Every day, a team of cooks and waitstaff serves 13,500 meals at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Midshipmen gather for every meal in the historic King Hall, the dining hall in T-shaped Bancroft Hall — the largest single-building dormitory in the world. Staff at King Hall can prepare 2,000 pounds of shrimp, 3,000 hamburgers, or 2,500 pounds of chicken a day for the 4,400 midshipmen seated at the 392 tables in the dining hall.
Business Insider visited King Hall to see cooks prepare an estimated 500 pounds of sauerkraut and 7,500 wursts for their annual Oktoberfest dinner and celebrate the Navy's 248th birthday by slicing a cake with a ceremonial sword.
Business Insider visited King Hall to see cooks prepare an estimated 500 pounds of sauerkraut and 7,500 wursts for their annual Oktoberfest dinner and celebrate the Navy's 248th birthday by slicing a cake with a ceremonial sword.
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00:00 These cooks are preparing over 13,500 meals for the 4,400 midshipmen who attend the United
00:10 States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
00:16 For today's meal, kitchen staff told us they ordered 7,500 German sausages and about 500
00:24 pounds of sauerkraut, in addition to this sliced Lieberkäse, a German meatloaf similar
00:30 to bologna, for the Academy's annual Oktoberfest celebration.
00:39 Feeding these future sailors isn't like feeding your average college student.
00:43 As a midshipman, they are engaged with a lot of activities, academic, military, and sports
00:51 activities as well.
00:53 So it is very, very important for us to feed them at least between 35,000 to 4,000, 4,200
00:59 calories per day.
01:01 Be on me!
01:03 And the food doesn't just have to be plentiful, it also has to be good.
01:09 If food's bad, people's morale will be bad.
01:12 If food's great, people's morale will be great.
01:14 You know, we're trying to boost the morale, because back in the fleet, it's nothing like
01:17 this.
01:18 It's a real deal, but here we take care of them.
01:22 Feeding for thousands of midshipmen is no easy task.
01:26 A staff of over 50 cooks and nearly 100 wait staff serves the students three times a day.
01:36 This is a beast here.
01:38 This is a machine that never stops.
01:40 The second you're done with one meal, you gotta jump on the next or you're not gonna
01:42 make it.
01:45 We got access to the Naval Academy's dining hall to see how different meals are prepared
01:50 and served, starting with the biggest meal of the day, lunch.
01:57 But not just any lunch.
01:59 It's Friday, which means they're serving the midshipmen their favorite meal.
02:05 Can you explain to me what is your favorite meal here?
02:07 Oh man, my favorite meal is definitely buff chicks.
02:11 I think buff chicks.
02:12 I know a lot of people are big fans of buff chicks and I am as well.
02:15 Yeah, definitely buff chicks.
02:16 Buff chicks stands for buffalo chicken and because it's so popular, we have it every
02:21 Friday now.
02:22 But typically it consists of a chicken patty.
02:27 And then they have this really like spicy, spicy sauce and people usually slap it on
02:33 and add some potato wedges, call it a day.
02:36 We actually moved buff chicks from a Wednesday meal to a Friday meal this semester, kind
02:42 of boost the morale going into the weekend.
02:45 We serve that every week.
02:47 We try to pull away to get angry at us.
02:49 When it first started, the chicken would be deep fried to try to make it a healthier item.
02:56 It has since been cooked in the combi ovens.
02:59 Kitchen staff told us they prepared 7,000 to 8,000 pieces of chicken for this meal,
03:05 which they put on trays with enough fries to feed the entire student body.
03:10 The trays are then placed in the combi ovens and baked until everything is crispy.
03:15 Nowadays we have combination combi ovens, they call them, that will either cook radiant
03:20 heat, convection heat, steam heat, or combination heat.
03:25 That's the combi oven where you can adjust it to anywhere from zero to 100% humidity,
03:31 cook half radiant, half steam.
03:34 While the chicken patties cook in the combi ovens, two cooks prepare the sandwich's signature
03:39 sauce and cheese.
03:40 How many bowls do you have to do in the buffalo sauce?
03:41 Right now we're doing like 400.
03:42 Yeah, the chicken too, we only do like 400.
03:43 The favorite menu here is chicken.
03:44 I have to do 40 trays of blue cheese to feed 418 tables of mission.
03:45 Wow.
03:46 That's a lot of blue cheese.
03:47 Yeah.
03:48 Once all the food is prepped and ready to go, it's a race against the clock to get it
04:17 out the doors and onto the tables in the Naval Academy dining hall, known as King Hall, a
04:26 55,000 square foot dining hall with 392 tables.
04:31 Right now we're in King Hall, which is the ward room, we call them ward rooms in the
04:36 Navy, not a dining hall or mess hall or chow hall.
04:40 So we have a different term because we operate like we're on a Navy ship and it's a ward
04:45 room there.
04:46 So this is the office's ward room.
04:49 King Hall is located in the center of Bancroft Hall, the massive dormitory on campus where
04:55 all Midshipmen reside.
04:57 It's the largest single building dormitory in the world.
05:00 All 4,500 or so Midshipmen live together in Bancroft Hall, split between eight different
05:05 wings of 30 different companies.
05:11 While King Hall staff finish prepping for lunch, all Midshipmen gather in front of Bancroft
05:16 Hall for formation.
05:25 Our brigade commander gives us commands, carry swords, all that stuff.
05:33 After all the attention, parade, rest, all that fun stuff, they say, "Censor face."
05:39 And that's when the whole brigade turns towards the middle of T Court.
05:43 And from there, they say, "Forward," and then everyone starts marching towards Bancroft.
06:09 The academic schedule is such that they're really in class from 7.55 to almost 8 o'clock
06:13 in the afternoon.
06:14 Whereas a typical college university, you might have a class at 6 o'clock in the morning,
06:20 you may have your last class 6, 11 o'clock at night, and they can go eat whenever they
06:25 want to.
06:26 Not here.
06:27 So we're limited by the time, what the academic schedule says we can do.
06:33 They come all together and sit at the same time.
06:36 King Hall wait staff then serves all 4,400 students in under five minutes.
06:46 A task aided by 30 heated carts.
06:49 Basically, one tray is one table.
06:51 Twenty trays go into twenty tables, multiplied by twelve.
06:55 So we have over 30 carts.
06:59 It's insane of how they roll out these gray carts, and then from there they have trays
07:03 of food and they're just handing it out to different tables.
07:06 This is all in the span of five minutes because everyone's hungry and they're all trying to
07:10 eat.
07:11 I've been in the big command.
07:12 I've been in the carrier, which we serve 5,000 to 5,500 people.
07:17 At no time that I serve 5,500 in one sitting.
07:21 This one is a little bit different.
07:23 The massive sitting of 4,400 in 15 minutes is tremendous.
07:28 I've never seen it like it before.
07:31 They only have from the start to the finish, they only have 15 to 20 minutes to eat their
07:37 food.
07:38 In the midship, we need about 10 minutes.
07:40 It's like they inhale the food.
07:55 We do because we put 18 pieces on each table.
08:00 So 150%, so we give them an additional riding table.
08:03 Another thing too, we always have a few trays extra.
08:06 So if they want more food, we just tell them, "Raise your tray up.
08:09 The staff will bring you more food out here."
08:11 We got not one, but two buff chicks.
08:12 We call it the double-pick buff chick chicken sandwich.
08:13 What's so good about it?
08:14 That's the mystery.
08:15 That's what makes it that much better.
08:26 The buff chicken might date back further than I've been here, since I've worked here.
08:32 Since I've been here, it's always been a favorite.
08:34 It's never come off the menu.
08:35 I don't envision it coming off the menu, but I know if we ever took it off the menu, we'd
08:40 be in trouble.
08:41 We'd have some complaints.
08:42 But feedback is welcome at King Hall.
08:45 A student liaison tasked with gathering the midshipman's thoughts on the meals works
08:50 with the kitchen staff to help refine menus.
08:54 Basically what we do is we take midshipman feedback and improvements that we can make
08:58 in King Hall and translate that into how it could actually happen with the civilians and
09:01 the military staff.
09:03 Also, before releasing a new menu cycle, the staff invites midshipmen to come in and taste
09:08 potential meals to see what they like.
09:11 We have what we call menu boards, where we bring in vendors that come in here with the
09:17 new products to display them.
09:19 We have 60 midshipmen that come in, sample it.
09:23 They grade it, they give us a score and say, "Okay, we like this.
09:25 Put it on the menu cycle."
09:27 They do so much for us here to try and provide us with good food and in a quick manner that
09:33 everyone's going to like.
09:35 So they're always trying to work with feedback from midshipmen and staff saying, "Hey, here's
09:39 what we didn't like about this meal.
09:41 Here's what we did like."
09:42 And so immediately we try and go in and solve that problem.
09:45 Until we meet once more, here's wishing you a happy holiday.
09:55 The menu is only one reason this meal is special.
09:58 Because today is the Navy's birthday.
10:01 So happy birthday, Navy.
10:02 248 years.
10:03 Hooyah!
10:04 Today is a day to think about our legacy.
10:13 George Washington formed the Continental Navy in October 1775 to protect American colonies
10:20 from British attack.
10:22 Seventy years later in 1845, Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, the namesake of
10:28 Bancroft Hall, founded the Naval School in Annapolis, Maryland, which later became the
10:34 United States Naval Academy.
10:40 Lunch at the Naval Academy is a mandatory meal, where all 4,400 midshipmen eat together
10:47 at once.
10:48 Well, the big difference you have here is we're still traditional.
10:53 It's family-style feeding.
10:54 But most everything else in College University is bars, Chick-fil-A, Subway, that they've
11:01 contracted out with the local fast food restaurants to come in and do the food for them.
11:13 For the birthday celebration, staff and students take part in a traditional cake-cutting ceremony
11:19 using a sword.
11:21 For the Navy birthday, we usually have cake-cutting, in which the oldest person of the brigade
11:25 and the youngest person of the brigade take turns cutting the cake and eating it, which
11:29 is really fun to see.
11:31 You'll see an old prior who did two or three years of service before coming here.
11:36 And then you'll meet, it's typically a plebe who's 17 years old, and they barely made it
11:42 into I-Day.
11:43 So the contrast is super fun to see.
11:46 This year, the oldest midshipman at the Academy was born in December 1996, and the youngest
11:52 in April 2006.
11:54 I think it's symbolizing the connection of the Navy.
11:58 It takes us between our present and our past, and all the people who have helped to defend
12:03 this country.
12:05 In addition to the large cake, each table is given a smaller cake for the oldest and
12:10 youngest midshipman in their squad to cut.
12:19 The Navy birthday lunch has its own set of traditions.
12:22 But even for everyday meals, eating in King Hall involves a lot more rituals and customs
12:28 than a traditional college dining hall.
12:31 Every table seats a squad, a group of about 12 midshipmen from each grade level at the
12:37 Academy, all with different nicknames.
12:40 Freshmen first years are called plebes, then youngsters second years.
12:46 In your third year, you're just called a second-class midshipman.
12:48 But then your last year, your senior year, you're called a firstie.
12:52 In the middle of the dining hall stands a raised area, known as the anchor, where leadership
12:57 gathers before the meal.
13:04 One unique tradition in King Hall is a favorite among students, a ritual they simply call
13:10 "Beat Army."
13:11 Essentially, if a plebe or someone at the table opens a can of peanut butter and there's
13:16 the seal on it, they'll pass it to a plebe, and they have to essentially heat up the jar
13:21 as best they can.
13:22 The reason why is because they need that warmth to make sure when it comes out it's very liquidy.
13:28 So they stand up on the chair, they unscrew it just a little bit, but not too much, and
13:34 then they scream "Beat Army" at the top of their lungs and smash it against their forehead.
13:39 "Beat Army!"
13:44 And so it'll all explode everywhere and go on people.
13:46 And so it's pretty funny.
13:47 Some people hit other mids, which is kind of frustrating if you have a nice crisp uniform
13:51 on, but just to get it as far as possible.
13:54 And we have grads that come in here and sometimes eat and they'll still do it.
13:58 And so we try and do it as much as possible.
14:00 Unfortunately, if mids don't clean it up, it is kind of a headache on the staff to clean
14:04 it up.
14:05 So we limit it in the same sense, but it is a fun tradition.
14:11 At 1230, lunch concludes, and the midshipmen quickly gather their things and head to their
14:18 next class.
14:20 Back in the kitchens, cooks have already begun prepping the next meal, a unique dinner that
14:26 will require all hands on deck.
14:31 Tonight, the Naval Academy will celebrate Oktoberfest.
14:37 We've been doing that for about eight years now because we have a contingent of German
14:43 midshipmen that come in from Germany.
14:46 Tonight's entree, various pork, beef, and vegetarian worsts.
14:56 The sausages, for the most part, are prepared in our ovens.
14:59 They're not boiled, they're just prepared in the ovens.
15:02 They're heated up.
15:03 They're cooked all the way through and heated up and we serve them that way.
15:07 Like the sausages, a lot of the food in King Hall is prepared in ovens.
15:13 Some of the food here are mostly pre-prepared foods already.
15:17 Not a whole lot of scratch cooking, like I said, due to the manning constraint.
15:23 I hate to say it, but we always have staffing issues, shortages, but the show must go on.
15:30 It's tough with any government hire because everything has to go through all the red tape
15:36 and the bureaucracy and stuff.
15:37 It's not like the private sector where if you need somebody, you can hire them off the
15:40 street and have them working the next day.
15:42 I have about 45 that's actually working in the kitchen right now.
15:48 For side dishes, cooks are preparing about 500 pounds of sauerkraut and a mound of red
15:54 cabbage.
15:59 And Leberkäse, a traditional German dish similar to a bologna meatloaf.
16:05 That cooks slice into individual portions before placing it in the ovens.
16:09 Usually the day before, the staff will start preparing the food.
16:14 They'll put in whatever pans they need to do it, put in the oven racks and whatnot.
16:19 So the next day when they come in, they're basically putting the items in the oven or
16:22 in the vats and whatnot.
16:25 So it's difficult if we try to do everything in the morning, we just run out of time.
16:32 The menus at the Naval Academy are carefully crafted to fuel the needs of the midshipmen.
16:38 So our primary focus is making sure that they're getting enough carbohydrates, protein and
16:43 fat as well as fruits and vegetables for fiber and micronutrients.
16:48 So it's really a balance of all of those things.
16:50 In addition to the daily meals served in King Hall, there are alternative options in King's
16:56 Court, which offers grab-and-go meals, as well as a large salad bar.
17:04 Vegetarian options are also offered daily.
17:07 They are prepping for the midshipmen that has some dietary restrictions and stuff, so
17:12 we give them available options.
17:16 While some midshipmen have dietary restrictions, others require more calories than their classmates.
17:23 There are certain sports that require higher weight, so those midshipmen do require more
17:29 calories, so in those instances, they're going to have a little bit bigger portion sizes.
17:34 The Navy football team, for example, receives double portions for every meal.
17:40 We definitely always have to have extra.
17:42 A football team gets 200 percent, maybe 10, sometimes 20 pans extra.
17:52 Back in King Hall, it's nearly 5.30, and waitstaff is being assigned to their positions
17:58 to serve the special meal.
18:00 From there, when it's empty, you need replenish it, OK?
18:03 You help them too, OK?
18:05 Meanwhile, other staff members are adding the final touches in nearby Dahlgren Hall
18:11 to convert it into a German beer hall.
18:13 Why do you guys go all out to do these events and really promote morale here?
18:19 Oh yeah, because basically, this is a campus, so we're trying to boost the morale.
18:25 Every month or so, we have a special menu or special events for them, because back in
18:29 the fleet, it's nothing like this.
18:31 It's going to be, it's a real deal.
18:34 Here we take care of them, and we do a lot of functions and special events for the crew
18:39 to boost their morale.
18:42 Well, let me put it this way.
18:44 We spoil them, OK?
18:47 We operate on a four-week menu cycle and try to, we try to mimic a lot what they're
18:53 going to get in the fleet.
18:55 The fleet operates on a 20-day menu cycle.
18:58 They have no flexibility and change it.
19:01 We have flexibility.
19:02 I can buy food, or we can buy food from any vendor that we want to, because we're trying
19:07 to encourage them, motivate them, and provide a good morale that they stay here, because
19:13 being a midshipman in academics and the sports is a tough job for them.
19:26 Back in Dahlgren Hall, midshipmen begin filing in for the festivities.
19:30 A lot of times, they'll come in a full lederhosen, or the women will come in a dirndl.
19:38 Men over the age of 21 are allowed to try a selection of imported German beers.
19:45 But everyone is under the close watch of a task force to make sure they're all following
19:51 the rules.
19:52 What's it like doing all these events?
19:53 It's a great opportunity to get to network with a lot of the officers, but also just
19:54 passionately eating authentic food.
19:55 That's the cherry on top.
19:56 The cost we get for the food is so high.
19:57 It's like, you know, you're not getting paid, but you're getting paid for the food.
19:58 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
19:59 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:00 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:01 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:02 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:03 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:08 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:09 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:10 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:11 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:12 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:13 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:14 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:15 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:16 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:17 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:18 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:19 It's like, you know, you're getting paid for the food.
20:41 Every single plate, cup, and piece of silverware must be washed before the next meal.
20:50 You know, it's unique, that challenge that you need to feed the 4400 Brigade Strong.
20:55 It's what kind of gets me up and interested and, like, pumped up to do my next day.
21:01 I guess there's a sense of purpose in cooking for midshipmen and future leaders of the world.
21:08 It feels as if you're, you know, maybe pushing towards a higher calling.
21:13 I worked at the Air Force Academy for eight years, been here 14 years, so I'd say I've
21:18 got about 40 years food service experience.
21:20 I've always loved it.
21:21 It's always what I dreamed of, and this is a very ideal job.
21:24 It's Bunny Friday.
21:25 Let's hear some jokes.
21:26 Why do Swedish ships have to be so expensive?
21:27 So they can stand in Navy air.
21:46 Yeah, go Navy.
21:47 Beat Army.
21:48 Go Navy.
21:49 Beat Army.
21:49 Veed Army.