A small city rises up for a day whenever the Baltimore Ravens play at home. Nearly 80,000 fans converge on M&T Bank Stadium, all of them hungry, pretty much all at the same time.
Keeping this ravenous crowd well fed is an army of hawkers selling humble hot dogs in the stands. Toqued chefs setting bananas foster aflame in exclusive suites. Wired food-service bigwigs monitoring crowd data on their BlackBerries. Overnight cleanup crews mopping the kitchen floor. Not to mention cooks, who get started days ahead of time in kitchen space that looks like it could serve a good-sized restaurant, not a huge stadium.
If they get the game-day food right, it's not just because they've made sure the beer is cold and the dogs are hot. It's because they've consulted weather forecasts, considered the depth and history of team rivalries and merged foodie culture with the he-man kind. If they could also look into a crystal ball to foresee if the contest will be a nail-biter or blow-out, that wouldn't hurt, either.
"It's teamwork and it takes a lot of hours," said Joe Arena, general manager for Aramark, the Philadelphia-based food services company that has been feeding Ravens fans since 2003. (Aramark recently lost its contract as Oriole Park at Camden Yards concessionaire after 19 years; an Aramark spokesman said that decision will have no bearing on its work at the football stadium.)
Using a BlackBerry as he walks the stadium on game days, Arena consults real-time data from scanned tickets to gauge whether fans are lingering at their tailgate parties or filing into the stadium early. The earlier they file in, the more food they buy. That's only one variable that plays into how much or what kind of food sells on any given game day.
Though every game sells out, fans eat more when the weather is cold or rainy, and they eat different things: more chili, less ice cream. They also tend to chow down if the game is close, a playoff clincher or a grudge match. When the Ravens play the Colts or Steelers, food sales shoot up 20 percent.
Tucked behind the stadium scoreboard, blessed with good air conditioning because the board must be kept cool, the Ravens' kitchen is smaller than you might expect for an operation that feeds what would be Maryland's second-largest city if the stadium were an incorporated municipality. There's a pair of refrigerator-size smokers, a couple of steam-convection ovens, a single charcoal grill, a flattop grill and four fryers.
"I'd like to have six more ovens," executive chef Joe Bachman said. He then noted the $40,000 price tag on those steam-convection combos and acknowledged that his wish was unlikely to come true.
Preparing a feast for 80,000 requires about eight days of preparation. That is, if there are eight days between games. Kitchen crews have to work even harder when there are back-to-back home games, as when the Ravens play the Bills in Baltimore Oct. 24, then the Dolphins at home Nov. 7. There are often catering events at the stadium in between.
Next door at Camden Yards, back-to-back games happen all the time. But there aren't nearly as many mouths to feed at the baseball stadium. Attendance at O's games averaged 21,662 this season — and actually dipped to 20,610 in the final two months, even as the team's record improved under new manager Buck Showalter. Nearly four times that number show up every time the Ravens play.
And feeding football fans presents another challenge because the pacing of the games is different, said Arena. Baseball games move slowly, so fans will stroll to concession stands in the middle of an inning without fearing that they'll miss too much action. At football games, fans tend to stay glued to their seats. That leads to bigger rushes at concession stands right before kickoff and at halftime, and bigger lulls in between.
"Baseball is a little more spread out with the different innings," Arena said. "When it comes to football, you have that hit before the game starts, 30 to 40 minutes before the game starts, where there's constant activity."
On the club level during the team's regular-season home opener against the Cleveland Browns, chef Fred Huber stood at what's called an "action station," ready to carve hickory-smoked and herb-rubbed breasts of turkey ($11.50) for any takers. There were none. They'd all cleared out by kickoff.
"We do a lot of business right before the game starts," he said, stirring a pot baked beans and bracing for another rush at the half.
Bachman's kitchen staff gets started days ahead of time on things that can hold, like from-scratch salad dressings, crab dip, Bolognese sauce and pulled pork. ("The more it sits, the better it is," Bachman said of the pork.)
On game day, members of the kitchen crew start showing up at 2 a.m. Their first task is to fire up the smokers for the 400 pounds of turkey and 400 pounds of beef. The meat will soak up that flavor for six to eight hours before making its way onto plates.
Getting the food from kitchen to fans requires 1,100 game-day workers. Using a fleet of fridge-size "hot boxes," they roll food to suites, corporate tents and other locations in and around the stadium.
Some of the concession stands bear the names of area restaurants: Attman's Deli, Pickles Pub, the Greene Turtle, Oregon Grille. What looks like outsourcing on Aramark's part is just "branding." The food is prepared to the restaurants' specifications, but it's done by Aramark employees.
The Oregon Grille stand passes for a little bit of Hunt Valley right there in Ravens Walk, a tailgating area outside the stadium. But the invisible hand of Aramark is really serving up that top sirloin sandwich with onion, peppers and provolone on a ciabatta roll.
"They love it, too," said Justin Copeland, a line cook preparing the dish to order.
The gourmet ballpark food trend evident in that ciabatta-and-sirloin offering got its start next door at Camden Yards. When it opened in 1992, the baseball stadium boasted a menu with Maryland crab soup, crab cakes, pulled pork and smoothies; even fancier dining could be had in suites and at a private supper club. Though nobody bats an eye at that sort of upscale stadium fare today, back then it was revolutionary. Ballparks across the country followed suit.
So when the Ravens' stadium opened in 1998, it was a given that it would have more than hot dogs and fries. But the offerings have become even more high end in the years since, as foodie culture has swept the nation.
"Fans come in expecting a higher standard of stadium food now," said Dan Smith, an Aramark spokesman who credits the Food Network for much of the cultural shift.
That isn't to say that stadium chefs can take their cues straight from "Top Chef," dishing out precious tasting menus or daring molecular gastronomy. There's a fine line between doing something new and fresh in stadium chow and alienating Joe Six-pack with concession offerings that seem frou-frou.
Aramark menu planners seem to have hit the right balance with the Roseda Beef Burger ($10) and Prime Rib sandwich ($12), which debuted on the club level this season and have been top sellers so far. Made with meat from a Monkton farm, the sandwiches offer grass-fed, locavore chic with plenty of he-man cover.
Same goes for the Argentinean Chorizo Sausage Sandwich with arugula, shaved red onion and chimichurri ($9), also available on the club level. Sounds exotic and contains an herb that Barack Obama couldn't reference on the campaign trail without being called elitist, but it still looks like a hot dog.
"It still has to be football," said Smith, contending that the chorizo meets that standard. "It's one of our best sellers."
For all the culinary innovation, plain-Jane franks remain the most popular food at the stadium. Some 8,150 sell on a typical game day, surpassing soft pretzels (7,000), French fries (5,950 pounds), pizza (1,850 slices) and crab cakes (1,200).
"Hot dogs are still king," Smith said. "Always were, are now, always will be."
laura.vozzella@baltsun.com