Smart Meetings

Palate vs. Palette

Author: Carolyn Koenig
March 2008

Food + Beverage

Ellen Burke Van Slyke has one of the most unusual job titles in the hotel restaurant and catering industry:

Creative Director of Food and Beverage, at Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego. “I’m the first person to have this title,” says Burke Van Slyke, explaining that “As a company, Loews is committed to moving forward in a creative way.”

For meetings, this means “creating a ‘non-banquet’ banquet experience,” she says. “We’re changing our language and calling the ballroom the ‘large dining room.’ We’re creating a residential feel for banquets so it doesn’t feel like the same old thing. And we’re keeping the focus on what’s new and fresh.”

She comes to this approach naturally. Speaking both French and Italian, she took off to Europe at the age of 20, a jaunt that ignited her passion for cooking and where she also discovered a talent for painting. In the 20 years since then, she has exhibited as a professional painter, while owning and cooking at her own restaurant prior to moving up in the dining and hotel world to become director of food and beverage for Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in Tucson, Ariz. During her tenure there, the resort’s Ventana restaurant achieved AAA Five-Star status—one of only three in Arizona.

“I regard a blank canvas and a blank plate as similar things,” she says. “When you create a menu, the color, the form—all the issues of composition—go into it.”

When she and the hotel’s chef design a menu, they also design the plates—how the food is presented—at the same time. “I draw my plate—the chefs are used to me by now,” she says with a laugh. As they proceed, she might say to the chef, “We’re missing a crunchy moment here.” If she’s looking at the balance between courses and one is predominantly green, she will tweak it. Or, she’ll use unusual vessels—plates that can’t be stacked or kept in a hot box. “This extends to guests a feeling of immediacy when [the food] is made right before it’s served at table,” she says.

Referring to the menu she created for Smart Meetings’ readers, Burke Van Slyke  notes it isn’t the typical three-course dinner; at Loews she prefers to do four. “It’s taking the concept of small plates, smaller portions, but more courses, more like a restaurant,” she says.

The menu features suggested wine pairings, and here again, she demonstrates her creativity. “The correct pairing is really critical to enhancing a menu,” she says. “Because we feel strongly about this, we offer a wine-by-the-glass program for banquets. We have three different tiers: everyone’s budget is different, and we want a client with a great budget to have options as well as a client with budget constraints.”

The most discerning tier on the banquet wine list features wines that are all produced with sustainable farming practices, and all represent a minimum of two-generation-winemaker businesses. “It has to be an established wine family; we’re supporting families that have been doing this a long time before it was fashionable...We don’t want wine from somebody who had a lot of money and bought a winery. We want to pay respect to the winemaking families.”

Sustainable is a word you’ll hear often from the creative director. Organic is another. To this end, the resort kitchen has its own 3,800-square-foot organic herb and vegetable garden, which provides many of the ingredients used in both banquets and Mistral, the resort’s fully sustainable restaurant. The herb garden also has another function that is ideal for small groups. “There’s a break we do for meetings called ‘A Walk in the Herb Garden,’” she says. The planner stops the meeting and says “We’re going to take a break, a really unusual break.” The group then follows the banquet captain outside, where the chef will have a beverage made with some of the herbs, such as a virgin mint mojito or lemon verbena lemonade. Then the chef will give a demonstration, “maybe do little crostinis with mint pesto and goat cheese or shrimp with fresh fennel vinaigrette,” she recounts.

“We’re really trying to shake it up,” she says, “and get the group excited about what they’re here to meet about and eat about.”