ake no mistake about it. The Four Winds Casino Resort in New Buffalo, Michigan, which debuted on August 2, 2007, wants to attract high rollers. It just doesn’t want its foodservice program to look like all there are are high rollers.

Four Winds is owned by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and managed by Lakes Entertainment, Inc. The resort offers 130,000 square feet of gaming with 3,000 slot machines and 100 table games including poker. It also features five restaurants, entertainment bars and retail venues, and a 165- room hotel.

According to Steven Kline, Four Winds’ VP of food and beverage, the goal from the outset was to connect with guests on their level, a conclusion he reached together with Lakes’ corporate VP Mark Sicilia.

“Mark asked me to come to the property level because we share the same management philosophies and vision for the restaurants,” says Kline. He and Sicilia visited the area, including some of their competitors, early on and tried to figure out what would work best in this market. Kline, who has had years of experience working in the Midwest, said the overriding goal was to be “approachable, basically from a nomenclature point of view, so people would recognize the products we were offering them.”

The casino’s six dining outlets reflect a wide variety of culinary trends and consumer tastes:

• Copper Rock Steakhouse, a traditional, white-tablecloth steakhouse with leather overstuffed seating, masculine décor, and gourmet fare. The menu features prime steaks and desserts made fresh daily.
• The Buffet, offering a variety of cooking stations and dishes from around the world.
• Silver Creek Bistro, an eclectic menu that includes European-style pastries in the morning, followed by light lunches and sandwiches in the afternoon.
• Willowbrook Café, a casual outlet serving breakfast all day with specialties like stuffed pork chops, New York strip, pot roast, BBQ ribs, soups, salads, and extensive Asian and sushi menus.
• Timbers Fast Food & Deli, serving pizza, burgers, hot dogs, and fries alongside mile-high deli sandwiches.
• Grab 'N' Go at Four Winds Casino Resort, with a variety of portable items.

Four Winds chefs use some local products, but there has been no effort to peg the menus to regional tastes, Kline says. “We each had recipes because we’ve been in the business a while.” So did Executive Chef Barry Rhodes, whose resumé includes a long stint with InterContinental Hotels & Resorts at properties in Russia, Switzerland, Miami, and Los Angeles. “He is originally from Liverpool [England] and has worked around the world, and we’re comfortable with his approach, so I can’t really say that we used local recipes.”

Far more important, Kline stresses, was bringing foods into the market that were not “over the heads of our diners,” both nearby in Michigan and traveling from Chicago. “We wanted it to be approachable. We were solely focused on price value.”

Total foodservice revenue for the first 12 months, without beverage, is projected at $28 million to $31 million, Kline says.

PHILOSOPHY AND VISION
The Lakes team “wrote the menus over and over again at corporate up in Minneapolis,” says Kline. Later, once equipment was installed at the casino, testing moved to another level. Menu tastings were “probably six times a day for two weeks prior to the opening. We did soft openings in each outlet by feeding the employees and various invited vendors.”

The desire not to be “over the heads” of guests “wasn’t really a concern,” Kline insists. “We wanted to capture the diners in this local area, as well as casino diners we knew we were going for here in the Midwest. If we’re throwing out quail and foie gras and all these other things, although I love it and other people love it, we don’t know if the majority of people would be satiated with things like that.”

The total seating is about 900, divided as follows: 160, including the bar area, in Copper Rock; 480 in the Buffet; 22 in Silver Creek; 186 in Willowbrook; 42 in Timbers; and, of course, none at Grab ‘N’ Go.

Average per-person checks at the various outlets vary. Copper Rock about $60. Silver Creek is $5, Willowbrook Café just over $10, Timbers $7, and Grab ‘N’ Go $4. Between lunch, dinner, and special weekend pricing, the Buffet’s average tab is about $16.

The casino staff operates a 7,500-square-foot central commissary kitchen that supplies each of the dining outlets and includes an in-house butcher shop, garde manger area, and a pastry shop. An employee dining room has its own dedicated kitchen, and there is another, admittedly small, kitchen behind Willowbrook Café— and a very, very small facility behind Timbers. There is also a good amount of display cooking in front of diners’ eyes. The total price tag on the kitchen equipment for the casino was, Kline says, in excess of $5 million.

Much of the product prepared in the employee dining area is stored in the main kitchen. The employee cafeteria seats close to 200 and has been notching as many as 1,500 covers a day. The restaurants and a trio of bars on the casino floor are operated by 700 front- and back-of-thehouse employees.

“I would say that one constant in [the foodservice] business, especially in the casino business, is change,” says Kline. “We would be fooling ourselves if we thought we had nailed it out of the gate. We have made some adjustments, and more will be forthcoming. You listen to your guests and let your team be a little bit more empowered to make suggestions and changes so there is more buy-in and ownership. Four Winds has already done some of that. And you’ve got to do what’s best for the company, so there are margins to be considered and that sort of thing.”

From the beginning, Kline says, the tribes have been “very aggressive” on the subject of expansion. “They have always said that if the numbers fall into place, and they have, that they want to look at second and third phases.”

There are, Kline adds, more than 600 acres of land available for expansion of the casino. Some rough plans have already been discussed, but remain “all over the board. Nothing has been solidified as to what that entails. They have told us they would like to add additional rooms, convention space, additional venues, and the like.”

Howard Riell is a frequent contributor to HOTEL F&B