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July 9th, 2012

by Total Food Service

Brad Hill



That's great. And what did they sell when they first opened?

And what impact did your dad have in the business?

And what did you take away from him?
He taught me well. I worked for him for 16 years directly - full time but I also came here as a kid and worked. He taught me how to train and treat our employees. He taught me if we take care of the visitors, the visitors will take care of us.  It's been great and I still keep my father informed on how the operations are going.


As far as sales are concerned, we're about 65% retail and about 35% souvenir and the main reason for that is, for most of the year we don't open until 9 a.m. and we close at 5 or 6 p.m. so we don't really serve breakfast by the time people get here and we don't serve dinner. So, we're basically a lunch operation, lunch and snacks.


What do you think enabled you to win that bid?

Right, the Park Service world is different than most other concerns. The financial element is weighed a little bit less. It's not the highest bidder. Money is important, no question about it. Our proposal had concepts that invested over $12 million into our Park operations.

As you look at your food operations, you have two distinct pieces, you've got a concession business that you operated out of your cafes and then you have your catering business. What is the object of the game - to consolidate through buying properly and through kitchen and through the type of kitchens or commissaries that you built. Walk me through your approach to food service.

You mentioned the rebuilding or the opening of a new cafe.

Any changes in the menu?

Is there an executive chef that executes that for you?
We work in part with healthydining.com for designing a healthier menu. We're also a member of the Green Restaurant Association. We are actually a 3-star certified green restaurant-one of the few!

That's really interesting. You don't see this a lot - a commitment in both what I would call front of the house and back of the house to agree on a sustainable strategy.

This is a personal issue. We've been environmentally conscious for decades. We were the first concession in the Park Service to install waterless urinals, and we did that back in 2000. But we've always tried to reduce our paper and disposable usage and anything that would go in the garbage. We have plastic tumblers for drinking. Platters and plates for eating.  We installed new Energy Star® dishwashers. The new dishwasher also reduced our water use by 40% compared to the prior dishwasher. At the retail pavilion we collect the storm water off the roof which reduced our water bill for the restrooms by about 60%. So there's a lot of positive things that can be looked at. Over the past few years especially with the new contract, we were able to make that capital investment to do many things.

So personally, where did this come from?  Whether you're running a restaurant, whether you're running a concession, whatever you're  running there's a lot of ways you could have done these things cheaper, cut corners. What is it about you that drives you to do this? Is it about your grandfather and your father before you?
The environment has always been something I've been concerned with going back to high school days when Earth Day first started. It's just been something that has been important to me and I'm able to take my concept and ideas and execute it on the business. I don't really boast about it. I don't usually see my name on these things, I just enjoy doing these things.
Right, it's just who you are. So, you were way ahead of your time before it was fashionable.

So, does this keep you as a company from growing into other contracts because it's diametrically opposed to maximizing.


Our menu design basically comes from what our philosophy is and what the public generally would like to eat going out for a simple nice dinner, nice lunch and so on. We have a simple fashion to restaurants that middle America enjoys like a TGI Friday's or Applebee’s type of foods, but kept on a simpler basis. Because we only serve lunch and the typical tourist coming to visit the Statue of Liberty, didn't come here to eat specifically, they came to see the Statue and then they're going to another tourist attraction. We want the foods for them to be familiar so it's easy for them to choose. That's our point of reference and then we do special foods on a monthly basis, like highlight a different ethnic group like Polish immigrants and we'll have some Polish entrees for one month. We highlight about a dozen ethnic groups.

Five million visitors almost no waste, how's that possible?
Reusable plastic tumblers that you know are typical in the food industry like in Friday's or such. Our platters are reusable and then all of our food is composted along with our straws and forks that are compostable. And so it becomes less and less waste. We recycle plastic both PET, HDPE and also LDPE. Food is composted. Our straws, forks and even our paper cups, are compostable.

Our staff stays with our company.  Bob Uffer our General Manager has only been with me eight years so he's sort of a new employee. Our Director of Food Service at Liberty has been with us over 25 years. Our oldest employee Hilton Bonilla, will be celebrating his 50th anniversary with us this fall.

Yes, they are awesome. There's that golden rule but of course I think we're a good company to work for. We offer good benefits and we do try and make it a family. We probably have over 20 other employees with over 20 years with our company.


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