Kandice Vest has always known her way around a kitchen. From the pretend preschool meals she whipped up in her wooden playset to preparing a surprise steak dinner for her parents’ anniversary at age eight, she’s always pushed the boundaries of culinary innovation.
As Silver Dollar City’s culinary manager, Kandice and her team never take the “easy” way out! Sure, they could purchase premade soups, stews and canned creations for convenience, but they choose to make each festival a feast of enchantment where homemade masterpieces are the star attraction.
“Thawing out frozen, factory-made meals just isn’t who we are,” Kandice smiles as she pushes a rack of gooey butter cakes baked fresh for the Showboat Branson Belle. “We owe it to our guests to give them our best, made-from-scratch recipes. We keep it fun but still stay true to who we are. Food is that important to folks!”
It’s important to Kandice, too. A lifelong “foodie” with a flare for outside-the-box recipes, cooking is her unconditional love language.
Kandice thinks about those moments each month when she hops on a collaboration call with chefs from other Herschend properties, including Dollywood. They start planning each festival’s fare about a year before its launch date.
“We all submit our recipes and ideas to the group. Then, we create a collection of about 50 products we can pull from. We don’t mess with fan favorites, but we’re constantly looking for ways to make what’s great even better!”
Once the lineup is locked in, each recipe is cataloged and each ingredient is added to inventory. Preplanning is essential to keep the park’s food service running smooth as butter, which Silver Dollar uses a lot of.
“Oh, yeah! Fresh butter and cream are in so many recipes! We never claim to be heavy on healthy meals, but we will love on you with stick-to-your-ribs home cooking,” Kandice laughs.
It’s mind-boggling to see how the park’s production kitchen, with a staff of only 19, creates foods for eateries across the entire park. For example, it takes a full-time “potato person” just to fill orders. More than 400 pounds of red potatoes alone are washed, sliced and packaged every day just for Lumbercamp. Another 300 pounds are taken to Tater Patch and Dockside. It’s a lot.
Across the production kitchen, another employee carefully brines and breads hundreds of pounds of chicken to fry as another teammate bakes hundreds of pounds of bacon for Traveler’s Stop artisan grilled cheese sandwiches. Whether it's simmering stews or seasoning sides, the production kitchen is in constant motion like Santa’s workshop—packing pulled pork instead of presents. It’s a vast operation tucked away from public sight in a six-story building.
It can be hard to hear over hums from ovens and whirring of mixers. A six-shelf rotisserie smoker is in full rotation for 16 hours, smoking pork and briskets for various City favorites like BBQ nachos and pork belly skillets. There is a special section where frozen lemonades are created and even a Dippin’ Dot room.
Each week, eateries place orders for everything they need, from sauces to marinades to gravies to pies to chopped vegetables. The production kitchen team perfectly prepares everything from scratch and then stores the items for pickup. It takes rows of deep freezes, aisles of ingredients and racks of spices. There’s even a dedicated portion of one freezer for giant wedges of cheese.
“That’s for our mac and cheese,” smiles Kandice as she does visual inventory of the chunks. “Making sure each individual ingredient is high quality leads to the overall enjoyment of our meals. We don’t skimp on that.”
This time of year, Kandice’s team really gives folks “pumpkin to talk about” as Fall foodies line up for all sorts of sweet and savory autumn treats during Harvest Festival. It’s a collaborative effort to please all palates when just putting pies on plates would be the easy thing to do. Instead, guests are treated to fall flavors such as pumpkin chili, pumpkin-spiced rubbed BBQ ribs, bacon maple and pecan funnel cakes and hot caramel apple cider.
“People are so crazy about pumpkin,” she laughs. “These big ideas came about from collaboration—that creative bravery to take pumpkin beyond pies. There’s something so satisfying about that.”
In all, it takes about 300 food service employees to feed the park’s more than 2 million annual visitors. Kandice, who started with the company in 2001 as a 14-year old at Lumbercamp, is grateful for the Silver Dollar City Company’s focus on work-family balance and opportunities to grow.
“I try every day to be a mentor to my team and find teaching moments. I’m so proud of them and their drive to make our guests happy. Seeing them shine does good to my heart.”
Her journey from childhood—standing on a stool in the kitchen helping her mom stir—to the leader she is today has been a remarkable path of learning, growing, loving, and sampling!
As Public Relations Manager for the Silver Dollar City Company, she is eager to tap into her journalism background to hunt down “heart tugs” to write about—those stories that celebrate…
