Chef Craig Bowerson’s big idea started with a lot of complaints.
“I was sitting there thinking about my residents telling me how much they disliked the menu,” Bowerson tells TODAY.com.
In his 33 years as a chef, he says, he’s never had more folks dissatisfied with a menu than when he was working in the kitchen a nursing home in McPherson, Kansas called The Cedars.
“I’d say when I first started, I looked at it like I did any other job: You kind of walk in, and you’re like, ‘This is the client,’” he says, but his administrative approach to the job changed during the COVID lockdown.
When he started spending more time with residents, he found many had fond memories of the food they’d shared with their families during their younger years.
Many of his residents were homemakers who cooked nightly dinners for their families before moving into The Cedars.
So he thought to ask them a simple question: “How would you make the food?”
The chef first shared his light-bulb moment in an interview on the podcast Owen by the Oven, which went viral.
“Just, ‘Hey, how did you make spaghetti? How did you make lasagna? How did you make your chicken cordon bleu?’” Bowerson says in a clip viewed by millions on social media. “I ended up re-creating a menu just based off of what my residents want.”
Bowerson started a program at the nursing home where he solicits residents’ recipes, and the dissatisfaction rate went from 75% to almost 0%, he says.
“After that first week, I ended up with several hundred recipes,” he continues. “When you start getting that personal connection, you realize you’re a guest in their house.”
Bowerson recalls a personalized menu he prepared for a resident with dementia.
“His name was Bill, and he had started regressing back to his childhood,” he says. “He used to tell me stories about how his father was a chef in Winnetka, Illinois, and so I ended up contacting the Chamber of Commerce there. I got all the information that I could about that, and we re-created some dishes from his dad.”
He says he has received all sorts of recipes: some written from memory, some printed from old magazines, some originals that were family staples for decades. A few he’s received are more than a century old. He’s ended up incorporating all sorts of recipes into his menu.
“A lot of times, they would give me the main dish with the sides that they served,” Bowerson says. “I found that very helpful.”
And there’s one dish that returns to the menu often because it’s so frequently requested.
“This recipe has never let me down,” Bowerson says. “It was a chili mac recipe. The resident gave it to me, and he originally only had his wife’s shopping list, so we had to take the six ingredients she had asked him to pick up at the store and figure out what she made.”
After a couple of weeks of recipe testing, they figured out it was a shopping list for chili mac.
“He ended up having us add cheese to it, and that was the only thing that wasn’t in the recipe,” Bowerson says, adding that the man has since died. “It became a staple.”