Cal Dining
University of California at Berkeley
Shawn LaPean is director of this world-renowned campus's foodservice program. With a customer base that is 48 percent Asian or Asian-American and highly knowledgeable about ethnic food, LaPean scrambles to keep up with students' wide-ranging tastes. See what's cooking at Cal Dining.
The concept
We serve 22,000 students a day out of 10 different facilities. The students in the residence halls have to have a meal plan, but there are 1800 other students that choose to have a meal plan. And we have had a 17 to 20 percent increase in chosen meal plans every semester for the past seven, so to me we're doing the right thing.
What students want
Eighty-five percent of our students are from California, but they really come from all over the world. They have an understanding of what ethnic food is, and they're not looking to us for lowest-common-denominator food. Of course, some students will eat pizza every night, but most of them want something new from us all the time. They want flavor, spice, taste. They want authentic and regional. They know the difference between Filipinio and Thai food, and they want to see the difference. Students are saying, "Give us the real stuff." Recently we had one student complain that we had Indian food twice in one week. So I asked the chef and she said, "But it was East Indian one night and West Indian the other night. They're completely different cuisines."
The staff
We have 60 cooks from all over the world and we're trying to use some of them to not just follow our recipes but to put in their own creativity and flair. I'm trying to turn my chefs loose on creating food they like to explore. They have more ownership in what comes out of the kitchen when it's got their name on it. We have some chefs that do Asian really well, and some that don't, and we're trying to get them to teach each other.
The pitfalls of ethnic cooking
Inconsistency. We hit it some nights, and some we don't.
We have staff training, but we need retraining: How much spice do you add to this? When do you taste? What should it taste like? All the chefs have different ideas about that. We do work from recipes, but the individual making it has to have a certain buy-in to the dish. We have one chef who, when he follows our recipes, it's horrible, but when he does it on his own, it's great. The benefit to the chefs is that they're always learning, and it's always changing. We went away from the traditional cycle menu that projects six months of menus in advance. Now we do seasonal menus that project only two weeks out, so if customers are requesting more Indian food, we can do that.
New idea
We are rebuilding a dining hall with a pho bar, all you can eat sushi rolls, a cold salad area, and a stir-fry area. It's dedicated to being Asian five nights a week. We're trying to create distinct destination dining halls, because if you do fried chicken one night and chicken masala the next, how does the customer make sense of that? They can use their meal plan anywhere, and they shop around now. We're the fifth most-visited web site on the campus. They're checking out our menus to know where to eat tonight. We know we've done a good job when the cell phones start coming out and they're calling their friends to come for dinner.
Appealing to the middle ground
We're trying not to be on middle ground. If the dish is supposed to be hot, it's going to be hot. When you take it down a notch into that mediocre realm, the people who know what it should taste like don't come back, and the others won't try it anyway. This is not food for the lowest common denominator. We're trying to get as far away from that as possible.