How Berkshire CC Celebrated Easter

These certainly are crazy and trying times. At Berkshire Country Club (Reading, Pa.) we traditionally do large brunches for both Easter and Mother’s Day. In addition to those events, we always have an Easter egg brunch the week before on Palm Sunday for the families with children who would like to do an egg hunt and enjoy a themed buffet from 10-2PM.

This year we were obviously not able to have our egg hunt or our Easter brunch. That doesn’t mean we did nothing. Far from it, actually. We had to pivot our service style and plans to find new and creative ways to help our members celebrate this holiday in a new way.

Here are some of the programs we launched to make Easter a little extra special.

• We created Easter baskets for any member family who made a reservation. Inside the basket, we included six fresh, hard-boiled eggs, an egg dying kit and candy filled eggs, too. The baskets were delivered on April 11, 2020 to each family by Paul Bovenzi, Berkshire CC’s General Manager.
• We offered a large menu for curbside pickup. (View our menu here.) Members placed orders by 3pm on April 8th and they picked up their orders the day before Easter between 3-7pm so they had everything they needed on Easter Sunday no matter what time they planned on eating.
• I included detailed cooking/reheating instructions in each package. I’ve found over the years that the quality of the food items are always better when I send the food prepared but cold.  This way they don’t feel rushed to get everyone seated for dinner while the food is hot. Maintaining quality is our team’s primary objective. This helps achieve that goal. 

In addition to the holiday programming and our Family To-Go Menu program, we also recently started doing a featured meal every Friday and Saturday. In the first three weeks of this program, we sold 102 family packages and 323 individual 6oz. and 10oz. filet mignons, crab cakes, Scottish salmon, and NY strips steaks.  We offer this service Wednesday-Saturday.

At the end of March, we also rolled out our own Berkshire Country Club essential needs grocery list program. I wanted everything to be consistent so we sell deli meats, smoked bacon and cheeses in 8 oz. portions. We also offer 6-packs of toilet paper, as well as paper towels by the roll, butter, milk and loaves of bread.

Members can place orders Monday-Thursday and pick up all of their groceries on Friday between 4-7pm. We have all the products vacuum-packed and bagged, ready to go when they pull up out front. The first few weeks have been very successful and the membership appreciates this service.

I’m extremely proud of what we’ve been able to provide for our membership so far during this crisis. Finding value in a country club membership when you can’t utilize the clubhouse can be challenging, but we’ve found ways to make membership worthwhile.

As club chefs, we must continue to provide our members with the amazing food that they are accustomed to and are unable to get anywhere else. Hopefully our responses to member service during this strange time will remind them that the excellent and creative food—along with all the other amenities that they love to enjoy—were here before COVID-19, and they’ll be here long after, too.