Trade show centre goes after banquet and conference business

MISSISSAUGA—The International Centre on Toronto’s airport strip has been the site of consumer and trade shows for 36 years.

Now, in an effort to expand the range of culinary offerings, a brand new 7,800-square-foot kitchen is sending out food to a new conference centre.

The International Centre ended its contract with Sodexho Canada last year, after six years with the commercial caterer. It brought foodservice in-house under the direction of a food and beverage manager and an executive chef who both have extensive hotel-style banqueting experience.

The centre, which has 500,000 square feet of exhibition space, is adding 42,000 square feet of banquet and conference areas to the 36,000 square feet of meeting space it already has, in a bid to attract more conferences as well as food-centered events.

Food and beverage director Trevor Lui came to the International Centre last year after holding positions at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, co-ordinating convention and meeting food services; Delta Hotels, as director of catering and conventions services; and the Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort, in charge of catering, conventions, banquets and in-room dining. He told ORN last month that the International Centre is going after social, wedding and corporate banqueting business.

To be able to do this, the centre had to be able to handle foodservice itself, explained Lui. Also, it is more convenient for meeting planners to deal with the centre to organize meeting space and food, instead of having to deal with one company for meeting and seminar facilities and another for food.

The new addition to the centre, which is expected to open in late summer, has a 17,000-square-foot ballroom divisible into four sections, with two of those sections each also divisible into three smaller breakout rooms.

On each side of the ballroom are meeting rooms of 2,028 and 2,900 square feet, each divisible into smaller sections.

A 10,000-square-foot lobby and pre-function area, with skylights letting in natural light, can be used for meeting breaks or cocktail receptions.

The old kitchen was completely torn out, and a new cooking area twice as big was built. It was designed with the help of consultants Matt Marrack and Cam Jenkins.

The new kitchen was filled with $300,000 worth of Alto-Shaam equipment from Lauer’s Restaurant Equipment in Orillia, a property of Gordon Food Service.
Two full-size combi ovens, cook and hold ovens, a very large blast chiller and mobile warmers are at the centre of a system that marries hospital-cooking science with fine dining creativity.

Executive chef Joe Levesque, previously the banquet chef at The Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto, leads the kitchen brigade.

Levesque’s team will par-cook fine dining quality food which will then be blast chilled and cold stored until it is finished and served at the time of the banquet.

Lui says he will be able to serve dinners of up to 2,000 people with this system. He needs three days for planning and preparing food for such events.

When they were planning the design of their kitchen, Lui and Levesque travelled with Claudio Baldinelli, national sales manager for Alto-Shaam Canada, to check out casino kitchens in Las Vegas where, according to Baldinelli, Alto-Shaam equipment is nearly universally used.

While they found the front of the house design superb at the casinos, the Canadians were not impressed with the way the kitchens were laid out. Lui said that what he learned from seeing the Vegas kitchens was that his own layout is more efficient.

While waiting for the new banquet facility to open, Lui has been experimenting with trade and consumer show foodservice.

Go to any show and you will find pizza and sandwiches, he comments. Since November he has been expanding the show culinary spectrum at the International Centre, serving pasta and a variety of ethnic foods, including shawarmas and sushi, at the Centre’s food outlets.