A great tasting dish simply isn’t enough for the Culinary Team at The Grand America Hotel. With sights set on producing high-quality dining experiences for their guests, Grand chefs focus on preparing house-made ingredients, sourcing locally, and investing in innovative kitchen technology.
The secret behind every great restaurant is its ingredients. Behind the scenes, you find culinary team members creating classic American dishes with ingredients as innovative as they are fresh. Think essentials prepared from scratch daily; bread, butter, ricotta cheese, ice cream, yogurt, pasta. Insistent on the best, our team uses house-made and local ingredients whenever possible.
“Every culinary team member is trained to make house-made butter from start to finish. Beginning with 24 hours of fermentation, the process continues with careful cooling, mixing, and cleaning. While separating the butter from the liquid, the resulting buttermilk is used in The Garden Cafe’s Lemon Ricotta Pancakes.”
-Tomas Olvera, Chef De Cuisine
The Grand America Hotel
The Grand kitchen is filled with inventive, back-of-house techniques. Our Chefs blaze new trails by being adopters of culinary technology. Like Rational; a high-performance oven that produces top-quality food with precise temperature, humidity, airflow, and cooking time settings. Or the Sammic water bath, which yields consistently perfect results by allowing chefs to cook in exact, temperature-controlled environments.
“Innovation and creativity are key factors to think outside the box, which directly encourages excitement and passion for my team and me. They are a necessity to keep up and stay above the competition in today’s rapidly evolving food industry.”
-Praveen Dhananjayan, Pastry Chef
The Grand America Hotel
Grand Chefs are passionate about the integrity of the food they prepare, and no effort is spared in the process. The result – exceptional food served to every guest, from a single diner to hundreds of banquet attendees.
“I look at food differently than when I was younger. Food brings balance to my life–this is not only my career, but what best describes who I am. Food now means the future for me. This career path is for people who are go-getters who want to create and keep creating every day, and who want to share their love of food with family and friends or even a stranger whom they will never meet.”
-Natalie Miller, Chef De Cuisine
The Grand America Hotel