- 7 hours ago
How do you feed 37,755 fans inside Major League Baseball’s oldest ballpark? At Fenway Park, where every inch of the historic stadium must be used, the Red Sox serve 12,000 hot dogs, 2,000 sausages and 2,000 slices of pizza per game—plus more than 1 million rolls and 79,000 gallons of beer every season. Step behind the scenes with Senior Executive Chef Ron Abell and the Fenway Park team as deliveries arrive at 5 a.m., ovens run for 15 hours straight and high-volume ingredients move through kitchens with limited space and storage.
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00:00How do you feed a packed house, game after game, inside MLB's oldest ballpark?
00:04And with nearly half the space of their division rivals, how do you get food out fast, keep
00:08the ingredients and ideas fresh, and still be unmistakably Fenway?
00:12Fenway is the biggest restaurant in New England, no matter what anybody tells you.
00:17The Patriots?
00:18No, they don't do as much as we do.
00:20Every inch needs to be used in the building.
00:22We have season ticket holders that are coming to 81 games.
00:26Imagine you're going to the same restaurant 81 times in one year.
00:29That's unheard of.
00:30It's like the Mafia.
00:31Nobody ever leaves.
00:32Why would you ever leave?
00:33This is the best place to be.
00:36We're here at Fenway Park in Boston, home of the Red Sox.
00:39Fenway's been the heartbeat of the city for well over a hundred years.
00:42In our humble opinion, it's the most beloved ballpark in America.
00:46Fenway Park opened just days after the Titanic sank.
00:48In 1912, baseball was about baseball.
00:51Food meant 5-cent peanuts or Cracker Jacks, and a 10-cent hot dog.
00:54But today's fans demand a lot more every game.
00:57We sell around 12,000 hot dogs, 2,000 to 2,500 sausages, 2,000 pizza slices.
01:03We also go through a lot of lobster here.
01:05It's Boston.
01:06That's what people come here for, the lobster and the chowder.
01:08You would be surprised at how many people still order it when it's 100 degrees out there.
01:12Over a season, the stadium will also go through over 1.1 million rolls, nearly 7,300 gallons
01:18of ice cream, 325,000 pretzels, and over 79,000 gallons of beer.
01:23We can do an Olympic-sized pool, right?
01:24Yes.
01:25Sam's summer alone.
01:26And some of them are swimming in there yelling wicked.
01:28Wicked!
01:29In the building, we keep getting bigger and bigger.
01:32More products.
01:33We get more stands.
01:35But we don't get any storage for all this.
01:38You've heard the phrase, ten pounds of beef in a five-pound bag, right?
01:41And that's kind of what we have here in this whole building.
01:44I think the modern ballparks are definitely set up for ease of execution.
01:49They don't have nearly the challenges that we have here at Fenway Park.
01:53As executive chef, Ron Abel is at the head of Aramark's 300-person culinary team, which
01:58consists of 10 chefs and over 300 cooks and stewards, working in nine kitchens to get food
02:03out to 100 concession stands, five restaurants, and two main club spaces.
02:07At 5 a.m., deliveries arrive at the loading dock, ride a freight elevator up to the warehouse,
02:12then get staged for distribution across the park each morning.
02:15Joe Quinn, who handles the incoming and distribution of all food and beverage throughout the building,
02:19uses the previous game's sales to determine what each stand needs.
02:23Stagers pull the orders.
02:24Runners move them to their next stop.
02:26Some product heads to the commissary kitchens for more prep or holding.
02:29Premium ingredients go to club kitchens that feed spaces like Dell and Aura.
02:33But a significant amount of high-volume ingredients go directly to concession stands.
02:37With limited space to prep everything on-site, some of the work happens before the ingredients even arrive.
02:42When you're talking about an item like peppers and onions, where we're going through
02:4650, 60, 100 pounds a game, we need to bring that already cut.
02:50We know our limitations on how much prep power that we have.
02:54We have our purveyors come in, we show them exactly how we want things cut.
02:58They'll do all the labor for it, and we can focus on other things.
03:02A lot of the product comes in and goes right out.
03:04We order our sausages fresh.
03:05We order on a Monday, they make them on a Tuesday, we get them on a Wednesday.
03:09We don't have any old sausage hanging around.
03:12Freshness is one reason to keep everything moving.
03:14Space is another.
03:15Fenway is a classic jewel box ballpark, one of just two left in MLB.
03:19Built right into a Boston City block, its brick walls run right up to the sidewalks.
03:24And while the menus and number of stands have grown over the years, there's been little
03:27room for the kitchens or storage to expand.
03:29Every inch needs to be used in the building.
03:32Most of our items are built on like a five block, so it locks in.
03:36For example, these peanuts, you get three, two, and two.
03:39And if we stack something on top of it, then you do the same thing but reversed.
03:43It won't fall over.
03:44If you take these peanuts and you stack them all straight up 18 high, they're gonna be wobbling,
03:50and they're gonna fall on somebody, and we're gonna have a peanut injury.
03:53Not allergy, injury.
03:55While Joe's team stalks the park, another operation is already deep into production.
03:59A full pastry kitchen making desserts from scratch.
04:03Chef Caitlin Follett starts before 6am, and in peak summer, her ovens can run 15 hours straight.
04:09I'm here 12 hours before the game even starts.
04:12Just getting everything ready, and wrapping it all up, getting it finished, and dropping
04:16it off to over 10 different locations.
04:18We're baking off 1,500 cookies a day.
04:21Average cookie count for homemade cookies for the year is about 300,000.
04:2618,000 brownies a year, and about 20,000 cupcakes as well.
04:29Our largest bake this season was a doubleheader Yankee game.
04:34I think we capped out at 2,900 cookies.
04:36It was about five hours of baking.
04:39One machine known as a cookie depositor changed the labor behind that volume.
04:43We used to make all our dough and scoop it by hand and portion it and let it rest in
04:47the fridge.
04:48The cookie machine has allowed us to cut down on labor significantly.
04:52It's pumping out 250 cookies every three minutes.
04:55At 300,000 cookies a year, that machine could save the team more than 200 workdays just on scooping dough.
05:01But what happens once they leave the kitchen matters too.
05:04They eat with their eyes, walking right up, going,
05:06Oh, yep, I want one of those, and it goes right into a box, right into their hand.
05:10We moved the monster cookie over two stands to the left, and we're selling double the cookies this year.
05:17By late morning, the park is stocked, and Fenway's pastry, club, and commissary kitchens are deep into prep.
05:22But the next ingredients don't come through the loading dock.
05:24They need to be harvested, on the roof, where baseball's oldest park runs one of its most modern food operations.
05:30We're so lucky to have Green City Growers, our rooftop farm that produces 5,000 to 7,000 pounds of
05:37organic produce a year for us.
05:39And that is the engine that drives all of our menus across the ballpark.
05:44The rooftop farm is about 4,000 feet of growing space.
05:49About 20% of the produce that is served at the park comes from Fenway Farms.
05:54So this garden is built in a modular way that brings some great efficiencies to it.
05:59These are upcycled milk crates that we're using here to grow the crops in.
06:03They can be moved out of the way.
06:04We're tight on space up on this roof, so we want to make sure we're maximizing yield.
06:09We're maximizing quality.
06:10Look who's here.
06:11Does this guy know what he's talking about here?
06:13Hey, bud.
06:14Good to see you.
06:14You know how many of these I've collected in your farm throughout the years?
06:17Listen.
06:17This is a serious foul ball if it's in this farm.
06:20Can we tell these guys to hit the ball that way?
06:24That way.
06:24Another challenge with the rooftop garden is that growing season doesn't always align with the baseball season.
06:29As far as our garden goes, we can be doing a 10-game homestand with the Red Sox be as
06:34busy as we possibly can be.
06:36And then on the 11th day, they're going to the west coast and they're not coming back for two weeks.
06:41Mother Nature has a bunch of product coming out of our garden ready to go.
06:44We have a ton of basil that needs to be picked.
06:47This is the last game of the homestand.
06:49So what are we doing with that?
06:50So we are making a big vat of pastel.
06:54We'll work some of that into our catering.
06:57We'll put some of it in the freezer and work it back out when the team comes back.
07:00We are literally, like, a hundred feet from the kitchen.
07:04And the guest gets it pretty much that night or the day after.
07:08With the fresh produce delivered to the club's kitchen in the world's most literal farm-to-table pipeline,
07:13the sous chefs can now focus on executing an elevated restaurant-style dish at game speed.
07:17I like to describe it as fine dining, like, food truck-style cooking, where we're doing, like, really fancy stuff,
07:23but we're also trying to get the people out into the seats for first pitch.
07:27If you go too fast, it can kind of bruise the pesto and it'll lose its color a little bit.
07:31This way it doesn't get, like, brown and muddy and it keeps that, like, nice vibrant, like, fresh basil color.
07:37You're gonna do this process, like, five more times, right?
07:40Yeah.
07:40Whatever fits in this blender.
07:41You can't do it all at once with all the basil we have.
07:45I love the amount of garlic you have. The salt's right.
07:48When we're menu engineering, we think about how many steps and ingredients are in each dish.
07:53The simpler, the better, but simple doesn't mean that it has to be boring.
07:56Like, the gnocchi dish that we're making this pesto for, they only have about four ingredients for it.
08:01We'll blanch off our gnocchi ahead of time, so they're not cooking them to order.
08:04So it's more like a two- to three-minute pickup as opposed to, like, a seven-minute pickup, which
08:09every single minute down here counts.
08:11And it's not just the club kitchens racing the clock.
08:14With an hour to go before gates open, Chef Caitlin's finishing a dessert that takes plenty of work to make,
08:19but almost none to serve.
08:21Concessions needs to be a very quick pickup. If anything, it needs to be prepackaged, like cake cans.
08:26That's something a guest can grab themselves and self-check out with.
08:30We have season ticket holders that are coming to 81 games.
08:33I want them to experience something that they can't go and get at another ballpark.
08:37We're changing that flavor every month, and it's fun. It's fun for me, it's fun for my team, and it's
08:42fun for the fans.
08:43There should be more. I want them to experience something that they can't go and get at another ballpark.
08:47Of course, the classics aren't going anywhere. And with thousands of Fenway Franks to serve, even buttering the buns needs
08:53a little strategy.
08:54We have butter wheels all over the ballpark because most of our buns, whether it's a hot dog bun or
09:00a hamburger bun, are buttered and then griddled.
09:02And it makes it so much easier to do it that way. You just roll the bun right on that,
09:07and it magically has butter on both sides. Golden brown and delicious.
09:11And in the thick of service, even the smallest time savers add up. Shave just one second off serving each
09:17of the 12,000 Fenway Franks sold per game, and across 81 home games, that adds up to nearly 34
09:23full eight-hour workdays saved.
09:26Meanwhile, as the stands work through that first round of food, Joe's warehouse team is already getting the next one
09:33moving.
09:33We don't have the capacity to hold all of this product at the stand. So maybe an hour into the
09:40gate's opening, that product needs to be replenished.
09:43We also have to move that food when the place is packed. That's a logistical nightmare.
09:48Sometimes it can take 25 minutes to get from one side of the ballpark to the other.
09:52His advice? Be aggressive. Be aggressive. Be aggressive. Isn't that the chair? I think so.
10:00For all the quirks that come with feeding a crowd at Fenway, by the end of the day, most fans
10:04never have to think about any of them.
10:06And when tonight's crowd goes home, the Fenway staff start getting ready to do it all again.
10:10By 5 tomorrow morning, the loading dock is open, and the whole system starts moving again.
10:15I love coming to work every day. I love my team. I love most of the guests. I don't have
10:19to go places and people go,
10:20Oh, you got an accent. I don't got an accent. And that's what Boston's all about. Being yourself, making every
10:26day the best it can be.
10:27We all have some sort of connection to Fenway Park. It kind of is what unites us here.
10:31I wouldn't trade anything. Fenway is Fenway for a reason.
10:36Imagine walking into this every day as a chef and seeing this, having Fenway Farms, seeing the grounds crew, having
10:43the whole place to myself.
10:44I'm the luckiest chef in the city, I guess in the country.