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| Chef's Showcase |
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| Longevity Breeds Creativity
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 Executive Chef
Tom Hannum
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Executive chef: Tom Hannum
Owned and operated by: The Du Pont Co.
Setting: Located near Pennsylvania's historic Brandywine Valley
Year opened: 1913
Number of rooms: 206 plus 11 suites
Noted guests: John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, Ingrid Bergman, Joe DiMaggio, Elizabeth Taylor
Dining venues: Green Room, Brandywine Room, Christina Room, Lobby Lounge, The Grill
Number of kitchen employees: 45 chefs and cooks, 22 pastry staff, 25 stewards
Green Room menu features: Gewürztraminer-poached foie gras with fennel and orange salad and green peppercorn-caramel sauce, $12.95; shrimp mousse and crabmeat cake with champagne-mustard sauce, $11.00; grilled porter house steak with Merlot-chili preserves, $31.00
Sample banquet hors d'oeuvre: Raspberry and Brie beignet; Malaysian shrimp fritters with sweet chili-garlic sauce; crab n'cheese, open face; crayfish éclair with Creole mustard, duck crostini with mango chutney, smoked chicken on cheddar walnut cracker
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What Makes Work at This Historic Property Continually Rewarding? - Questions & Answers
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Over the last 24 years where has your Hotel du Pont career path taken you?
I started as a cook's helper and progressed through the entire kitchen, eventually making it to senior cook,
banquet chef and dining-room chef. I became the executive chef for the hotel in 1993.
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What are some of the biggest changes you've seen at the property over the years?
Customer tastes have changed. Everyone's a "foodie" now. When I first started here, there was no food
network; there was only one big food magazine, and people didn't travel like as do now. Guests have
expanded their food knowledge, and that changes their expectations.
For example, the Green Room has always been described as a French restaurant. Well, even the truest French
restaurants now have other influences on their cuisine. Chefs make use of flavors and ingredients from
Asia, the Mediterranean and even America. So we're just doing the same thing that's now going on in
traditional and regional French restaurants.
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What sort of things haven't changed?
The Hotel du Pont has a history in families for generations. That kind of repeat business demands that we
respect certain traditions year after year.
One menu item has been offered for 34 years. It's called the Crab N'Cheese, an open-faced sandwich that
features crab salad on toasted bread with cheese melted on top - sort of like a fancier crab melt. I
wouldn't dream of taking it off the menu because we still serve 25 to 30 of them every day.
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What's The Brandywine Room like?
Guests compare that dining experience with dining in a private club. The room is rich with wood and leather,
and the menu takes a contemporary American approach.
So there we might offer dishes like "Jail Island" salmon with corn and scallion griddle cakes. "White
Meatloaf" was popular for a while. It was made with ground veal, pork, and chicken with green peppercorns
and shiitake mushrooms.
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How do you and your crew stay fresh and open to new ideas and techniques?
We are very lucky to have a lot of chefs come and work with us from other Preferred Hotel properties.
We've recently had visits from chefs from Madrid and Sweden. Those chefs bring all sorts of new information
with them and serve to energize and inspire our chefs.
The Hotel du Pont also hosts just about anything that happens socially in the area. We always strive to
exceed expectation at those high-profile events and work hard to source the best ingredients and develop the
best menu items.
We do about 150 weddings a year, and Saturdays in the ballroom are booked two years in advance, so that
keeps us ahead of things, too.
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Between the business meetings, the social events, the restaurants and the 24-hour room service, your
kitchen must be busy all the time. What can you tell us about how it works?
We have 20,000 square feet of kitchen and use just about every inch. There's a main production kitchen with
butcher, pastry and garde manger areas as well as 20 walk-ins. Then each restaurant has a service kitchen of
its own as well.
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What are some of the operational solutions you've developed to maximize production and quality?
We have our own soup-and-sauce-packaging system to help us capture the flavor and freshness of our
house-made products. Because we always have about 14 soups in rotation plus different kinds of consommés and
all the different sauces, that has become extremely helpful. The 6-quart bags will have a shelf life of
eight weeks, although we've worked it out so that we use them in about four.
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Do you have the typical issues of retaining good employees?
I have no turnover, so that's not a problem at all. What is a challenge is keeping the people who have been
here 10 or 12 years from getting stagnant. So I make sure we all have the opportunity to work at other
properties and take occasional classes back at The CIA. I think it's important for our chefs to get out in
the world and have different experiences they can bring back to our operation.
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What makes you most proud about your crew?
Safety is a preventative thing for us. Even though we've become more efficient and streamlined, we've been
2,400 days without a recordable injury and 12 years without any cuts. Kevlar mesh gloves have helped us
achieve that objective plus the fact that all the crew members are aware of those issues and stay on their
toes.
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