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The most delicious food and food-related experiences occur because they start with good ingredients. Dedicated chefs know that their job will be easier if they start with high-quality produce, meat, dairy, grains, and spices. A restaurant or banquet facility flourishes when the good ingredients also include an attentive staff, a top-notch venue, and a culture that embraces creativity. Whether the focus is on making a batch of ice cream or preparing a formal dinner for 200, the underlying principle is the same: value matters. Beginning any cooking endeavor with the best products available will produce the best results. Customers know what fresh tastes like, what good service feels like, and what looks, smells, and sounds appealing and delicious to them. When it comes to food, the following experts in the field can tell you that value comes from knowing that if you start with what’s good, good things will happen.
Q: Chef, you state that you offer added value at the Bentley Banquet & Conference Center. How do you do it?
A: We strive to reinvent catering. We infuse passion to elicit emotion and create culture, because preparing food isn’t just about gathering materials, labor, and technology. Recent trends that impact the food and beverage market relate to purity, authenticity, and sustainability.
Added value matters. Despite some lingering economic uncertainty and mounting scrutiny of many food products, our clients remain willing to spend a bit more on food that stands for something.
We provide added value in the food and service we present, along with the venue itself, as our Bentley Banquet & Conference Center is second to none in the Detroit metro area in terms of the facility’s elegant neoclassical design and intricately executed ballrooms. Incorporating each client’s unique vision, we create sumptuous occasions memorable well beyond the last morsel of dessert or sip of fine wine.
Q: What makes for a superior ice cream?
A: The best ice cream is made from simple, basic ingredients such as cream, skim milk, cane sugar, and corn sugar — not corn syrup. An ice cream made to have 15 percent butterfat won’t need a lot of added sugar, which is often what lesserquality ice creams do to add flavor.
While ingredients such as nuts, berries, and chocolate should also be natural, the most popular and versatile of the 50 flavors at Ray’s Ice Cream is still vanilla. Those with allergy concerns should know that the only ice cream with egg is French vanilla, sorbets have no milk fat, and scoops can be carefully sanitized to reduce risk to those with nut allergies.
