No one who has spent any time in hospital will dispute the fact that the food is usually pretty bad. No salt. No sauce. No spices. And almost always cold. But The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) is revamping its food services with a menu update designed by a celeb restaurateur…
An actual patient ‘testing’ one of the 30 new dishes auditioned
by the food services department at The Ottawa Hospital.
A new era in food services is about to dawn under the supervision of Ottawa celebrity resto owner and chef Steve Beckta (photo, left). Improving the nutritional value and attractiveness of the hospital system’s food – both in the patient kitchen and the cafeteria – will produce multiple benefits.
“It needs to be delicious, it needs to be nutritious, because we need to have malnutrition levels reduced and hopefully have patients go home sooner,” said Beckta, who has been serving the hospital on a part-time basis as a consulting specialist in ‘food service transformation’.
Done and done…
“You can’t begin to describe how important food is to the patient experience,” Beckta added. “When [patients are] so vulnerable in that situation, to be able to improve their day or hopefully send them home a little bit earlier or care for them in a way that really resonates, it’s better than any five-star review.”
Beckta says it’s just a larger-scale version of what smart home cooks do to make sure their families get the nutrition they need in foods that they’ll love to eat.
“Any good parent knows, you hide the good stuff in with the stuff that the kids will like,” Beckta ex-plained. “The same case is true with patients. So we enhance the mashed potatoes with high-protein cottage cheese, and we had seven different vegetables in with the ground beef and it’s delicious, but it’s also very easy to understand and appreciate from the patient perspective.”
Just like any new recipe a resto chef wants to put on their menu, Beckta rolled out his 30 new dishes for a real-world – or ward – review. The new plates were tried out on patients in on selected units of the hospital for two weeks in the fall of 2024, then for another 10 days last spring, CBC reports. The reviews were encouraging.
New dishes even sound better
Take a moment to imagine a food tray filled with a fresh chicken and baby kale Caesar salad with puffed quinoa and chickpeas, homemade bone broth, or sausage gnocchi with peppers and spinach pesto. Is your mouth watering yet?
“It’s not lost on us that ‘good food’ and ‘hospital’ are words that you rarely ever see in the same sentence,” the official news release from The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) admits. However, it’s, “on a mission to change that. With help from a renowned Ottawa restaurateur, we are reimagining the patient food experience, and these are just a few meals that appeared on our prototype menu.”
Not gone unnoticed
TOH launched its Food Transformation Project back in 2024. And a lot of R&D has gone into the effort. “The goal was to see if it is possible to improve the overall nutrition and quality of food we serve to our patients, while increasing bedside hospitality, enhancing the overall sustainability of our food services, and not increasing operational costs.”
Our trial phase of the project wrapped up last year, with ‘promising results’. The project has been so successful, in fact, that it recently won a prestigious provincial award for hospital innovation. The full-scale rollout is slated for this year.
My take
Kudos to Beckta for his top-level contribution consulting on the TOH food service revamp. When the hospital signed him on, he came with a wealth of talent and over 30 years of culinary experience. Beckta is President of the Beckta Restaurant Group, which includes Beckta, one of Canada’s premier fine-dining restaurants.
And kudos to TOH for taking the initiative to blast its food services into the 21st Century.
However… I can’t help pointing out that the tiny (by comparison) Queensway Carleton Hospital, serving the city’s far-west end and the upper Ottawa Valley, did the same thing back in 2016…
But who cares if TOH is copy-catting? It’s the food that counts!
~ Maggie J.