Crimson Catering Relocates to Allston Facility With Focus On Efficiency and Scale

Crimson Catering, Harvard University Dining Services’ in-house catering arm, moved into a standalone production facility at 168 Western Avenue in Allston last August, ending a decades-long arrangement that had the company sharing a kitchen with the Eliot-Kirkland dining operation.

The new space — designed to support high-volume events and increase the company’s efficiency — has consolidated the company’s operations and reshaped the way it produces food for University events.

For at least 30 years, Crimson Catering operated out of 80 JFK St., where its kitchen overlapped with the Eliot-Kirkland HUDS division. The Allston facility marks a shift toward a more dedicated home for the provider.

“It was much more of a mixed use space previously,” HUDS managing director Smitha Haneef said. “168 is much more defined.”

Jessica Capraro, the general manager of Crimson Catering, said the move had eliminated the logistical friction of working in shared quarters.

“At 80 JFK, you really had to cross through common areas that were shared with Eliot-Kirkland,” Capraro said. “In this location, we don’t have to share,” she added. “It is all our own.”

The new facility includes an independent loading dock and a beverage cooler positioned directly off of it — a configuration Kyle Ronayne, HUDS director of catering, said cut the time it takes to move stock.

“Our refrigeration was up a ramp before,” Ronayne said. “We had to bring it through a ramp, all the way through the kitchen, then all the way to the loading dock before. So you’re talking about hundreds of steps to get to the lowering dock from the beverage core, whereas now it’s like five to 10.”

The kitchen itself was designed as a single “contiguous” open space, a departure from the segmented layout in the previous location. Mobile stainless steel tables and equipment on wheels allows chefs to reconfigure the floor each day depending on what they are producing, and refrigeration sits adjacent to the cooking area.

“The biggest difference between this kitchen and the old kitchen, is efficiencies,” Ronayne said. “The number of steps to get something done is far less than what we were doing at 80 JFK.”

The facility is also outfitted with new programmable convection ovens from Rational, a German manufacturer, which Haneef described as “state-of-the-art.”

“They’re amazing,” Ronayne said. “It cooks with steam, it cooks with heat. You can program each of the shelving units to cook at different temperatures.”

Ronayne said the new equipment would give chefs room to test menu items during slower stretches of the year.

“We typically slow down during the summer, and that will be the time that we can kind of experiment with how that works and create new menu items based on experimentations,” he said.

The move also advanced HUDS’ sustainability targets, according to Haneef. Several appliances that previously ran on gas now run on electricity, and the new space uses less water.

“With every renovation we are moving ourselves towards the University’s goals, on as many metrics as possible,” Haneef said. “For many years now, every piece of equipment we are buying, we are making sure we are advancing those sustainability goals.”

Crimson Catering shares its 168 Western Ave. address with swissbäkers, a European-style bakery, but the two companies intersect only along a common walkway between the kitchen and the bakery’s office.

The new facility is designed to expand Crimson Catering’s capacity to serve large-scale events on campus.

“This particular venue gave us the opportunity to install new equipment that supported high volume production needs that we knew we needed,” Haneef said.

“The team at Crimson is handling flagship events, high volume events,” she added. “The size of each event could be quite large, so we were looking for a scoped out kitchen that could give us that capacity.”

Throughout the transition, customer satisfaction has held steady, according to Haneef.

In an open house held in August, shortly after the kitchen opened, campus partners were invited to the space for a behind-the-scenes tour and a tasting.

“Once we had the open house, and people got to come and view it firsthand and get to sample some of the dishes that were produced in the kitchen,” Haneef said, “I think it gave the campus a high degree of confidence.”

—Staff writer Samuel S. Rudavsky can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @samrudavsky.