Regina Toomey Bueno, director of food, nutrition and transport at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J., had to wait 12 years for her operation to be renovated. Throughout the long process, Bueno has learned the importance of doing your homework and maintaining realistic expectations.
In March 2006, The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, renovated its employee cafeteria—12 years after administrators began talking about it. Regina Toomey Bueno, who became the hospital’s director of food, nutrition and transport at about the time the project first was put on the table, talks about the process and what she’s gotten out of it.
“When I interviewed for the job at Valley 12 years ago, the vice president said, ‘I want to make sure that you have experience with renovations because they’re going to be renovating the cafeteria almost immediately.’ Well, we finally renovated the cafeteria in 2005. So we actually had three different plans at three different times as we kept changing the scope of the project. Initially it was a small facelift, and then it was going to be a little more extensive, and eventually we decided on a total gut and redo. And then from that point it took almost three years to complete the project.
The equipment design was done by our equipment distributor’s designer, and the mechanicals and the finishes were done by an architect that the hospital uses for a lot of architectural projects. There is a natural tendency among architectural firms designing many projects within the same building to go for a cohesive look. So all of our renovated areas blended together and are quite lovely. But you really don’t want your cafeteria to blend in. You want it to ‘pop.’ Fortunately the architect was open to other ideas and he really came up with some creative things. The dimensions of the cafeteria only allowed us to do a straight line [servery], and the ceilings are pretty low so we couldn’t do a lot of soffits to enhance the look of the area. But by using a lot of visual tricks the architect did a nice job. He had the tiles laid on a curve and he did these mini soffits and had them run along curvilinear lines. It made a difference.
One of the things I learned was that I have been in this business for 25 years and yet, in terms of equipment, I really don’t know all that much. I really should have done homework on every piece of equipment, no matter how basic, because some of the equipment was problematic for us. Every designer has their own prejudices about what they like and don’t like in terms of equipment. You need to be aware of that and you need to ask questions.
It’s sort of a natural thing that when you have an area with problems, you think when you renovate it you’re going to solve all the problems. That’s an unrealistic expectation, particularly when you are renovating in an old building. You have to make compromises—amazingly enough, before pen is even laid to paper.
Even if you have a project manager, ultimately you have to live with it so you have to be involved every step of the way. You have to keep in mind how things are going to work operationally after it’s designed. Sometimes it looks like you have room, then you start construction and you think, this is going to be much tighter than I thought.
There is no such thing as a perfect installation or a perfect turnkey operation. There will always be problems, so be prepared. You just have to be patient and work through them.”