New Chefs Add Spice to Patients’ Meals - Hospitals: Hiring top-flight cooks to improve the quality of food has proven to be a great marketing tool.

On occasional pre-dawn excursions to the Los Angeles produce mart, chef Dietrich W. Hoffmann searches for vegetables that meet his finicky standards. Competing with him for the finest, freshest produce are the chefs of swank private restaurants.

But Hoffmann, a certified executive chef belonging to an elite society of culinary artists called the Chaine des Rotisseurs, is on a slightly different mission. The produce he buys is destined for the patients and staff of FHP Hospital in Fountain Valley.

Nothing is too good for the patient trays and employee cafeterias at FHP and many other medical centers throughout the nation. In these facilities, jokes about bad hospital food are becoming a thing of the past.

Today, an increasing number of hospitals nationwide are putting on the Ritz in their culinary departments. In Orange County, at least five medical facilities--FHP Hospital, Anaheim Memorial Hospital, United Western Medical Centers of Santa Ana and Anaheim, and Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin--employ professionally trained executive chefs.

Hospitals are jazzing up patient food to help fill beds. And they are improving the quality of their cafeteria and catering services to project a better image in the community and generate revenue. Hospital food services, which traditionally lose money, are striving to become self-supporting or even profitable.

For example:

Anaheim Memorial Hospital employs a chef who, with a dietitian, is developing a tasty heart-healthy, low-fat and low-salt menu for the employee cafeteria and has upgraded the fare in the doctors’ dining room.

Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin offers lamb shank, mahi mahi in a tropical fruit glaze, veal Oscar and beef Wellington to patients who eat from trays lined with linen napkins and set with china. Its chef formerly worked at Chez Cary, a highly rated restaurant in Orange.

United Western Medical Center-Santa Ana will prepare a five-course gourmet dinner for a patient and guest on 24-hour notice. The dinner is served in the patient’s room by waiters wearing white shirts, red vests and bow ties. The price: $13 for patients, $15 for visitors.

Tri-City Medical Center, a 440-bed hospital in Oceanside, offers a catering service that strives for the quality of a four-star hotel.

As hospitals cope with a growing number of empty beds and compete for patients, they are finding that fresh fish and vegetables and chocolate mousse can be an effective marketing tool.

And partly because hospitals have fewer patients to cook for, they are turning their attention more to expanding their cafeteria and catering businesses.

Some hospital officials say they are accomplishing all this at minimum, or no added, cost beyond the salary of a chef, which ranges from $30,000 to $45,000 a year. The use of fresh food and attractive garnishing requires more talent in the kitchen, but not necessarily more funds, they say.

Richard Carpe, a hospital consultant at the accounting firm of Laventhol & Horvath, said he thinks culinary improvement is a cost-effective method for hospitals to boost business.

He noted that “food is one of the biggest single areas of complaints that patients have. When you are hospitalized, the one thing you look forward to is a meal.”

Audrey Sullivan, who negotiates food purchases for hospitals that belong to a subsidiary of the Hospital Council of Southern California, said many institutions are advertising their new talents by catering events for service clubs in their communities and giving senior citizen discounts in their cafeterias. The hope is that these people will remember the good food and return as patients if they later need hospitalization.

One of the first steps many hospitals take to improve their product is to hire a trained chef to take charge of their food production. Hospital kitchens traditionally have been run by dietitians and people trained in hotel and restaurant management. They may know how to create balanced meals quickly and in large volume but not how to make the food look and taste good.

Typically, the cooking staffs at hospitals “come through the armies or have short-order experience, but have not had formal training,” said Patricia Burton, assistant director of the American Society for Hospital Food Services Administrators. She believes the hiring of chefs is “a positive change.”

Shawn Leary, regional vice president of Food Dimensions Inc., a West Coast food management company with 32 hospital and retirement home clients in Southern California, estimates that fewer than 5% of Southern California hospitals have chefs. But that percentage is expanding rapidly, he said.

Chefs who are taking the jobs say they have been drawn from restaurants, hotels and cruise lines by the shorter workweek and greater medical and retirement benefits that hospitals offer. William Jacoby, director of education for the American Culinary Federation, said he has noticed “a lot of interest” among chefs to work for hospitals, nursing homes and other institutions.

Partly in response to the trend, the federation, which sets the certification standards for chefs in the United States, has added a requirement that all chefs receive a minimum of 30 hours of instruction in nutrition by 1992.

Chefs say that cooking for hospital patients, many of whom have restricted diets and depressed appetites, offers a special challenge. “The challenge is to be just as creative with low-sugar, low-salt and other special diets. You have to be smarter,” Jacoby said.

Sometimes called “the culinary guru of hospital food service,” Donald C. Miller was recruited to Tri-City three years ago to turn its food service around. “The food had no pizazz. It was very bland and unappealing,” Miller said.

Miller brought in lots of fresh fish, chicken and vegetables. Because most hospital patients are elderly and not interested in “French food with names they wouldn’t understand,” he said he decided to keep the menu simple. But he said the patients appreciated such gestures as fresh squeezed orange juice and homemade muffins.

Hospital employees who use the cafeteria showed their appreciation at the cash register for such touches as fresh graded Parmesan cheese and homemade Mexican salsa. In less than two years, Miller said, the cafeteria’s annual revenue jumped from $400,000 to $1 million.

Catering has also doubled at Tri-City, Miller said. “We now have the Kiwanis Club, Rotary, junior chamber of commerce and the like holding their meetings here because our food is better than local restaurants’,” he said.

Chefs are well worth their salaries, said Steve Porter, associate executive director of Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin. He said his hospital and 15 others scattered throughout the country that are operated by Healthcare International of Austin, Tex., have seen their food costs drop by 7% to 8% since they hired chefs. Fresh foods are less costly than processed products, he said, and chefs know how to “do more for less” by reducing waste.

Carla Wolz-Clements, food service director at Anaheim Memorial Hospital, said that after the hospital hired a chef, it improved the grade of its Sunday filet mignon. That was done without added cost, she said, because the chef bought a whole tenderloin and butchered it into individual portions rather than buying pre-cut meat.

Hiring a chef is not every hospital’s choice. Leslie Jenkin, director of food services at Saddleback Hospital and Health Center, said she is sending the hospital’s cooks to gourmet cooking schools instead. “We find it is beneficial to take people who know institutional cooking and teach them culinary skills,” she said. “Chefs are very highly paid and sometimes difficult to work with, and they often don’t understand the need for teamwork or for speed.”

But that hasn’t been the experience of Westcott W. Price, president and vice chairman of FHP, a health maintenance organization with almost 500,000 members. Not only has its chef, Dietrich Hoffmann, been well received by the kitchen staff, but the hospital reaped an immediate 15% gain in its cafeteria and catering business.

Price, who had been recruited from the restaurant field to enhance FHP’s reputation for good service, hired Hoffmann last January, first as a consultant and later as FHP’s full-time chef. “We conducted a nationwide search and got literally hundreds of top-quality chefs who applied for the job,” he said.

“Our goal is to have the patients’ food the same level as any fine hotel,” said Hoffmann, previously a chef for the Commodore and Admiral Cruise Lines. His upgrading included changing choice meat to prime, frozen chicken to fresh and veal patties to veal loin “that you can cut with a fork.” And he has spent many hours teaching the kitchen staff how to make such things as strawberry Romanoff and fillet of sole with crab meat sauce.

Terry Howard, a Chino Hills woman recovering from surgery at FHP Hospital, appreciated the improved cuisine as she dined Thursday on steak and asparagus. “It helps with your recovery knowing you are going to have a decent meal.”