Prepackaged food has been scratched within the walls of Gray’s Landing galley at Dahlgren in favor of a fresher flavor.
Joe Lonzanida, executive chef at Gray’s Landing, said he is responsible for the smooth and efficient operation of the galley and decided when he took the position a year ago that a change was needed.
“My main concentration is the food aspect,” Lonzanida said. “When I first got here, they were making a lot of prepackaged foods - heat-and-serve stuff. I’ve gotten down to basically taking all of that out and working with more fresh items and doing things from scratch. We don’t do premade lasagna’s any more. We don’t do premade barbecue pork or anything else like that. We do everything from taking the cut of beef to making it whatever we need to.”
Lonzanida said the metamorphosis from premade to fresh has been an ongoing process.
“For the first six months or so, I was slowly trying to introduce new and different things and teaching the staff about cutting down whole chickens as opposed to getting everything precut,” he said.
One of the challenges Lonzanida faced was trying to get the all-civilian staff of about 30 people at Gray’s Landing, now run by Morale, Welfare and Recreation, on board to a drastic change from the way they were accustomed to preparing food.
“The biggest part, at first, was everybody being hesitant to the change,” he said. “Before I got here, it was ‘this is how it’s done and it works and there are no complaints.’ But, once I got everybody on board, the kitchen staff started having a new sense of pride in what they do.”
Now when somebody compliments them on their food, they can say they made it themselves as opposed to just taking it out of the box and heating it up, he said.
“It was all about convincing them that it was going to be a good change for everybody,” Lonzanida said.
Lonzanida’s stepfather was a retired chief warrant officer and mess management specialist in the Navy and he said he has been exposed to the cooking industry most of his life. He started cooking as a young adult after a short stint in the Air Force, where he worked on the flight line. He wasn’t sure if cooking was what he wanted to do professionally, but he wanted to at least keep it as part of his life as a hobby. It’s a good thing Lonzanida did because he eventually decided to go the culinary route.
“Some things don’t turn out properly like you want, but at least I had something to fall back on that I actually enjoy doing,” he said. Lonzanida decided to enroll a two-year program at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
After completing the program at CIA, he came back to the local area where his family resides and worked at various private restaurants over the years in southern Maryland and northern Virginia, including The Lighthouse at Solomon’s Island. Lonzanida cites creativity as one of the favorite aspects of his craft.
“As far as culinary [art] goes, there are guidelines and rules, but your imagination is the only thing that limits you as far as the things you can make and put together. For instance, with chicken, there’s nothing that says you can’t cook chicken with chocolate if you want to.”
While that combination hasn’t yet come to fruition, the concept of making food from scratch has taken off at Grey’s Landing. Chefs now slow roast and pull pork shoulders or butts in house to make their own barbecue.
“We fry our own chicken. We marinate our own beef. We cut and strip it down,” Lonzanida said. “We have the capability to make anything and everything from scratch. There’s nothing we can’t do from scratch.”
Lonzanida stated it was actually cost effective in terms of dollars to cook from scratch, but that another challenge in the change was the “cost” of an increased work load.
“It entails a little more labor,” he said. “That’s really where you incur the cost from scratch cooking. Because of the structure of this place, when I first got here, there were a lot of people. So I utilized what labor I had and it was the perfect scenario.”
Lonzanida said he and Steve Rebarchick, food and beverage director, want Gray’s Landing to be the example for how an MWR-run galley should operate.
“We’re trying to be the standard. We’re trying to set that bar,” he said. Lonzanida understands how important of a role his staff plays in making that happen.
“The thing that makes it great is that I have a staff that is hard working and willing to do the things that need to be done to make everything great,” Lonzanida said. “It’s never a one-man show even though a lot of times one person usually gets a whole of the credit.”
Lonzanida, born in the Philippines, grew up a military brat and lived up and down the east coast for much of his childhood. He values family in addition to cooking and it gets even better when the two are combined.
“I’m big on family get-togethers - spending time with family,” he said. “Usually there is a whole lot of food.”
While he tests staff members at work to improve their food preparation, he receives the challenges from friends in his spare time who say they don’t like certain food.
“Then I make beef ribs or chicken alfredo for them and change their mind,” he said. “I try to change people’s pallets and tastes. It’s about opening people’s eyes to the way some things should be as opposed to the way they’ve had it before.”