The plat du jour in senior dining these days is choice. No longer are residents being expected to please their palates at a buffet of prepared foods, in the same environment, day after day, meal after meal.
Instead, organizations are recognizing that seniors want flexibility and variety—just like every other sector of the population—and that they don’t expect that craving to go away when they move into an independent or assisted living facility.
Susan Eckert, president of Harmony Senior Services (Roanoke, Va.), says she began to notice the change a few years ago and started adding pubs for happy hours to her facilities.
Today, along with the traditional main dining room, she’s seeking space to put in outdoor kitchens, where staff chefs might prepare dinner a couple of nights a week, and grab-and-go dining options, where residents can get a bite to take back to their apartments.
In a few years, when more Baby Boomers have moved in, she says she’ll likely have to change again. “Maybe I’ll divide up that dining room and change it into two or three venues.”
One thing she knows for sure: “It’s going to take some reinventing.”
Craig Kimmel, a partner at RLPS Architects (Lancaster, Pa.), says the desire for alternative dining venues is leading to more thematic designs or "something that people can identify with."
And that’s giving designers more opportunity to be more creative. “It’s freed up design professionals to be a little bit more out there in terms of an aesthetic for a given space, which has been really fun,” he says.
For a recent project at Erickson Living’s Charlestown community (Catonsville, Md.), RLPS took inspiration from the warehouse district in nearby Baltimore to renovate the Terrace Café with exposed brick walls and steel frames, black-and-white photographs, and arch-top windows.
The project team, which took home top honors in this year’s Remodel/Renovation Competition for the redesign, also reworked the programming so that residents don’t cue up in a single line to get their food but visit stations and talk with chefs about the menu items. (For more on the winning design, check out Environments For Aging’s fall issue.)
“We were trying to create an area of eating versus an area of getting food,” he says.
The result, Kimmel says, is a place that’s more special-occasion venue than the generic and dated restaurant it once was. “To me it feels like a great Saturday night venue, although weekends don’t have quite as much meaning for some seniors as I understand,” he says.
As the industry adapts to these changing tastes—and the challenges and opportunities they present—let’s raise a toast to the future of dining, where every day can involve a different culinary experience and every meal can feel like Saturday night dining.
