Paul King

Articles by
Paul King

Page 22
Operations

Gold standard on display

On Monday evening of the National Restaurant Show, I had the pleasure of attending the Gold and Silver Plate banquet in the Grand Ballroom of the Navy Pier. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, capped off by witnessing another non-commercial foodservice operator—this time, George Miller of the U.S. Air Force—win the coveted Gold Plate.

Operations

Garden Party

Gardens are springing up all over the world of Parkhurst Dining Services, and the foodservice management firm is keeping its sustainability coordinator busy fielding all manner of requests dealing with environmental topics.

Two events of note occurred last week in San Antonio, Texas, both revolving around school foodservice. The Culinary Institute of America, in collaboration with the National Restaurant Association, staged “Healthy Flavors, Healthy Kids,” a three-day event billed as a National Invitational Leadership Summit.

For many years Cal Dining, the foodservice program at the University of California at Berkeley, has been a leader in environmental awareness.

I came across an interesting article last week regarding a lawsuit filed against Princeton University that could have some impact on the Dining Services department. The suit claims that the university is claiming exempt status for buildings that do not serve an academic purpose, in violation of state law.

As we roll into the month of May, FoodService Director prepares to introduce a new advisory board, whose members will help guide us in planning our editorial calendars and our MenuDirections conference, and provide a sounding board for what works, what doesn’t work and what could work better in the pages of FoodService Director and foodservicedirector.com.

Earlier this month, I drove up to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., to sit in on one of the sessions of the Culinary Enrichment and Innovation Program. The topic was wellness, and when I arrived the chefs were in the kitchen creating some healthy dishes for lunch.

With the concept of sustainability well into its second decade, a number of operators have found that their programs have begun to stagnate. There may be one or more reasons: customers and staff may b...

George Miller Jr. has been involved with Air Force foodservice for a long time—more than 45 years. But the chief of Air Force Food and Beverage Operations hasn’t run out of ideas yet. At a...

There once was a time when, if you were a resident student at a college or university, you had to purchase a meal plan. More often than not, it was a standard, 19-meal-per-week program, and it led to a fair amount of complaining about missed meals, and women subsidizing the men due to the relative amounts of food consumed by each gender.

I read an article last week, posted on The Gothamist, an online blog/newspaper covering New York City, about the Department of Health inspections at Fordham University. (According to a friend of mine, an archivist with the university, the article apparently borrowed extensively from Fordham’s online student newspaper.)

I am a terrible grocery shopper. Just ask my wife. My failing lies not with budgeting; I’m very savvy when it comes to paying the best price or getting the best value for an item. No, my fault is buying some ingredients with the intent to use and then forgetting about them until they have sat in the refrigerator until they have gone sour, or rancid, or moldy.

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