NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
Chicago, Illinois

New hospital foodservice - 683 beds

Eight years from the initial planning stages, this new urban hospital opened in the spring of 1999. Our charge was to plan a state-of-the-art foodservice, with special emphasis on responsive and flexible patient service. The hospital campus included a new 400+ bed tower, linked to an ambulatory care and medical office building. In addition, the foodservice needed to support 200+ patients in another building located a block away plus future patient and non-patient programs in adjacent buildings. Cook-chill food production was the obvious choice given the meal volume, with one-third of the patients in a remote building, and the potential for other multiple patient and non-patient service areas. The challenging issue was how to configure the patient service system in order to achieve responsive service without planning an equipment and labor-intensive system. The hospital building is a 17-story high-rise with 40 beds on a standard patient floor. We designed decentralize tray rethermalization galleys to serve three floors - one floor above and one below for easy access - for a total of approximately 120 beds per galley. Each galley has a walk-in refrigerator where patient trays are rethermalized just prior to meal service. The lower level kitchen supports two non-patient retail foodservice outlets on the 3rd floor and a large conference and training center on the 4th floor. During the early design programming phase, it was projected that approximately 10,000 people would come to this combined hospital, ambulatory care and MOB on a normal weekday. After studying numerous options, planners decided to build one large main cafeteria and a smaller, limited menu quick-serve outlet that would be open 24 hours a day. The 640 seat cafeteria is supplied by a dedicated foodservice elevator from the main kitchen. It has a small hot food production workcenter for cooking vegetables and finishing some cook/chill menu items. The main serving area features two deli stations; a comfort food station with rotisserie; an exhibition cooking station with interchangeable wok range and charbroiler that serve an Asian menu for several weeks and then can be changed to a Mexican or other theme station; a grill; a double salad bar; two self-service flexible menu stations; a large Italian station with pasta and pizza production; an island dessert and coffee station; and eight cashiers. The cafeteria draws lunch customers from a wide area since the hospital is located downtown. The smaller quick-serve outlet was designed for grab-and-go meals, specialty coffees, bottled beverages, snacks and bakery products. It is open 24 hours a day.

Back to Project Portfolio.
Back to Client List.