Wembley stadium’s restaurant extravaganza

Here's a teaser for you. Name the two biggest restaurants in London.

Well, there's the Atrium, of course, and the Corinthian Club… What's that? Never heard of them? That could be because they lie outside the glittering heart of Mayfair or Chelsea, more on the northwest fringes of the Capital. Wembley, in fact… Wembley Stadium to be precise.

The new Wembley, £800million of spectacular steel and glass, is truly an arena fit to be called the home of football, albeit towering over the same drab car parks and narrow, winding service road of five years ago, when the old stadium bit the dust, twin towers and all. Several things set this modern colosseum apart from the old place: size for one thing – it's roughly twice as big as the old structure; comfort for another – the 90,000 seats actually have genuine legroom, for an adult male, as opposed to a small child; and the food on offer – oh boy! We're talking about Michelin star quality food. Well, four puddings at least.

Wembley is a venue of legends, of cherished memories: the White Horse Cup Final, Stanley Matthews, England winning the World Cup, Liverpool winning the European Cup, Live Aid… My abiding memory is of urine cascading down the concourse steps as desperate fans proved that 20,000 into two urinals doesn't go; of endless queuing for warm bottles of Hofmeister and a £3 hotdog that was more dog than hot. Hardly a tough act to follow, but Delaware North, the American company with a 25 year contract to feed the faithful, has turned Wembley into a restaurant extravaganza – somewhere you might well come for the food rather than the football.

As with all sport these days, you neglect your business customers at your peril, and Delaware North's UK Managing Director Simon Dobson has made it his mission to provide a dining experience of a standard that would not be out of place among the corporate hotspots seven miles away in the centre of town. Dobson talks passionately about customer service, the best ingredients, food miles etc – who doesn't these days? – but his challenge is to ensure that those standards are applied on the grand scale. On May 19, Cup Final day, a staff of 3,200 served 10,000 covers. No other stadium in the world can match that.

This included 1,900 covers in the members only Corinthian Club restaurant, 900 in the Atrium buffet, 1,500 divided between two à la carte restaurants, Venue East and Venue West, plus another 1,500 in the brasserie style Arc East and Arc West. There are two champagne seafood bars, a banqueting hall, plus 166 private boxes sharing one kitchen between two, not to mention the Royal Suite.

So that's the prawn sandwich brigade taken care of, what about the hotdog and Hofmeister brigade? "Customers are so different to 10 or 15 years ago," says Dobson, whose company won the Wembley contract on the back of a portfolio that includes the Chicago Bears, the Boston Celtics and the Australian Open, and has since added Arsenal FC's new home the Emirates Stadium. "In the old stadium a cheeseburger was a flat patty with no taste in a floury bun with a bit of cheese, and it cost £5. Our cheeseburger is 100 per cent Scottish beef in a fantastic seeded bun with tomato salsa and real cheddar cheese.

And it costs £5."

They've also created their own recipe for "hand-filled, hand-finished" pies, they're battering their own fish on site and they've gone all the way to Germany – yes, Germany – to source a bockwurst worthy of gracing the Wembley hotdog.

For true beer lovers, there'll even be two real cask ales in the north side bar.

All this will be served from 900 service points, equipped with 803 electronic tills – more than any other building in the world – linked to a constantly buzzing database. This will enable Delaware North to track the eating habits of its customers and adjust the offer accordingly. The old stadium had about 200 old-fashioned tills and it was ‘take it or leave it'. The sensible ones left it.

At the hub of the whole operation is a service kitchen that's the size of one half of the pitch, complete with its own bakery and state of the art equipment, including water baths. Sous-vide, Brian?

Marvellous. Of the 39 full-time staff, four are chefs, including the two Head Chefs Leon Smith and Julian Gill. Theirs is one of the toughest chefs' jobs in London, according to no greater authority than Tom Aikens. This is where the Michelin stars come in. Aikens has created four desserts for the prestige Corinthian Club restaurant, one per season, launching on Cup Final day with his spring offering of Coffee and Hazelnut Sponge with Mousse and Parfait.

"Some of the desserts are new, some I've done before. I actually created eight and we whittled them down to four.

Obviously I had to think hard about the ingredients; I tried to keep it down to four things on the plate, and I needed to think about the time factor as well.

People will need to be fed quite quickly so the desserts had to take no more than a minute to put together.

"It's been a big challenge for me," says Aikens, whose biggest service previously had been 320. "I normally have a team of 12 to 14 that do 60 people, whereas here…" He looks around at the gleaming new facilities with awe. "I wouldn't want to be head chef." But Aikens' input has helped bring about a cultural revolution down Wembley way. When England fans are eating German sausages, you know times are changing.

www.wembleystadium.com

www.delawarenorth.com