The residents at a nursing home rebelled against their dining room menu. The Chef realized he had to do something to make them happier. So he turned the tables on them. And asked, “Okay. How would YOU make it? The result was a stunning revelation…
At first, Chef Craig Bowerson approached his responsibility as food service director at The Cedars nursing home in MacPherson, Kansas, as just another job. But the residents quickly disabused hiom of that notion. Complaints poured in like raindrops in a thunderstorm.
“I was sitting there thinking about my residents telling me how much they disliked the menu,” Bow-erson told TODAY.com. Never, in his 33 years as a chef, had he encountered such pushback against what he considered his best efforts.
Turned the tables…
Stuck for a solution to the problem, craft Craig decided to put the ball in the residents’ court, asking them for family recipes they loved. And the resulting flood of suggestions amazed him.
Bowerson started by spending time in the dining room with his ‘customers’. Specifically, he struck up conversations with them, about the food, and their preferences.
“[He’d ask,] ‘Hey, how did you make spaghetti?’ ‘How did you make lasagna?’ ‘How did you make your chicken cordon bleu?’,” Bowerson says. “I ended up re-creating a menu just based off of what my resi-dents want.”
And the dissatisfaction rate plummeted from 75 percent to zero!
Who’s the guest?
“After that first week, I ended up with several hundred recipes,” he continues. “When you start getting that personal connection, you realize you’re a guest in their house.”
Bowerson recalls, he received recipes in all shapes and formats: handwritten from memory, clipped from magazines, off family recipe box cards. Some, he notes were more than a century old, handed down through generations.
Memorable case in point…
Perhaps his most memorable resident encounter was with a 93-year-old man suffering with dement-ia. The fellow would regularly lapse into still-clear memories from his childhood – when his Dad was a chef in Winnetka, Illinois.”
“I ended up contacting the Chamber of Commerce there,” Bowerson recalls. “I got all the information that I could about that, and we re-created some dishes from his dad.”
Another menu odyssey involved a dish that was represented only by a shopping list for its ingredi-ents. The creator had passed away. But Bowerson was unbowed.
“It was a chili mac recipe. The resident gave it to me, and he originally only had his wife’s shopping list, so we had to take the six ingredients she had asked him to pick up at the store and figure out what she made.”
After a couple of weeks of recipe testing, they figured out it was a shopping list for chili mac. “He ended up having us add cheese to it, and that was the only thing that wasn’t in the [original] recipe.” The recipe contributor has since passed away, but his dish has become a Cedars menu staple.
My take
They went through a similar reimagining at the hospital folks in my neighbourhood usually get taken to by the ambulance when they have a medical emergency. A new CEO deemed the food so bad that a major overhaul was needed, both on the nutrition and the ‘diner appeal’ vectors.
A similar consultation process to Bowerson’s was undertaken… And the Queensway-Carleton Hospit-al’s new food service program has become a model other institutions are emulating.
Given the longstanding legend about how bad hospital food is, it’s a wonder chefs like Bowerson didn’t have his epiphany sooner!
~ Maggie J.