What does it take to feed thousands? Trade Center’s Chef Chris hustles to get it done
This week’s two-day Jim Blanchard Leadership Forum may be high profile with its eclectic collection of colorful and interesting speakers, but at just over 1,000 attendees it isn’t anywhere near the largest gathering that will take place this year at the Trade Center. That honor goes to the annual influx of several thousand young thespians who converge on the city’s downtown from high schools throughout Georgia.
“I’ve got 5,500 kids coming in for three days, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We’ll be over 22,000 to 23,000 meals over three days,” said the Trade Center’s executive chief, Christopher Walters, of the event that is held in the cooler months of winter.
But the theater-oriented thespians and the tens of thousands of other hungry visitors who take in a special occasion or corporate meeting at the Trade Center don’t faze Walters and his staff of about 16 people, which includes prep and line cooks and two assistant chefs.
In fact, the Columbus venue is one of the memorable stops and major events that Walters, 50, has experienced in a culinary career that has taken him around the world after starting at the very bottom in his teens at a hotel in London, England.
The impressive list on his resume includes Trump Plaza, Sandals & Beaches Resorts, Club Med, Turner Field, the Georgia Dome, Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta Motor Speedway, the Ryder Cup, Wimbledon, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, a Super Bowl in Dallas, and the Georgia World Congress Center.
It’s that pedigree that begs the obvious question: What is the talented Walters — Chef Chris he is called — doing in the smaller market of Columbus, preparing and serving meals from morning to night for nearly 200,000 people attending roughly 500 events each year?
The London native, who landed the job of executive chef at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center in 2016, said it was simply a good time to slow his lifestyle down and breathe a little easier. His move from Atlanta came at the behest of the convention facility’s general manager in charge catering, Weezy Wingo Motzel, who threw out a very tasty carrot.
“She said, ‘Chef, this is going to be the best place for you. You don’t have to work 100 hours a week anymore. You’ll have a better way of life.’ I said are you serious? So I came down and fell in love with it and I said make me an offer,” recalled Walters, who like Wingo Motzel, works for Spectra, a Comcast company that both the city-owned Trade Center and the Columbus Civic Center use to deliver food and hospitality service to customers.
Walters said he definitely doesn’t miss losing precious hours of his life idling in traffic on the Atlanta-area highways, a change that has given him much more time to think about better and more creative ways to prepare meals for guests coming through the doors of the historic Columbus convention hall, which dates to 1853 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“To me it’s just a better way of life (in Columbus). It’s more relaxing. You can think more here. I can put myself into my craft more. I don’t have to be under too much stress. Yeah, I’m under a little pressure. All jobs come with pressure, but I’m able to think a lot clearer here,” the personable chef said Wednesday in his small office, tucked to the side of the large commercial kitchen that can become “controlled chaos” at times amid large and multiple events packed with people who are waiting to be fed either a plated meal or a buffet.
The Ledger-Enquirer visited with Walters just after his return from the second annual Spectra Culinary Innovation Summit in mid-August, an event in which only nine of the company’s top chefs were invited to compete and create new dishes and food items that might make their debut in Columbus and elsewhere in the near future. Spoiler alert: Doughnuts are trending in popularity in the culinary world.
Here’s more of what the chef had say about he’s learned in the food arena through the years and what it takes to deliver the goods to hungry and sometimes critical customers who attend events — from galas and weddings to trade shows and holiday celebrations — at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center:
Keeping it very clean in the kitchen
“Nobody has ever said, hey, show me the kitchen. I’m happy to show you the kitchen. One thing I stand proud for here is my kitchen is always clean. I have a great team behind me that keeps this place immaculate. No matter how busy we are, we keep it to the standards, because you never know who’s walking through your kitchen. So sanitation is really big for me. We’ve been running 100 percent A (health inspections) for almost three years since I’ve been there, and that’s a great achievement.”
His early days in the European kitchens were tough
“Back then it was a different world for culinarians. The egos of the chefs were very high, especially working with German chefs, French chefs, Swiss chefs. The tension was very, very high …. You’d get to work and not have a headache, and by the time you put your uniform on and clock in you’d have a massive headache because you know there’s a lot of pressure coming down on you. But if you were able to overcome all of that, you would realize it’s just good old training.”
Those experiences had a strong influence on his style today
“I don’t want to be known as that chef that is egotistical or not approachable … I put my ego away a long time ago to be successful. And especially in a convention center, where we’re dealing with thousands of people. At any given time, I could be pulled aside by the city manager, city director, my general manager, my senior VP, even my staff may ask me a question. I don’t want to be the one where they’re scared to talk to chef. My door stays open.”
There’s a process for creating those event menus
“The customers come in and they first go to the city (Trade Center management office). The city passes them on to Spectra. We have a catering manager that sits with a client and more than likely they’ll get me involved if they’re not sure of the ingredients or whatever. So we have a catalog of recipes and different menu options for them to choose from. Once they choose, more than likely we’ll do tastings. Like if it’s a wedding, we’ll do it maybe one or two months out, sometimes three. Then they’ll pick and choose what they like and don’t like.”
It takes preparation and execution to pull an event off
“I work ahead. Not only do I have to control food and labor costs, I’m in charge of the invoices, the scheduling, the budgeting, the whole operation. It is a lot of work.”
Serving plated meals versus the large buffets
“Personally, I wish I could do plate ups every day because you get to put more of your culinary touch to that plate. It is (more difficult) because you’re working with temperatures. You’ve cooked that meat half an hour before and let it sit. And just before you plate up, you’re slicing and portioning. It’s an art … People think of buffets and say, oh, how can food taste good? Well, it can taste good if you take care with it. On cruise ships, the food always tastes good. Go to the casinos, the food always tastes good, and the casinos are 24-hour operations.”
The pace of food service can be hot and cold
“We go from zero to 100 because it’s event-based here. We can go from doing 300 (meal) covers to 5,000 covers. It all depends on the events. Generally speaking, Saturdays are our busy days. The heaviest Saturday I’ve done here is 22 services, and out of the 22 we did about seven weddings in one night.”
No, everything doesn’t always run perfectly
“We’re in a business that things don’t (always) go as well as you planned in the back of the house, but we always try to correct it before you guys see it. So whenever you get the food it’s always calmed down … Look, who wants someone to come to you and say the food was cold, or the chicken wasn’t cooked right? It’s my job to be the sponge for everybody in the building. Respectfully, I’ll go to the customer and apologize for whatever it is, and I’ll try everything within my power to make it right for them.
“That’s another thing about chefs. If you drop your ego, you’ll be able to take a critique, because at the end of the day, the customer’s always right. My team and I, we’re here to exceed expectations of the customer that comes through the door.”
It’s about managing with grace under fire
“It’s called controlled chaos. If I show people that I’ve lost it, the whole operation dies. So no matter how much pressure I’m under, I still have to smile and act like nothing ain’t happening. But I either have to elevate my voice (to staffers) just a little bit to get my point over, or I roll up my sleeves and say, OK, boys let’s go and get it done. (claps his hands) That’s because we’re not going to leave anybody behind. We always work as a team and that’s what I practice here is teamwork.
“Without teamwork from the front to the back of the house, we have no operation. Here, the kitchen is separated by different stations, but now everybody’s trained to work every station. So at any given time, if we get busy over there, I can take all of the cold (food service) people and put them on the hot side (and vice-versa) … In my kitchen, you have to be able to do everything.”
He’s a fish lover for sure, but it can be as simple as P&J at home
“You want to know the truth? (At home it’s) sometimes a nice peanut butter and jelly sandwich or I’ll get to working on some noodles … I’ll take a regular Ramen noodle and I might pour in some chicken broth and finish it off with some fresh ginger, maybe add a bit of coconut milk, add some chicken strips to it. I know how to manipulate the noodle to a fine meal. But I don’t have time to eat at home. Maybe on a Sunday I’ll cook a family meal. Maybe we’ll do a roast or do a whole baked fish with some nice sides.”
What keeps the chef coming back for more in the Trade Center kitchen?
“Food is my love and my joy. But when you see your staff elevate into different positions, when you see line cooks following the recipes, when you see the joy on their faces coming to work, not only the cooks, but also the front of the house, the stewards, banquet captains, when you see the smile on their faces and feeling proud to be in this building, that uplifts me.”
About Chef Christopher Walters
Age: 50
Hometown: Born and raised in London, England, he moved to the U.S. when he was a teen
Education: Graduate of Westminster College in London; Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island; and Pro-Chef II at the Culinary Institute of America. The latter was an intense course over a week covering areas such as Indonesian cooking, healthy cooking, Southern cooking, French cuisine, baking and pastry, human resources, labor, purchasing and more.
An early test: His father gave him an ultimatum after high school to either enter the military service or settle on a career within a month. A Youth Skill Training course steered him into the direction of hotel work, which led him to hotels in London and Paris, working under very demanding chefs.