Senior community sprouts destination dining spot

This is part of Food Management's new Community program, which highlights the ways onsite operators are lending a helping hand in their communities.

Dining is a traditional communal activity in senior living facilities, but the emphasis usually is on getting residents to interact with each other. At the Laurel View Village in Davidsville, Pa., a new farm-to-table dining establishment on the premises has a slightly different emphasis: It not only seeks to gather the resident community together but it is also specifically designed to appeal to outside customers.

Called Fresh Harvest, the restaurant fills a market niche in the area around Davidsville, where eateries tend toward the downscale unless one is willing to drive a bit.

“There’s nothing else like it in the region other than a couple of chain restaurants,” notes Greg Poletti, district manager for Cura Hospitality, the unit of Elior North America that operates dining at Laurel View. “With Fresh Harvest, we tried to create something that didn’t exist here and our goal is to make it a well-known destination.”

Poletti says that the surrounding population’s makeup was very much top of mind in the design of Fresh Harvest.

“This entire region has an older population, so we wanted to create a restaurant for that group as well as our resident seniors, a place where they can come and enjoy themselves and create a kind of social hub,” Poletti says.

The menus strike a balance between the meat-and-potatoes traditions of the region and a bit of a twist—a red pepper glaze on a meatloaf, for instance—“and make it just a bit nicer than they’re used to.”

Not only does Fresh Harvest encourage walk-ins but promotes its restaurant and connecting 300-seat banquet facility as a venue to hold meetings, seminars and catered social events. It has already hosted a variety of group meetings, including the local chamber of commerce and hospital, and the restaurant’s patronage figures currently show outside customers are now nearly half the business.

That wasn’t always the case. Fresh Harvest debuted earlier this year, replacing a previous onsite restaurant that was not cutting it with a Cracker Barrel-type menu and a lot of fried foods that didn’t particularly appeal to the residents and certainly didn’t make outside diners regard it as a destination.

The centerpiece of the restaurant is the Chef’s Table where guests can enjoy watching a chef at work. It serves as a carving station at dinnertimes and turns out custom omelets at Sunday brunch. As it can do either hot or cold dishes, it can also function as an action salad station mixing locally sourced fresh greens and vegetables with a variety of proteins.

“It’s about the fresh food but also about the interaction with the chef and staff that says to guests, ‘We’ll make you what you want,’” Poletti says. “You get a connection with the customer you don’t get if you’re cooking in the kitchen.”