April 2006
Morongo's Ace Kitchen
By Janice Cha 

Morongo Casino, Resort and Spa, Cabazon, Calif., put a lot of money on the table when it built a spacious, state-of-the-art, cook-chill enabled kitchen to power the dining options at its upscale hotel and gaming facility. Now the bet is paying off—in menu- and layout flexibility, food quality, labor savings and customer satisfaction.

The story behind Morongo’s mongo new foodservice started in 2002, when the Morongo Casino underwent a $250 million ground-up rebirth. The business strategy was simple: to “out-Las Vegas” Las Vegas.

The goal couldn’t have been much clearer. The owners, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, figured they could tap into the growing number of young Los Angeles gamblers who head for Vegas on weekends. And why not? Morongo is just 91 miles outside Los Angeles, 20 minutes from Palm Springs, literally on the way to Las Vegas. The 44-acre location on the Morongo reservation virtually screamed its own marketing plan. All that remained was to rebuild the facility to match the target clientele.

Thus was born a gleaming new facility. Today, the new 27-story hotel complex rises above the desert, an oasis of light and color visible for miles. Inside lies a hip, Hollywood-oriented hotel, with a Sunset Strip-style nightclub, dimly lit VIP party rooms and sleek video slot machines preferred by younger gamers. Some 310 guest rooms, including 32 deluxe suites and six ultra-private “casitas,” encourage gamers to stay and play.

But it’s the array of top quality food offerings, served in posh restaurants, lavish buffets and round-the-clock eateries, that lets customers stay longer—and come back often.

The ace card of Morongo’s culinary strategy was dealt early on in the foodservice planning. “[We] didn’t want to be like some other Native American gaming-type casinos we’d toured that had limited kitchen and storage space, and were using ‘light duty’ cooking equipment,” says David Hamano, former director of design/regional manager for Cini-Little, South Pasadena, Calif.

“We made many trips to Las Vegas and to other Native American gaming facilities to see what was hot and what could be done better,” he adds. “No corners were cut in making sure that these kitchens would have the best equipment available to allow for menu flexibility and throughput.”

Menus Drive Kitchen Design

In the early stages of the project, the design and F&B team studied guests’ food and beverage requests at the existing Morongo Casino property, and compared them with profiles of the guest target market for the new property.

F&B Director Chuck Ponczoch, General Manager Bill Davis and Executive Chef Christophe Douheret worked closely with the design team to ensure that the foodservice operations would support the overall vision.

Planners started by parsing menus every which way to determine what they’d need for warehouse storage, a cook-chill system and food bank. The menus’ many high-end desserts and baked goods guaranteed the addition of a full-service bakery to support all Morongo’s eateries.

The buffet’s servery and cook stations were also menu driven, planned with sufficient mis en place, storage and support space. The Asian food station got star billing in the buffet since many of Morongo’s guests are Asian American.

Morongo’s Mongo Kitchen

The result was a 12,000-sq.-ft., state-of-the-art food production and cook-chill facility. Throw in the adjacent refrigerated warehouse, banquet and room service kitchens plus satellite foodservice operations, and Morongo’s foodservice-related territory would easily cover the better part of a football field.

The main production kitchen serves nine satellite kitchens:

• The 500-seat Potrero Canyon buffet servery and cooking area, at 6,400 sq. ft., capable of serving 3,200 customers per day

• The public bars and the gaming floor service station, supported by a 6,800-sq.-ft. kitchen

•  The Food Court, with approximately 4,500 sq. ft. of kitchen space

• One specialty restaurant with a 2,700-sq.-ft. kitchen  

• Serrano, the 200-seat, 24-hour café, with a 2,200- sq.-ft. area

• The 180-seat employee dining, servery and kitchen, 1,600 sq. ft.

• For poolside food and bar service, a 900-sq.-ft. kitchen

• Cielo fine dining restaurant, on the 27^th floor, with 800-sq.-ft. kitchen

• Pit Bar, the 80-seat casino centerpiece

• The 120-seat Mystic Lounge.

The pieces fit together in a footprint that maximizes flow and flexibility. Food product starts its journey through Morongo with temporary storage in the 6,000-sq.-ft. refrigerated warehouse—a must-have for the hot desert climate. The warehouse sits adjacent to the main kitchen. Workers come and go across a wide hallway opening into the kitchen’s cold prep area. Bulk food produced in the kitchen’s cook-chill area goes back into the warehouse food bank for later distribution. The refrigerated warehouse features palletized high-bay storage technology, which means more efficient inventory management and better buying power.

Product is then transferred to the main kitchen, where it is sent to the cold bulk prep area, cooking area, garnishing, bakery, or cook-chill. Once prepped or par-cooked, food may be temporarily returned to the food bank for later use, or continue on to any of five adjoining foodservice operations: the 500-seat buffet, the 24-hour café, the employee dining operation, room service or banquet kitchen.

The display-cooking buffet, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, gets the bulk of the main kitchen’s production. A series of pass-through refrigerators and warmers placed along the shared wall between the main kitchen and the buffet facility makes for efficient transfer and holding of prepared food.

The main kitchen and nearby foodservice operations are served by a centralized, well-equipped warewashing area. Two flight-type machines, one rack machine for glassware, a potwasher, a powered soaking sink and a single door machine for pans, plus lots and lots of racks, stand by to return dishware and cookingware to service.

Piggybacks and UDS: Out-Of-Sight Efficiencies

The flow-friendly, interconnected design is echoed in the piggyback refrigeration and utility distribution systems as well.

Cooling power for the warehouse, cold prep area and walk-in coolers and freezers comes from a large parallel refrigeration/condenser rack. The parallel system creates operating backups to guarantee 24-7 cooling power, with condensers linked so they can compensate for each other. The system encourages energy efficiency, too. When one box reaches its optimum coolness, unneeded compressors are shut down. And in the event of a compressor failure, others in the rack can take over.

The whole setup is linked to the manufacturer via modem. “If one of the box temperatures rises too high, both the manufacturer’s service agent and the facility team get a call,” Hamano said.

The system has generated energy savings of about 35% compared to a traditional refrigeration rack system, he says.

Meanwhile, at kitchen level, clever placement of the utility distribution system has made for an extra-flexible, extra-clean work area layout. 

In an unusual move, designers ran the electrical access across the ceilings rather than floors and walls. Retractable power cords and compressed air hoses reside in 14 neat, overhead stainless steel boxes situated above main work areas. Because worktables are all on wheels, and electric outlets are relatively mobile, reconfiguring the floor layout for specific catering functions is easy. Cleaning, too, is quick and easy.

The compressed air hoses, by the way, have proved to be essential kitchen tools. Workers use them in the cook-chill bagging area to power the clipping system that closes bags; in the garde manger area to spray glazes on foods; and in the bakery to run the pastry guns. The air hoses also get the call to clean and dry equipment (reducing the chance of water danger to electronic controls), and to power heavy-duty can openers.

“Now that I have the overhead air hoses, they’d be hard to do without,” Douheret admits.

Meanwhile, over at the cookline, an island-wall on pedestals houses a UDS that runs all utility lines—gas, electricity and water—through a shoulder-height stainless steel panel. Lots of benefits: For starters, because the cooking equipment on either side of the panel uses quick-disconnect hoses, pieces can be reconfigured as needed with minimum hassle. Second, the fact that the divider wall is only 50” high helps maintain sight lines in the open kitchen. Finally, the 2’ clearance between the bottom of the wall and the floor—plus equipment on casters and quick-disconnects--makes cleaning all the easier.

“We reposition the cooking equipment as often as once a week,” Douheret says. “If we have a banquet that will feature grilled chicken, we can move several grills together, take out the oven, and cook twice as fast.”

Cook-Chillin’ At The Casino

Early in the planning stages, the pricey question of “to cook-chill or not to cook-chill” was firmly settled by Douheret. The classically trained French chef, who had toured a number of commissaries and casinos to study their food production methods, realized that a cook-chill system was the only way to ensure consistent food quality and food safety, especially for the all-important buffet operations. And from a labor standpoint, cook-chill would also reduce the need for skilled workers, scarce in that part of the country.

The system was installed, and two full-time workers were trained to use it. “When we opened in Nov. 2004, we were only three-quarters staffed in the kitchen,” Douheret recalls. “Having the cook-chill inventory of food on hand saved us.”

The cook-chill equipment line features one 100-gal. kettle, one 50-gal. kettle and one 1,000-lb. turbojet cook-chill tank. Also included are three full-size roll-in combi ovens, a blast chiller and a fully automated bagging system attached to the kettles. Also used as part of the cook-chill system are two boilers for heating water in the steam-jacketed kettles and two large compressors used in the bagging system and the kettles.

For the cook-chill tank, the kitchen design team opted to use the relatively new glycol chilling technology rather than the traditional ice-builder equipment. The glycol system is “more space efficient, more mechanically-friendly than the ice-builder and best of all, uses much less water,” Douheret notes.

The cook-chill system, with its two full-time workers, processes almost 75% of food made at Morongo and has allowed the kitchen to function smoothly with about 30% fewer workers, according to Douheret.

Daily volumes average 500 gals. of soups and sauces, and 700-800 lbs. of rice. And every night, the cook tank slow-cooks 1,000 lbs. of vacuum-bagged proteins. Best-seller prime rib, for example, would be vacuum packed, cooked in 128°F water for seven hours, then chilled at 29°F for four hours. Bagged food stored in the food bank can be held for up to __ days at 32°F temperatures.

“With cook-chill, the meat is naturally tenderized and pasteurized at the same time,” Douheret notes. The yields are much better to, at 95% yield for cook-tank product vs. 75% yield for meat cooked by traditional methods. “I’ve practically paid for the whole system with prime rib alone in about two years—we use about 80,000 lbs. of prime rib per year.”

The roll-in combi-ovens play a key roll as well. “These are the heart of the bulk production,” Hamano says. Racks of just-cooked food can be directly wheeled into the large blast-chiller, and then later to the food bank in the warehouse.

Douheret swears by his cook-chill system. “It lets me run a made-to-order buffet, which is unheard of for an operation of this size,” he said. “People think they’re getting food that’s been cooked to order, but it’s really assembled to order. Food quality doesn’t depend anymore on whether your guys wake up in the morning in a good mood or bad mood.”

But is the Morongo culinary team really out-Vegasing Vegas?

“Absolutely,” Douheret says. “On Thursdays, when we do a regular $20 seafood buffet, there’s an hour wait all evening. We serve 1,200 meals over a five-hour span.

“The repeat business shows we’re doing something right.”