Power Players 2017: Turning theory into practice

When you run dining for a university with a high-powered culinary school, you can be sure of two things: One, you’ll have access to great student talent to assist in your operations and, two, you can’t afford to slip up. Campus dining at Sullivan, which has about 1,700 undergraduate students, centers around the Gardiner residential dining hall, which is fed by a bounty of locally produced ingredients, including fresh greens and veggies from the school’s own gardens, as well as plenty of locally raised pork and beef.

“We have somewhat of a unique situation in that a good percentage of our resident and full-time students are culinary students, so having culinary students as your primary customer allows you to be a little more creative than you might otherwise be with that demographic,” observes Jon Kell, director of food and beverage operations at Sullivan. “Though,” he is quick to add, “that’s not to say that they don’t love their chicken tenders and their pizza, because everybody does. But we do get to test the boundaries, so to speak.

“We also employ as many of them as we can,” he adds.

Gardiner offers action stations, a dessert station, a big salad bar and a big pizza oven, while retail dining is centered around the A La Carte Café, which is open all day and offers a hot line, pizza and grill. It accepts meal equivalencies off the meal plan but also gets substantial business from adult faculty and staff, Kell says.

The main garden and satellite gardens around the campus produce crops like zucchini, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots and lots of herbs.

“We do a lot of composed salads and fresh veggie stuff,” Kell says. “The kids seem to like it as a lot of them have helped in the garden and know some of the ingredients were grown right here.”

Students also seem to favor ready-made and composed dishes and grab-and-go items, perhaps because many have little time and prefer something they can get quickly, even though Gardiner offers plenty of customization options.

In addition to operating Gardiner and A La Carte Café, the campus foodservice department also manages its own catering company and a retail bakery that serves customers both on and off campus.

The bakery, which offers internships to students from Sullivan’s baking and pastry school, does business with a number of area restaurants as well as supplying the campus dining program with baked goods.

They also do a tremendous commercial wedding cake business, Kell adds. “We’re one of the few bakeries that doesn’t freeze cakes,” he says. “Every cake we sell is baked fresh for that particular order.”

The catering firm does about 70 percent of its business internally and tries to use these occasions to highlight products grown onsite. For example, a salad featured at some recent events was composed entirely of produce from the campus gardens.

“The farm-to-table trend is obviously really hot and we just took to it to campus to table,” Kell quips. Aside from the school gardens, a lot of sourcing of produce, proteins and daily products by both the dining operation and the culinary school is from nearby growers, often through an initiative called Kentucky Proud.

Kell explains that the Louisville area has a number of very specialized farms: one grows heirloom tomatoes exclusively and some others specialize in microgreens and microherbs grown in indoor growing rooms. “Louisville is a huge restaurant town with lots of aspiring and really great chefs, many of them graduates of Sullivan, and they drive the availability of things you might not otherwise be able to get locally,” he offers.

As for upcoming campus dining initiatives, Kell is anticipating reopening a renovated version of Winston’s Restaurant, a formerly fine dining establishment on campus that Kell says will now be more “fine dining-ish.”

“We’re looking to change the concept a bit and make it more eclectic,” he says. Kell hired James Moran, formerly chef de cuisine at Seviche Latin Restaurant in Louisville, to oversee the new venue, which is planned to open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday with a Sunday brunch, and draw diners not just from the Sullivan community but also from outside.

“We really want to make it one of the restaurants in Louisville that everybody talks about,” Kell says. He adds that the new Winston’s will harken back to his own early days.

“When I was younger I lived on the East Coast where a number of the culinary schools had restaurants that were run by the students, and one of the reasons I got into food was my experiences at those places.”

He plans to staff Winton’s with Sullivan nurtured talent. “Our goal is to completely have our staff be either graduates of the university or students that are currently attending,” he says.

Kell himself has been in college foodservice for a little over three years after a career in restaurants, including operating his own establishment in Covington, Ky., as well as a decade spent in casino foodservice.

He says his casino days included a period under a down economy where belts had to be tightened. “I learned a lot about efficiencies, about Kaizen processes, about wasted motion and about running on a tight, tight budget,” he recalls, “and that’s helped me make the operations I manage now at the university much more successful.”