New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health is hosting its 13th annual cooking competition among its hospitals, where hospital chefs will present fine dining dishes to be assessed by a panel of judges.
The hospitals submit an appetizer, entrée and dessert that use three required ingredients and meet nutritional criteria. The dishes are created by a team of three chefs and a registered dietitian. One of the dishes has to be on the hospital's patient menu before the competition, and all dishes must be created with patients in mind.
Northwell employees vote to determine the top three hospital menus, and those three hospitals then compete. Their food is judged by three people. This year, the judges are Bruno Tison, Northwell's vice president of systems food services and corporate executive chef; Chief Medical Officer Jill Kalman, MD, and celebrity judge chef Marcus Samuelsson. Sven Gierlinger, chief experience officer at Northwell, told Becker's, "It's hospital food that they're creating." The event "infuses competition, fosters creativity and excellence," he added, "and our chefs take it very seriously."
This year, New York City-based Lenox Hill Hospital, Tarrytown, N.Y.-based Phelps Hospital, and Plainview/Syosset (N.Y.) Hospital made the final cut and will create their dishes on May 1 during the live competition. The ingredients this year were rainbow beets (appetizer), wild monkfish (entrée), and dried prunes (dessert). The first-place winners will get a paid vacation to Napa. The second-place winners will win a dinner for themselves and one guest, and the third-place winners will receive a goodie bag.
The cooking competition predates the "supercharged food transformation" at the system by five years, Mr. Gierlinger said. Seven years ago, Northwell decided to do something about its food, which some patients had described as unfit to feed a dog. The results have changed the reputation of hospital food from bland or unhealthy to fine dining quality. The system uses its purchasing power to buy fresh food at the same price as processed food, allowing it to increase quality without costs. It has hired chefs with Michelin star experience and has a waitlist of chefs wanting to work for the system. The changes have put Northwell in the 90th percentile for food. Learn more about their food program here.