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| Food for Thought
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Chef Collins taps his kitchen crew for some of Midway’s best recipes.
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Executive Chef: Rubin Collins
Operation: Midway Slots & Simulcast
Location: Harrington, DE
Web Site: www.midwayslots.com
Concept: something to please everyone in a high-volume, gaming setting
Dining venues: International Buffet, Doo-Wop Deli, Simulcast Sports Bar
Banquets and catering: to accommodate from 20 to 1,000 guests
Number of cooking staff: 8 chefs, 40 cooks, 2 receivers
Buffet stations: Asian, Italian, Farmer’s Market, Home Cooking and the Dessert Factory, plus carved meats and daily specials.
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| Where did you learn how to serve up to 3,200 guests a day? – Questions & Answers
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On your Web site is a nice photo of some of your crew members working the International Buffet. Is there a lot of live cooking on the buffet line?
The Italian station and the Asian station both feature chefs preparing food in front of the guests. In the Italian section we prepare pizzas and pastas and Italian-style entrées, soups and seafood specialties. In the Asian station we have two woks and offer stir fries, soups, egg rolls, fried rice and fortune cookies.
The Home Cooking menu is prepared in the back-of-the-house and held in steam tables. Most of those dishes are slow-cooked favorites, such as meat loaf, carved roasts, macaroni and cheese, and other comfort foods.
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How much of the menu is prepared from scratch?
We make quite a few items from scratch here. We start with the stocks, which form the base for our soups, sauces and gravies. For the fried chicken we even make our own batter with our own special seasoning. We purchase the pizza dough but make all the other toppings for the pizzas ourselves, including the meat sauce. And then the specials are our creations.
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For example?
We run eight special menu events. Monday and Wednesday are seafood nights, with the focus on all sorts of seafood at every station. In the Sports Bar on Tuesday the menu lists beef, beer and wings. Every week we have a different beef entrée, plus we offer different variations on wings. We do a lemon pepper seasoning and jerk and Asian wings, too. It’s become one of our most popular evenings.
Saturdays are super busy. We feature what we call “Ethnic Night” with real homestyle food like chitlins, barbecue ribs, mashed potatoes, fried okra, collard greens, corn bread and bread pudding.
In the Doo-Wop Deli, where the concept is predominantly sandwiches, we provide some daily specials as alternatives – items like meat loaf, crab cakes or roast beef – in keeping with the retro-diner theme.
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How many people can you serve in a day?
Some Saturdays we’ll do as many as 3,200 people. But an average buffet day is about 1,800, with another 350 or so in the deli. And then we might have up to three or four parties going on at the same time.
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What’s your kitchen setup like?
We do all the prep and basic item preparation in the buffet kitchen. The food then moves to the smaller kitchens at the Doo-Wop and the Sports Bar. Right now, during live racing season, we also are running foodservice in the Clubhouse full-time.
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Where did you get the skills to manage all that volume?
I started in the military, in the Navy back in 1985 in San Diego. Over the years I got more training and responsibility, working at stations in Bermuda, Scotland and Meridian, MS. In Bermuda we fed flight crews and prepared in-flight meals. In Scotland I worked on an amphibious dry dock, where submarines loaded supplies and made repairs. The chow hall down below had only 35 seats, but we had 150 crew members stationed there, plus all the submarine crews that needed feeding. We had an expression – if you didn’t have food in your mouth, then it was time to get up and move on.
When I got back to the States, I went to a military hotel school for management training. That took me out of the kitchen for a little while, and I wound up supervising the barracks staff on base. After I finished my service, I went to work in a casino and that’s when I was recruited to work here.
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How do you keep yourself organized? Do you have a computer program to keep things straight, or do you use good, old- fashioned pencil and paper?
I’ve learned to keep a lot in my head. And I delegate a lot because I have a terrific group of chefs and cooks working with me. Some were trained in culinary school, and some went through the school of hard knocks but they all make valuable contributions.
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Would you consider yourself a fair manager?
I’d like to think so. It’s important to make people feel good about their work. We try to accommodate people’s time-off requirements and always be respectful of their family responsibilities. We even name dishes after the cooks who bring in their secret recipes. Some of our most popular items were developed this way, like Mary’s Meatloaf or the special cakes we make for parties. There’s even a dessert sauce named after me.
I also pay a lot of attention to basic training. Safety and sanitation are extremely important when you’re doing as many meals as we do, and I make that a priority for everyone.
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Do you have an open-door policy?
It’s so busy in my office that I’d call it more like a revolving-door policy. It’s almost impossible for me to get any time alone to do my paperwork.
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After you’ve mastered high-volume cooking, what’s next for you?
I’d really like to go back to school and learn ice carving and food garnishing. I’m hoping to go locally, but I really want to add those skills to my experience.
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