchen, which was originally the serving area opening into the original sixth-floor dining room, has been adapted for use as the cold-line prep and butchers' areas. Anchored by a central, 20-foot worktable, and containing other scattered worktables, this area includes a sandwich prep line for production of panini sandwiches offered at opera intermission, as well as sandwich production for the employee cafeteria. This 10-foot line is flanked by two reach-in refrigerators. The line on the opposite side of the space includes a six-foot cutting board for butchering duties. The RA kitchen staff has come up with some ingenious ways of adapting some of the old serving equipment in this area for new usage. For example, an older, steel oyster bar is now being used to hold coffee urns and various coffees served to patrons and employees at the opera house.

The front section of the prep kitchen contains a separate 100-square-foot pastry kitchen. For six years, Pastry Chef Randy Eastman has been creating desserts here such as Apple Crostata, Cluizel Chocolate Soufflé and other delectables for the Grand Tier's dessert menu. The pastry prep area has benefited from the most recent addition of new equipment, as new refrigeration and a single-stack convection oven were installed last year.

The Met's second-floor expediting kitchen, where all meals for the Grand Tier are finished and served, was initially redone in '86, when RA first took over the contract at the Met, and was reconfigured and refurbished two years ago with the help of in-house designers. This kitchen, built into a long hallway at one side of the building just off the Grand Tier dining room, now consists of a beverage service area next to a pass-through pantry area and a reach-through cold service station, with refrigeration built under all cabinets and extra storage reach-in refrigeration located at the other end of the hot line. The finishing kitchen's hot line contains a single-stack convection oven, grill, flat-top griddle, four-burner range, a half-flat-top griddle and a fryer.

Server puts finishing touches on table-tops in anticipation of dining service, which begins two hours before curtain time.

The new executive chef at the Metropolitan Opera, John DiLeo, said, "Before I started my job at the opera house this August, I was warned that I would walk more than I ever had before in my life! It is a challenge dealing with the various locations of kitchens and dining rooms around this building, particularly coordinating the menu for the Grand Tier between the prep kitchen and the expediting kitchen. It helps me a lot that our 24-member kitchen staff is experienced in the specific processes that make things work here, as most come back for opera season year after year."

Chef DiLeo was brought onboard as executive chef for the Grand Tier as a result of a new approach now being applied to menu development for the Metropolitan Opera's dining programs. On a mandate from Nick Valenti, CEO of Restaurant Associates, the main menu was updated and modeled somewhat on the menu of seafood dishes from The Sea Grill, a popular RA-owned restaurant in NYC's Rockefeller Center. Chef Ed Brown, executive chef at The Sea Grill, was tapped as supervising chef for the Vilar Grand Tier at the Met, and he and Chef DiLeo, who have been friends and associates for 20 years, set about creating new menus for this year's opera season.

"We added a few classic Sea Grill menu items, such as jumbo crab cakes, roasted Chilean sea bass and Sea Grill chowder," said Chef DiLeo. "We adapted some other Sea Grill items to suit our operation here, and I added a couple of new selections, including herb-crusted rack of lamb and crispy-skin salmon. Our pre-theater dining program generally involves serving around 180 meals in about an hour, so we put a lot of thought into designing our seven-entrée menu to make it work for us and satisfy our customers. "Another outcome of our menu upgrade is that it changed our service style in the dining room, and let us add some new tabletop items," continued DiLeo. "Servers used to stack up to eight covered plates for service and now only four plates at a time go out of the kitchen. We've also added some extra service equipment, such as the small, metal tureens used to serve individual portions of truffle mashed potatoes."

"I spend one night a week over at the Metropolitan Opera, and I know they appreciate the extra hands on a busy shift," said Supervising Chef Brown. "With the new emphasis now placed on seafood items at the Grand Tier, we'll add a new piece of cooking equipment there - a special griddle called a plancha that I discovered in Spain and now use at The Sea Grill. A plancha is a thick, chrome-plated griddle that provides six-square-feet of cooking surface. Usually when searing fish, a high temperature, about 650°F., is required, and the cold fish changes the temperature of its pan. The beauty of the plancha when cooking fish is that it retains a constant 400°F., almost toasting the fish rather than searing it, which helps the product retain fresh flavor and a good texture."

"We haven't really seen our numbers go down after 9-11 - opera patrons are not dissuaded by anything," added Fred Mills, RA's director of operations for Metropolitan Opera dining. "We've been averaging 170 to 180 reservations for pre-theater dining a night, and we try to accommodate walk-ins when we can. Chefs Brown and DiLeo have brought our menus to a new level, and we've been getting positive feedback from our patrons on our new service.

"One of the aspects of our operation's service structure that is absolutely critical is our nightly seating chart," continued Mills. "We offer various intermission services to patrons at the Vilar Grand Tier. For instance, pre-theater dinner patrons can choose to have dessert and coffee served at their table during intermission if they place their orders before going into the opera performance. These orders are pre-set at their tables just before intermission, so they are waiting for them as they retake their seats. We also offer a limited first-intermission dinner service, which includes a few select items from our main dining menu. In this case, patrons fax their orders to us the day of the performance, and their meals are pre-set for them and held under warming trays, so they're ready to be consumed at intermission. We also offer dessert and coffee service during operas' second intermission. We keep track of these intermission orders using our seating chart and computer and, obviously, our whole staff needs to be very attuned to what's going on nightly in our operations.

"In a way, the restaurant on the Vilar Grand Tier is almost like a club," concluded Mills. "A lot of our patrons come back year after year and, if they've subscribed to two nights a week at the opera, they come to us for dinner twice a week. Everybody knows each other. And, of course, this is New York, where status and 'real estate' are important, so everyone wants to sit in the most desirable area of the Grand Tier, in front of the Chagall mural," Mills said with a laugh.

"When we were first contracted to provide the Met's dining at Lincoln Center in '86," related Dick Cattani, president of restaurant services at RA, "I took the opportunity to visit some of the other great opera houses of the world, in Paris, London, Munich and Vienna, to study their dining services and get ideas to help serve our patrons in New York. In Munich, we discovered a piece of serving equipment used to keep plated foods hot that consisted of a covered, metal, plate cradle with a votive candle underneath. The design of this item was so simple, effective and elegant that we had a similar piece of equipment fabricated for our operations at the Met, where it is still used in the Grand Tier. Since we've had the contract at the Metropolitan Opera, we've worked constantly to enhance our operations. Recently, we've been making plans to add a special champagne and caviar service at the Vilar Grand Tier." RA's contract at the Metropolitan Opera has been extended twice and, last fall, RA signed a 10-year extension to provide dining services at the Met, according to Cattani.