Pop-up restaurant concepts, mobile ordering add pizzazz to retail dining at Mount Sinai

Morrison has rolled out its Best Concept Award winning micro-concept program to Mount Sinai’s Plaza Café, where each month one station is transformed from its regular offering into a pop-up restaurant with a featured menu that focuses on a particular cuisine, such as Liberty Street with its Southern barbecue, Tackle Box with its fish sandwiches, tacos, and salad bowls and Greek Street with its gyros and power grain bowls, items never offered before at this location. Additional micro-concepts such as Taco Shoppe, Southern Bayou, Naansense and Ramen Republic are planned for popping up at Plaza Café in the coming months.

The next venture is to offer mobile order pay through an app called Nourish that was designed by the Compass IT team specifically for Morrison. With it, guests are able to select from a variety of menu options and pay from their phone, an especially valuable convenience for hospital employees who are taking care of patients around the clock.

Morrison has also been working to offer more sustainable serviceware items in its retail spaces, deploying eco-friendly, compostable plastic containers and paper products at the majority of the stations, with more changes on the way.

The Mount Sinai dining team contributes to its local community pantry during the holiday season by providing frozen turkeys and prepared holiday meals. This year, meals that remained following the employee appreciation event were donated.  

Another community relations program is Teaching Kitchen, a new health and wellness concept for Morrison, that allows guests to improve their food and nutrition literacy in a way that positively impacts their food choices and experiences. One recent event had the Morrison team partner with the Mount Sinai Heart Healthy team at a local Manhattan high school to showcase a featured recipe for stuffed tuna avocado during which Regional Executive Chef Erick Ackolwitz showed the students how to prepare the dish while Mount Sinai RD Nava Tager provided healthy eating tips. The students were able to sample the dish and then take the recipe card home.

Other initiatives have helped support the clinical mission, such as a snack cart offering a variety of milkshakes and nutrient-dense snacks for oncology patients between meals that was developed in response to a challenge to the foodservice team to find a way to give cancer patients more convenient access to nutritious snacks throughout the day.

Another program, Date Night, was implemented for antepartum mothers who have had an extended stay. It has the chef visit the patient and offer a special select menu that is served at a small table set up by the nursing team, giving the parents-to-be a special evening together before the birth.