1.3 min. read
I’ve often wondered just how much food they serve at the big sports venues… And I finally ran across a post that tells all – about Boston’s historic Fenway Park. They call the home of the Red Sox ‘the big-gest restaurant in New England’…
The Major League park’s menu continues to grow, but there is no room to expand kitchen and food storage facilities. Yet, the foodservice machine hidden deep in the facility’s core manages to prep more than 12,000 hot dogs every game…
Hard numbers
“Fenway is the biggest restaurant in New England,” Senior Executive Chef Ron Abell told Food & Wine. “No matter what anybody tells you, the Patriots, no, they don’t do as much as we do.”
The park employs more than 300 cooks and stewards work across nine kitchens to supply 100 con-cession stands, five restaurants, and two main club spaces.
Every game day, the park serves more than 12,000 hot dogs, 2,500 sausages, 2000 Pizza slices and 1,500 Monster Cookies – along with an army of lobsters and oceans of chowder. And much more.
Big Green… Roof?
Fenway is famous for more than just its legendary Big Green Wall scoreboard. It also boasts a roof garden that generates 5,000 to 7,000 pounds of organic produce every year – about 20 percent of the produce served at the park each year.
The operation is called Fenway Farms, and is run by Green City Growers of Somerville, Mass., which describes itself as , “a purpose-driven force in the urban agriculture industry.” They use the term ‘edible landscapes’ to describe their approach.
My take
Here’s one of he oldest MLB parks in the system, doing things in the most modern of ways. And paying more than lip service to food sustainability and the environment.
It’s not only a great example for other pro sports facilities to follow; it’s the way things are going to have to be if the system is to survive in the face of the prevailing economic and climate-change realities…
~ Maggie J.