A seat at the chef's table
When Eric Nooe stepped into a corporate regional culinary role overseeing multiple ThriveMore communities, he wasn’t looking to put on a dinner party. Though he had previously worked for Ardenwoods’ parent company as an executive chef, this new role was less about cooking and more about operations.
But, as he settled in, learning more about each community’s chefs — including the menus they prepared for residents — Eric became inspired by their creativity in the kitchen.
“As I dove into the operations of all these communities, I just realized how awesome the culinary talent we had at each community was,” he said. “And I thought we really needed to make an effort to showcase that talent.”
That insight sparked the Chef’s Table series, an immersive culinary experience that Eric co-creates with the culinary directors at each of ThriveMore’s communities. On April 8, Ardenwoods hosted its first installment of the Chef’s Table dinners: a Scandinavian dining experience for 25 residents that sold out in a single day.
The evening was a true collaboration, with Eric and Ardenwoods’ culinary director each contributing two courses guided by a willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory — cloudberries, cheese shipped in from Europe, elk chops plated tableside, and wines carefully paired with the evening’s courses.
“A lot of times, we’re creating dishes with ingredients we’ve never worked with before,” Eric explained. “So it’s not only an educational experience for the residents, but it’s also an educational experience for us.”
For instance, he continued, “we opened up this Norwegian brown cheese that none of us had ever tried before — we’re standing there tasting it raw, giving our impressions and throwing out ideas. It was almost like a malty, salted caramel cream cheese.” The team mulled it over and decided to put a Nordic spin on traditional cheesecake, serving it up with cloudberry jam, stroopwafel, cardamom spice whipped cream and pineberries.
Part of what makes the Chef’s Table special is the spirit residents bring to it. Eric has observed that the potential for dinner-table hesitancy disappears when residents sign up for a special event.
“When they’re intentional about signing up for a dinner experience, they come with a different perspective and a different attitude,” he said. “They’re prepared to try something new, because that’s why they came. The wonderful thing is everybody’s palate is different, so it sparks so much conversation about their impression of the food and how it paired with that wine.”
After the April dinner, the feedback was telling. The first question Eric heard from residents was: “Why can’t we do this more?”
Eric explained that, if all goes as planned, Chef’s Table dinners should happen three times per year at Ardenwoods, with the next one anticipated sometime this summer. Ideas for the next menu are still in the works, though Eric hints that it could be coastal-inspired fare — a culinary tour through the two chefs’ hometown cuisines, from the bays of Maryland to the Low Country of South Carolina.
For Eric, this series is part of a broader mission to redefine what living in a retirement community means. When he initially made the career switch from country clubs to senior living, he realized “there’s this very outdated assumption that all we’re serving is boiled chicken and mashed potatoes.”
Instead, he went door to door, sitting with residents in their homes and asking them about their lives with food. What had been the most memorable meal of their lives? How adventurous had they been when trying new things? Would they be willing to give these dishes another shot?
What he found — aside from “gaining 400 new grandparents,” he said, laughing — was that “these residents have sophisticated palates. They’re independent; they enjoy going out to try new and innovative restaurants. A lot of our residents are world travelers — someone was telling me about these kebabs they’d had in Morocco. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I wanted to be able to continue to create those experiences for them.”
In addition to the Chef’s Table events, Eric is working on producing a ThriveMore cookbook, featuring 20 resident recipes from each community, which he hopes will publish by the end of summer. “It’s just a great opportunity to share their stories along with some of their favorite recipes,” he explained. “They just have such amazing stories. I enjoy sitting down with our residents and learning from them so much that I figured others would, too.”
A Scandinavian-inspired recipe from Chef's Table
