Sep 26, 2004 By Jennifer Harr 5 min read

Nemacolin Woodlands executive chef Jeremy Critchfield summed it up best during a planning meeting with the food and beverage workers for the 84 Lumber Classic “We’re sort of like David and Goliath here – 300 of us against 140,000 for the week,” he said.

And with a field of talented golfers like world No. 1 Vijay Singh and John Daly, event organizers expect 110,000 to 140,000 attendees will have visited the resort by the time the tournament ends today, more than the estimated 70,000 last year.

The David and Goliath comparison “kind of puts things into perspective,” Critchfield said.

Between full-blown meals, concessions and other miscellaneous food-service needs, the team dedicated to keeping people fed will handle 140,000 requests, the head chef said.

The menu again this year features the same delicious concessions on the course, which include a BBQ chicken sandwich and last year’s favorite, fresh cut potato fries. In 2003, Critchfield said, the resort went through about 5,000 pounds of potatoes.

“This year, we’re ready for about 15,000 pounds,” he said.

Other repeats from last year include a doughnut fryer, which was as much a hit for children at the tourney as it was for the golfers themselves, Critchfield said. Ditto for the fresh smoothie bar. And the lunchtime milkshake station was a “huge success,” he said.

The resort is offering a sundae bar, where youngsters will feel like culinary geniuses with pint-sized chef hats, and a day when the children can experiment with cotton candy.

The resort has added a full bar at the concession at the 17th tee box.

The major culinary change this year is that all of the resort’s restaurants, except the new Aqueous, are open to the public. Last year, they were closed to ensure privacy of the players, who essentially were living at the resort during the tourney.

But since the new Falling Rock hotel and the Aqueous restaurant are dedicated to players and their families, Critchfield said the resort made the decision to open the other restaurants.

Falling Rock and Aqueous are the resort’s newest ventures. The restaurant serves an array of dishes. Its appetizers are called “Progressions,” Critchfield explained, because they use one theme ingredient and are served in three ways.

In the case of fish, the “progression” is tuna and sweet soy sashimi, swordfish-road beet carpaccio and salmon-lemon oil ceviche. The main dishes are titled “Aqua-Terra,” and offer a surf and turf combo.

Critchfield came up with the menu after extensive research to bring together progressive, modern American dishes.

He said the most popular of those dishes thus far has been the Virginia black bass and natural beef filet combination. It’s served with black-eyed pea forie gras gravy and apple celeriac salad.

With 42 guest rooms, Falling Rock is hosting this year’s PGA top 40 money winners who are playing in the tournament, Critchfield said.

This year, Nemacolin also built an RV park so that people like 84 Lumber-sponsored golfer John Daly have a place to park their home on the road. To accommodate those golfers, Critchfield said, yet more unique arrangements have been made: grocery lists and pre-packaged dinners.

Both RV travelers and those golfers who opt to stay in Nemacolin townhouses receive lists from which to make personal orders, and are privy to specially designed pre-packaged dinners. The vacuum-sealed meals include lasagna or prime rib with roasted vegetables, Critchfield said.

On check-in night, the golfers were greeted with a fresh baked apple pie and ice cream to give them “a very homey welcome to the Laurel Highlands,” Critchfield said.

With a laugh, he said he started planning for the culinary end of this year’s tourney “the day after it stopped last year.

“And I just built momentum all the way through,” he said.

He expected to put in the same 18- to 20-hour days that he put in the first year, but said he doesn’t mind.

“The adrenaline kept me going,” he said.

And though he fretted that the uncooperative weather at the beginning of last year’s tournament might have hampered staff and volunteer enthusiasm, Critchfield said that was not the case. “We knew the sun was coming out on Sunday, and so was everyone else.”

Last year’s challenge, Critchfield said, was getting the pots and pans washed in the most timely fashion. There seemed to be a lack of space to get it done, he said, so this year, Nemacolin brought in a 48-foot tractor-trailer truck from Alabama specifically to provide dishwashing space.

And the stewardship team, which includes dishwashing in its duties, is one of the hardest working at the resort, Critchfield said.

“They’re really the backbone of everything we do there,” he said.

Of last year’s event, Critchfield said it was a culinary success. Despite the dish problem, he called last year’s tournament “really amazing” in terms of how the teams of servers, cooks and cleaners came together to make it work.

Another key component for success, said Critchfield, is the volunteers who give their time during the tournament.

An estimated 1,300 people volunteer each day to help keep different aspects of the tournament on track. About 500 of them deal with the food end of things, he said.

“We absolutely could not do it without the volunteers,” he said.

In some areas, food service volunteers provide the main staffing, assisted by one or two Nemacolin employees, Critchfield said.

The ages of volunteers also are varied, ranging from high school students to retirees.

Many of the volunteers from last year asked to work in the same areas, and with the same Nemacolin associates, that they worked with in 2003.

“It promises to be something special once again,” he said.