How Dining Menus are Created at Fellowship Senior Living

In your hunt for the perfect life plan community for your retirement, you’ve compared residences, the type of maintenance-free services offered and, of course, the cost. But there’s another factor you shouldn’t forget to consider: the food!

You don’t want run-of-the-mill cafeteria food where you just have to accept what is given to you. Instead, you deserve nutritious meals, delicious gourmet meals and options to eat what you want. This is what you get at Fellowship Senior Living, where we offer a menu that stands out from other senior living dining menus and go above and beyond to craft high-quality menus that ensure residents are getting everything they need from their meals.

The Culinary Team and Menu Creation Process at Fellowship

To create our five-star, well-rounded menus, we work with our entire culinary team to ensure we’re providing residents with the highest quality dining options possible. Richard Mercado, Vice President of Dining Services at Fellowship, provided insight into the team collaboration needed to create the final menus that residents see. Our dietician, in particular, is essential to our menu creation process. This role is focused on approving meal options that are safe, healthy and appeal to all residents’ dietary needs.

“The chef, the dietician and the rest of our management team go through each menu and share feedback and brainstorm on how we can make this our best menu yet, Richard explained. “Our dietician reviews the menu to ensure we are offering some healthy options for those residents that have different challenges like diabetes or high blood pressure.

When creating our menus, our objective is to provide all residents with healthy, high quality options that will allow them to have an unforgettable dining experience every time they sit down for a meal. We try to offer a variety of different types of foods to appeal to everyone’s appetite.

“For casual dining from our Bistro, we have a grill for hot sandwiches to order, a deli where residents can have fresh sandwiches made and we have a full station just to make salads. Residents create their own salad by choosing from different toppings and ingredients, Richard explained. We also offer a formal dining room with an exceptional menu as well as a Tapas Bar and Lounge for small plates and drinks.

We go above and beyond to not only ensure our quality of food, but to also get residents excited about what they’re eating! For example, we offer a pizza station where we prepare Italian pastas and fresh pizzas from scratch that are made from ripe, locally sourced tomatoes.

In addition to our variety of food options, we also have a coffee station available that serves both Starbucks Coffee and Seattle’s Best Coffee and latte options. This is a full barista station where residents can get their favorite coffee in the morning or indulge in a nutritious smoothie.

There’s truly something for everyone when you dine with Fellowship.

How Fellowship Keeps Dining Menus Fresh and On Trend

At Fellowship Senior Living, creating our unique menus is a process we take very seriously. Our menus play a large role in the overall dining experience for residents and we do our best to ensure our menus are unique, healthy and well-rounded before they are finalized.

“When we make our menus, we want to offer residents the chance to enjoy something unique that they might not ever have enjoyed before, Richard explained, We really try not to get stagnant with our menus and constantly try to think outside of the box.

Some elements that go into the menu creation process include taking a look at what the current culinary trends are and infusing them into our menu here at Fellowship.

“Whatever the current concepts and ideas that are going on in the market, we try to fuse those into our menu, Richard said. We try to give residents an opportunity to have something new and have a variety of foods to choose from at a very high level.

Seasonality and Fresh, Locally Sourced Ingredients

Another element to our menu creation is our use of organic and seasonal ingredients that we source locally. We love incorporating things like fresh, ripe apples into our menus during the fall season and sweet, juicy strawberries in the summer to provide residents with rich, tasteful options when they dine.

In addition to seasonal products, we also offer one superfood menu item a month for residents to enjoy. These superfood items add another layer of uniqueness to our menus and provide residents with foods that can boost their immune systems and keep them healthy.

Experience High-Quality Dining Options at Fellowship Senior Living

If there’s one thing you can absolutely count on from Fellowship Senior Living, it’s an unmatched dining experience. Our passionate culinary team uses fresh, locally sourced ingredients to craft delicious menu items that are sure to satisfy.

We welcome you to enjoy unique meals and creations with friends and family at our Village Bistro & Marketplace, in our beautiful Terrace View dining room or in our new Wilson’s Tapas Bar Lounge that has opened this month.

Contact us today to learn more about our variety of senior living dining options and the precautions we have put in place to ensure Fellowship Senior Living is a safe place to live and dine.