lame it on SpongeBob and Xbox. Blame it on deep-fried McSnack bits. Whatever the reason, American kids are fat. But the nation's hotel chefs are here to help.

It’s a question of giving the people what they want, when they want something other than a cheeseburger for the kids. Maybe they want a turkey burger instead. Loews Hotels is ready to offer that.

“The idea wasn't to remove anything that wasn't healthy but just to have other choices available, so if guests want to, they can balance a vacation with some not-sohealthy
things and then also have some healthy things,” says Loews spokeswoman Emily Kanders Goldfischer.

Such hotel efforts come against a backdrop of increasing awareness of children’s nutritional needs. With media attention focused on the topic, the School Nutrition Association conducted its 2006 Back to School Trends Survey conducted July 19, 2006. It found that over 71 percent of school districts have made “significant” efforts during the past two years to offer healthy meal choices. Over 63 percent of school nutrition directors surveyed also said their districts have made “significant” efforts to offer healthy a la carte choices in the past two years—up from just 38 percent in 2003.

Schools are doing it because parents want their kids to eat nutritious food, and parents want it when they travel too. For hotel food & beverage executives, this means re-envisioning the standard kids' menu fare of chicken nuggets and mac-n-cheez.

At the Ritz-Carlton, Huntington Hotel & Spa
(Pasadena, California), in the Terrace Restaurant, Executive Chef Denis Depoitre overhauled the offerings for kids. There's bow tie pasta with fresh hot-house tomato sauce, sautéed salmon with tofu and Chinese broccoli, grilled free-range chicken tenders served with peas and carrots and mashed potatoes, and a refreshingly familiar garden veggie pizza with low-fat mozzarella cheese.

“You have to give them some items where they relate a little bit,” Depoitre explains in his intense French-chef accent. “They get the vegetable pizza, so they find something they know. Chuck E. Cheese, right? And they do not know it is low fat.”

Depoitre implemented the menu about two years ago, when word came down from corporate that all hotels in the chain would need to add healthy kids' fare. “It was all over the news, all over the news media,” the chef recalls.

Each hotel would design its own menu, a plan that suited Depoitre just fine. He already had in place such variants as a macrobiotic menu and specialty menus such for those with cholesterol problems or vegan leanings.

As the menu evolved, Depoitre invited in kids and parents to sample new items. It took about a month and a half to nail down the new menu.

At Loews, meanwhile, F&B executives brought in outside help in their efforts to reshape kids’ offerings.

“We worked with a nutritionist in New York City, Heather Bauer and her company, Nu-train. She and several of our chefs helped us come up with several recipes that are palatable and also healthy,” says Goldfischer. Chefs from New York, Miami Beach, and Loews Coronado Bay Resort all contributed to the effort.

The net result is a menu that offers not just the items one might expect—baked chicken fingers, turkey wraps and the like— but also some surprises, like a full line of drinks at 200 calories or less. Parents can wean kids off soda with the TropiColada (a pineapple, coconut, tofu, flax seeds, and soy milk smoothie) or the Purple Nurple (a blend of grape and pomegranate juices and seltzer water).

Deployment of the new menu took just six months from conception to the time it hit the field. “With 17 hotels we can effect change very quickly,” Goldfischer says. “We can roll things out very quickly and if they don’t work we know right away.”

Still, implementation required some effort, according to Nando Belmonte, executive chef at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando. Belmonte feeds about 1,000 people a day in his main restaurant and another 500 through room service. “The biggest challenge is always the training, having the employee buy in,” he says. To get that buy-in the chef directed extensive testing: Cooks prepared the new items, servers presented them, everyone sampled the goods. “Any time we have a new menu item we go through training with the staff. We have a standard recipe card on hand, then we do a testing with all the line employees. They'll taste it, and we'll talk about the vision of healthy kids, showing them why we bake it, why we have it.”

While healthy items are mainly about ingredients and preparation, there's more to it than that. When trying to foist veggies upon fat-jaded palates, sometimes it's not a question of what you put on the plate, but rather an issue of the plate itself.

“If you put it on regular china the kids, they will not even touch it. So we put it on SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob? Yes! SpongeBob,” says Depoitre. “If you give shrimp tempuras on SpongeBob, now they have something to look at. If you put it on a plate that is inviting for them, they are going to try it.”

At Loews, presentation extends to the menu. After running a separate “healthy kids” menu for a year, the hotel chain now has mainstreamed its nutritious offerings into the standard kids' listings. As executives move to “reinvigorate” the brand, Goldfischer says, the now solidly entrenched
healthy offerings can be toned down on the menu to make room in the spotlight for other emerging items.

The plan appears to be working. “It’s been really well received, we've gotten really positive feedback from our customers,” she says.

Still, the overall concept of healthy choices for kids remains in its infancy. Some chefs say it will be a while before baked nuggets and broccoli florets assume a full-fledged place at the table.

“The purpose is not that we are going to make money out of this right away, but just to be ahead of the trend as things start to roll,” Belmonte said.

Adam Stone is a frequent contributor to Hotel F&B Executive.