May 2006
SPECIAL REPORT:
IP's High-Speed Revival
By Janice Cha

If you happened to be watching CNN, Good Morning America or MSNBC last Dec. 22, you may have seen footage showing bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-10 heading into Biloxi, Miss. Everyone’s destination? The grand reopening of the IP Hotel & Casino, the first casino resurrection since the city and its nine casinos had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina at the end of August.

Inside IP, health inspectors had spent most of the day going over the foodservice areas. At 6 p.m., they finally gave the green light for the buffet opening. Just 90 minutes later, the staff of the IP’s newly rebuilt buffet began serving... and serving... and serving. Over the next 24 hours, more than 10,000 covers would be dished up to eager guests.

The beeps, chirps, and bells of the slot machines were a huge contrast to the noise of hammers, saws and heavy machinery you would have heard throughout the property for nearly four months since Katrina. In just 100 days from the start of work to completion, the $60-million-plus project had transformed a flooded, hurricane-battered hotel and casino to total glamour.

Ultra-Fast Plans For Change

Well before Katrina, the Imperial Palace Hotel & Casino had been long overdue for a renovation. The eight-year old, 1,088-room hotel and casino had become tired, rundown and neglected, a place whose declining numbers were not helped by low employee morale, utterly undistinguished foodservice and shabby furnishings.

The owners had just hired an “agent of change” in the form of General Manager Jon Lucas, a 23-year veteran of the gaming industry with a flare for food and beverage. Plans were in the works to add 500 slots and a poker room and to upgrade the hotel rooms, part of a phased three-year upgrade.

Then Katrina hit.

After the winds died down and the waters receded, Biloxi lay in ruin. The coastal Mississippi town, known for its casinos and old-South charm, had been pummeled by the Category 5 hurricane’s high winds and relentless storm surge. Giant gambling barges had been tossed hundreds of yards from their moorings; entire buildings had been swept away from their foundations leaving only stairs to nothing; and a stretch of the US-90 bridge connecting Biloxi and Ocean Springs had been uptilted into the sea like a row of collapsed dominoes.

Imperial Palace was much luckier than most. Its location in the Back Bay area, well away from the oceanfront, allowed it to escape serious damage. Still, by the time the ­­27-ft. storm surge receded, the facility’s entire first floor had been filled with mud and debris; many of the windows facing the ocean had been blown out; and the structures connecting the hotel property to the casino barge had collapsed. Electricity, gas and water were knocked out, and phone lines were barely functional.

Two days after the storm, it was assessment time. Lucas, newly hired six weeks earlier from a casino group in Tunica, Miss., plus trustees Owen Nitz and Jeff Cooper surveyed the damage. After meeting with insurance agents and contractors, they came to a daring and ambitious decision: They would shoot for a December reopening, only three and a half months out. Just over 100 days to clean up, gut the existing casino and recreate it to become a premier Biloxi destination.

So radically different would the new property be that it earned a new name as well: IP Hotel & Casino.

Lucas and company brought in a crack team: foodservice design firm JEM/SSA, headed by Ken Schwartz and John Egnor; foodservice equipment contractor Gill Group, led by Laura Gill and Brian Maloney; and construction company Roy Anderson Corp., led by Judson McLeod.

The December 22 deadline was a gamble for sure, but everyone involved was in.

The renovation was split into two parts. Phase I—with the 100-day deadline—included completely overhauling the casino; designing and installing a whole new buffet plus support kitchen; updating the main dish room; redoing casino service bars; rebuilding the entire first floor of the hotel tower; and redesigning and renovating the high-end Restaurant 32 on the top floor of the hotel.

Phase II, now currently in progress, would bring a Brazilian-style restaurant; an upscale coffee bar; a high-tech sports bar, a food court and a pool-oasis restaurant and bar.

Twenty-Four Seven

Talk about breakneck speed. In the IP project, the usual process of meeting, brainstorming, creative drawing, review and changes, was compressed into thirty days. Traditional procedures were left by the wayside in the sprint.

Designers drew up the plans, sent them electronically to manufacturers and fabricators and got production underway with no middleman.

“I would call manufacturer friends and ask if they could make me a particular customized piece of equipment,” says Schwartz, who first set foot on IP property on Oct. 14, about 60 days before the deadline. “There was no time to draw up contracts and purchase orders. Those came later. At one point, I had nearly $2.5 million worth of work being done in my name, which is typically not the role or responsibility of the foodservice consultant.”

Gill Group followed up, creating the contracts after the commitments, and guiding all aspects of the job-site work as it related to foodservice equipment. Hours were long. “From early November through mid-December, we’d all work until nearly midnight, but would still try to beat each other back to the office in the mornings,” recalls Maloney, Gill Group v.p. and director of national sales. At the construction site, Gill Group fielded a supervisor and team of up to 16 installers working to make the new IP a reality.

The logistics of building in such a widely damaged area called for some extraordinary efforts on the procurement front. Several trucking companies had to send deliveries through a New Orleans warehouse. The labor shortage in the area meant that the product would sit there—unless Gill rented trucks to go pick it up--“if the bridges were working and we could get there,” Maloney says.

And helicopters were used to deliver the oversized remote refrigeration systems to the rooftop. The helicopters flew in three times from Atlanta at a cost of $25,000 per lift.

Despite all the construction, the IP still had to function as a hotel. “There were probably 600 people working on the renovation on any given day,” Lucas says. “We were housing FEMA staff and other emergency personnel at the same time, so had a good 500 employees cleaning the rooms, providing foodservice and running day to day operations.”

In late November, Lucas, F&B V.P. Stephen Morgan, and Schwartz met with Biloxi Health Inspector Alison Felsher to review the foodservice plans and make sure they met code in advance of completing the foodservice construction documents.

Less than a month later, IP opened for business.

IP’s Cinderella Story

Two project dramatically transformed two areas in particular: the casino buffet and the fine-dining restaurant on the hotel’s 32^nd floor, known in lower-case style as “thirty two.”

The Back Bay Buffet, on the second floor of the casino barge, is by far the most jaw-dropping makeover in the 100-day saga. Before Katrina, the no-frills buffet served food that was practically “inedible,” according to the straight-talking Lucas, from a cafeteria filled with steam tables, sneeze guards and tubular tray slides. 

The goal was for a contemporary upscale magnet space that could serve cook-to-order food, and lots of it—up to 6,000 covers per day in a 470-seat area. While the construction team was gutting the 13,000-sq.-ft. buffet space down to the bare walls, Schwartz and company were busy creating magic.

The plan was for the buffet to produce 90% of the food it served, so speed and efficiency would be key goals for production. In a dramatic break from traditional buffets, designers positioned high-powered grills, woks and other cooking equipment so cooks would face guests rather than the wall. Behind the scenes, a 9,600-sq.-ft. support kitchen received new exhaust systems, walk-in coolers, freezers, buffet support equipment, and a new liquor system and soda system. A second kitchen on the third floor backs up the conference and meeting room area. 

The buffet consists of seven action stations: Italian, Tex-Mex, Southern, Asian, a Carvery, Salad and Bread, and Dessert. Each boasts a “wow!” factor focusing around a custom-fabricated equipment showpiece.

Motion And Light To Catch The Eye

When you walk through the entrance to the Back Bay Buffet, your eyes go straight to the focal point of the space: a spotlighted display of barbecued and grilled meats at the Tex-Mex station. Schwartz designed a granite, glass and steel “Ferris wheel”-style self serve station, in which the product is displayed on four slowly rotating heated granite platforms. The device is spotlighted by halogen lights and stands about 7 ft. tall by 5 ft. wide. Thanks to clever edgings, the granite appears to be 4 in. thick, when in fact each “slab” is only ¾ in. thick.

Another kind of moving equipment anchors the Carvery. Here, a pair of vertical rotisseries turns whole skewered chickens in and out of flames dancing from the center spoke. Between the Centerpiece Carvery Station and the vertical rotisseries is a broiling station, which allows product to be cooked in front of guests. Capping this station is a one-of-a-kind arching hood system, with the appearance of being more art than function.

Meanwhile, at the Southern Station, it’s the shrimp that’ll pull you in. The shrimp is displayed on a bed of ice, illuminated from below. The ice sits in a glass case made of triple-pane insulated hurricane impact glass. A set of under-case light fixtures gives the shrimp that come-hither glow.

Although each station has its own unique look, the overall image is united by the granite countertops and other upscale finishes specified by the Friedmutter Group. The granite countertops were laser-cut so that various cooking and holding devices could be slotted in along with induction cooktops, soup wells, tortilla heater, char-broiler and griddles. The back wall of each station has a handmade tile mosaic depicting a theme appropriate to the food offerings. The buffet’s curvy, contemporary look, with its warm colors of chocolate, ruby, tangerine and mango, is echoed throughout the property.

Wine Cellar With A View

The 125-seat restaurant at the top of the IP hotel tower got its own Cinderella treatment at the same time. “thirty-two” evolved from what project team members say was an uninspired, clichéd white-tablecloth eatery, with little going for it besides the bird’s-eye views of Biloxi and the ocean. The old layout featured a long, narrow entrance to the main dining room, with a ramp and short staircase leading to a raised area in the center from which diners could gaze out on the windows.

For Schwartz, this ramp/stair/walkway area was purely wasted space. When he learned that the clients wanted to emphasize the wine collection, Schwartz suggested building a glass-walled, temperature-controlled wine storage area to occupy the center spot, along with gutting the entire space to rebuild with more upscale materials and fittings for an intimate dining experience. The time frame for design and construction: one month.

The resulting wine display, executed by Koolco, was a dramatic piece of art: a floor-to-ceiling glass-walled structure supported by a deep red powder-coated steel framework.

The installation was not without drama. “The glass wall panels were too large to fit into the elevator cab,” Maloney recalls. “We had to remove the roof of the elevator and have two men ride on top of the cab to get the panels up to the 32^nd floor. Talk about a dicey situation—replacement cost would have been very, very high, as was the chance for problems.”

The interior of the display area is divided in two, with white wines on one side and reds on the other, holding up to 7,000 bottles. The display’s position in the center of the restaurant allows for tables to be set up at the entrance for tastings or decantings. Butcher-block tables will be added to the interior for wine tastings for VIP customers.

Biloxi Update

Since IP and two other casinos—the Isle of Capri and the Palace--opened for business last December, they earned a combined revenue of $62 million during January, according to Larry Gregory, the executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. The gambling revenue earned by the three casinos is about 69% of what nine casinos operating in Biloxi in January ’05 had made.

And as for the IP itself: It’s now providing jobs to some 1,400 employees—about 100 more than before Katrina.