PARKHURST DINING FEEDS THE VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE
The Virginia Military Institute is a public senior military college in Lexington, Virginia, United States. It was founded in 1839 as America’s first state-sponsored and -supported military college and is the oldest public senior military college in the United States.
LANG:
Let’s start with your name and the name of the business.
TH:
My name is Tracy Hiner, and I work for Parkhurst Dining.
LANG:
Which is part of the Virginia Military Institute, correct?
TH:
It is. We’re at Virginia Military Institute, yes.
LANG:
Tell us a little bit more about the Institute.
TH:
Virginia Military Institute was founded in 1839. We have about 1,600 cadets on average. It’s a four-year program, so probably close to 50/50 that will commission into the Armed Forces. We cover Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, even National Guard. The rest will go into the workforce, or they will go into graduate school.
LANG:
And you provide all of the dining for VMI? And catering?
TH:
Parkhurst Dining is contracted by VMI. We service the dining hall, we service retail, we service catering, and we also service concessions.
LANG:
What drove you to get into the business?
TH:
I started out as a young teenager working in the kitchen for a summer job and then just kind of fell in love with food service. I went into the Navy as a cook for six and a half years, went to Johnson & Wales for my culinary degree, worked at a bed and breakfast for a few years and then got into higher ed as an executive chef. I was an executive chef up until about 16 years ago. I left the kitchens about 16 years ago to work as the director of dining. And then I came to VMI about three and a half years ago as the GM for food service.
LANG:
Are you the owner of the business or do you work for the business?
TH:
I work for the business.
LANG:
You said you were involved with cooking before. Have you always been interested in cooking?
TH:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love food. I didn’t cook much for my family when I was in the kitchen all the time, but when I did get out of the kitchen, yeah. I cook at home now, but food is at the heart of everything we do. It’s hard for me to stay out of the kitchen sometimes, but we have an excellent culinary staff, and when I get a chance to support them through, say, the smoker or another piece of equipment, it’s as much fun for me as it is for them.
LANG:
You said that you do all of the dining halls and the catering. Do you have any kind of like, like food trucks or anything like that? Do you do anything beyond like the dining room?
TH:
No, we do not have food trucks. We do over a million in sales and catering. Our retail is probably close to a million. We’re busy enough without a food truck.
LANG:
What advice would you give to someone getting started in a catering or food service business?
TH:
I would certainly suggest that they go work for somebody else first and see if they like the business. Also, hopefully get a chance to understand the business side. Understand the profitability, or sometimes the lack thereof. It’s really a labor of love. There are exceptions of course, but it’s something that, certainly if you own it or you manage it, you’re going to spend a lot of time in it.
LANG:
What do you find to be the hardest thing about the business?
TH:
Making everyone happy all the time. It’s not only your customer, but it’s your staff. We’ve got over 100 employees here, a fabulous team. I wouldn’t choose anybody else to work with, but it’s 100-and-some lives to help manage. The business still goes on, day-to-day, whether everybody’s here or not. On the customer side, you’re as good as your last meal, so you’re proving yourself every day. But that’s part of the excitement as well.
LANG:
What do you find most rewarding?
TH:
Oh, no doubt, making people smile through food, no matter what meal, who the customer is. We do a core appreciation, maybe one a semester here, where we go way upscale in the dining hall. I was walking through the dining room one night when we were doing this meal, and I heard two cadets passing each other. One looked at the other and said, did you see that gourmet **** coming out of there? And that was, that was like four Michelin stars to me, you know, nothing else mattered. That’s why I do what I do, for sure.
LANG:
What makes what you do with Parkhurst unique?
TH:
Parkhurst is a family-owned business. It is a subsidiary of Eat’n Park Hospitality. Eat’n Park Hospitality is the restaurant side that started in Pittsburgh, and then in 1997, Parkhurst Dining started to get into higher education. The company is still very organic. It’s people first. There’s tons of opportunity for autonomy and entrepreneurship. We are not a one-size-fits-all. It’s based on the location that we’re at. Versus a larger company, and I understand part of that’s due to scale, but it’s nice to be able to steer our business in the direction that our client wants to go or that our customers need us to go. Certainly, Virginia Military Institute is a very unique location. There’s lots of tradition here, such as the march downs that they do at breakfast, and they call dinner “supper,” where we’re feeding 500 or 600 students in 30 minutes. It’s finding a way to bring the dining experience to those people. It’s different than you would do if you were doing a plated dinner. VMI is, like I said, a fully accredited college. We have a lot of athletes. When you get a chance to use your skills across the different aspects of business, dining hall, catering, retail concessions, it makes it a lot of fun.
LANG:
When did you first purchase a Lang for the business and which unit did you get?
TH:
It was spring of last year. I had done some research online and spoke to Jan. It was maybe an hour or so later, the owner called me back and was talking about his smokers and what we might be interested in and why we wanted to even purchase one to begin with. We ended up picking the Lang 84″ Original. I really enjoyed having that experience with the people that care about the business and how we were going to utilize their products. I had read the reviews, and I couldn’t find anything bad about Lang smokers.
LANG:
Do you just have the one Lang smoker or do you have multiple models?
TH:
We just have the one 84″ model. Initially, I thought that we would use this for a mixture of catering and the dining hall. I wanted something that was mobile so that we could go to different spots, depending on where we’re catering at. It wasn’t just the product to come off the smoker, but they could actually see the smoker in action and that would change the experience. What happened was, what I thought would end up being maybe a couple of days of usage over two or three weeks turned into it being used almost every single day. The smoker sits behind our dining hall that’s in close proximity for all of our kitchen staff to utilize it. We are smoking meats for catering as well as the dining hall almost on a daily basis. If the catering client asks for something that’s smoked, obviously it’s going to come off the smoker. We’ve actually written menus specific to the smoker. It’s called slow mode. Beef, pork, chicken, we’ve even smoked trout on it. That’s routine in our dining hall. Then last fall, for football season, we started taking the smoker to the football field for concessions. We were selling a beef brisket sandwich. It went from nice-to-have-and-we’ll-use-it-occasionally to it’s-used-almost-daily. It’s used in our dining hall, it’s used in catering, it’s used in concessions. Not long after we purchased it last spring, we did a spring cookout for the corps in front of the barracks. We actually pulled the smoker up to barracks, and as we’re making the sandwiches, we’re pulling the meat off the smoker. So again, it’s wanting to give the cadets the same experience that we would give somebody for a catered event or at a football game.
LANG:
That’s great that there are so many different ways that you can use it.
TH:
It is.
LANG:
What features do you like best about the Lang?
TH:
I like the simplicity of it. It’s easy to use. I like having the racks that slide in and out. It’s got doors on both sides, so you can unload or load the product on either side. It’s easy to hook up to a vehicle and move. I think it’s very well made. I think that the hot box where we load the wood works very well. With the dampers on both sides and on top, it’s easy to control the flame to get the right temperature inside. The indirect smoke feature of the smoker helps it stay consistent from one end of the smoker to the other. And it looks cool too.
LANG:
How does the Reverse Flow Process of the Lang help?
TH:
Oh, it definitely helps keep the temperature consistent and the smoke consistent throughout the entire smoker. Your box is on one side and product can be all the way on the other. Your smoke is going to work throughout the entire smoker consistently and cover your product. It doesn’t have to be on one end or the other.
LANG:
What’s your favorite type of wood that you like to cook with?
TH:
Because of accessibility, we primarily use either cherry or oak.
LANG:
What is your goal as a chef?
TH:
To provide the best food possible and make people smile through food.
LANG:
Do you have any favorite meals that you like to prepare?
TH:
I like wild game. I like waterfowl. I like fish. I like venison.
LANG:
Do the students have any particular favorite meals that they like?
TH:
We’ve done beef short ribs on the smoker before. They really enjoyed those. That’s the nice thing about our customers. They’re coming from everywhere, so nothing to do with the demographics of Lexington, Virginia. You get to try everything and anything. Honestly, we’ll be thinking up new types of meals every now and then from different countries or different regions. And the more exotic we get, the more excited they get.
LANG:
Are you in any kind of BBQ competitions?
TH:
No.
LANG:
Is it mostly just the students or do you have other customers? Some parents or alumni coming in, anything like that?
TH:
Most of our catering is internal, so alumni, faculty, staff, and we do outside catering. It really depends on our availability. VMI is a busy place. Our calendar is pretty full with what they want, but if we’re down, or sometimes we get referred to somebody, and If we have the availability, we cater their event.
LANG:
What kind of events do you cater?
TH:
We do graduations. We do reunions. We’ve done weddings. We’ve done some baby showers.
LANG:
What do you want your customers to know about the way that you work?
TH:
I equate it to how I provide meals at home. I want to look at them after they have one of our meals and be happy and see a smile, every meal, every single day, no different than if I go home and cook dinner for my family. It’s not just a job, it’s the same care and passion to feed them as it would be to feed my family. My colleagues share that as well. We take it personally that they’re taken care of. Another aspect of the military regiment is that their time is limited and they’re working very hard. It’s a lot of stringent PT activity and things. It’s not unusual to run across somebody that’s missed a meal for some reason. If we know it, we can take care of them. We’re going to make sure they get fed.
LANG:
Is there anything that I haven’t hit on that you would like us to know?
TH:
We’re still as excited today as we were last spring to have the smoker and how we’ve incorporated it. Again, I’m astonished at how much we use it. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me, looking back, with all the different types of business that we have, but the way my staff embraced it as well. I thought it was my baby when I was bringing it in here, but it’s not. There’s probably six or eight of us that take care of it like we own it.
LANG:
Is there a recipe that you can share with our readers?
TH:
Yeah, absolutely.
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