In a town of tourists with pockets full of discretionary gold, Station Casinos doesn’t try to compete with the Wynns and Bellagios of the city for F&B dollars; their focus is on mining local treasures. Some of the Station properties’ regular guests come in seven days a week, and the buffet, open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., is the biggest draw at each property.

Last year, Station upgraded its buffets across the board, including new china, menus, buffetware, and action stations. The driving factor behind the changes was feedback from guest satisfaction surveys.

The surveys, which now include 23 questions, delivered sobering information. Questions ask what guests think of the food quality in various categories, such as flavor, variety, presentation, and temperature, as well as whether the guest would return and whether they would recommend the buffet to others, says Steven Zappacosta, corporate executive chef with Las Vegas-based Station Casinos, a brand with 11 properties in the Las Vegas/ Henderson area and one in Lincoln, California. He says the answers to the former were incredibly good, with loyalty around 95 percent, but the latter garnered a response of only 60 percent of guests willing to recommend. “To get someone to put their name on a recommendation, we had to up our game,” Zappacosta says.

VARIETY AND LOGIC
Something else Station discovered in its feedback, Zappacosta says, is that, “It’s not just about having a whole bunch of different foods and options. It’s functionally not enough. You’ve got to walk people down the row and tell them the food story.”

At the American station, instead of just seeing meatloaf, fried chicken, and pot roast, “there are things around it that make sense,” Zappacosta explains. “You have the meatloaf next to the mashed potatoes next to the broccoli next to the brown gravy. The fried chicken is next to roasted potatoes and biscuits and country gravy. It’s not about having all your proteins in one spot, all your starches in one spot, and all your vegetables together.”

Beyond the logical grouping of items, Station also thought outside the standard pan. “Instead of having the industrial half pan, shotgun/pencil pan, and full pan, we started going to companies that would cut out stainless steel templates with specific shapes for pans to go into,” Zappacosta says. “It gave us a variety of sizes and shapes and allowed us to put some more items out there.”

The custom pans also allow items to turn quickly, so that hot, fresh product is always out—a necessity, given the increased number of items.

COMMON FOCUS
Station uses a core menu for all buffets, then adds varied items to the presentation at each. Departures from the core menu are determined by the buffet’s size. At the Santa Fe Station property, the buffet has 171 spaces for product; the core menu is 90. So the other 81 items provide plenty of opportunity for differentiation from other properties. At Palace Station, the buffet has 100 spaces, so the non-core items are far fewer.

Visually and functionally, most of the buffets look different. “There’s no cookie cutter,” Zappacosta says. “You wouldn’t walk into Red Rock and then Boulder and think they are the same buffet.”

While the physical space at Boulder Station didn’t allow for quite the same buffet setup as at other properties, Director of F&B Chris McGonigle says he, too, heeded the guest perspectives gleaned from the survey, placing new emphasis on how to present hotter, better product.

“Our buffet was really old,” McGonigle says. “There wasn’t really room for it, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to go in the direction of the other buffets. So we set it up almost like a short-order kitchen, except we doubled it. We also have two cooking suites that are identical, one for each side of the buffet.“

The buffet uses almost no warmers, resulting in hotter, better fare. “We hold nothing except whole mussels and meat like hams and turkeys,” McGonigle says. “Everything is made to order. From creamed spinach to ratatouille to saffron risotto to chili to menudo—all these things are made fresh daily. That’s the biggest success we’ve had. Because of that, in a normal day, I only need two cooks. If I were at another Station Casino, I’d need a cook for each station. The only one we have separated is the Chinese area.”

The result, McGonigle says, is the most covers company-wide—about 940,000 in 2009, by his estimate. “The team members are really proud,” he says. “They can tell someone, ‘I tasted that today. We made that menudo this morning, and it’s great’—compared to someone just throwing stuff in the warmer.”

SIGNS OF SUCCESS
Because of business conditions, covers have actually gone down overall, Zappacosta candidly admits, but he says the real sign of success is increased guest satisfaction garnered by simply putting out what guests like. Further, production is tighter as a result of learning what guests don’t like.

LOCAL INCENTIVES
Two-for-one coupons in local newspapers help attract locals, as does Station’s Boarding Pass that gamers use in casino machines, earning rewards in the form of discounts on F&B. And because the Station Casinos are all within a relatively small radius—two are literally across the street from each other—the food variety of the buffets keeps things fresh.

Thurston E. (Tad) Wilkes III is managing editor of HOTEL F&B. Formerly editor of NIGHTCLUB & BAR Magazine, he has covered on-premise bars and outlets for the past decade.

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