As part of Colonial Country Club’s $100 million capital improvement plan, the Fort Worth, Texas, club is introducing two brand-new dining experiences, led by Executive Chef Cynthia Romstadt, which General Manager and COO Frank Cordeiro expects will increase F&B revenue by at least a third.
“Annual F&B revenue will be $5.5 million this year,” he notes. “Since 2020, we’ve seen 10%-20% year-over-year increases. With the renovation, we’re adding about a third to the overall capacity.”
Cordeiro joined Colonial CC about four years ago. In the 30 years he’s been in the industry, club culinary has evolved significantly.
“When I started my career in the industry, dining was very formal. Sometimes people confuse formal with quality,” he notes. “Formality has declined, but expectations have increased.”
The new casual grill, named Leonard’s after the club’s founder, Marvin Leonard, will feature an exhibition kitchen and indoor/outdoor dining and bars. The focus will be on fresh, housemade foods like pizzas and pastas, all centered around crafting fun, family-friendly, community-focused experiences for members.
The club will also introduce a more upscale dining experience called Hawk’s Landing, which will feature panoramic views of the city.
“It will feature a chef’s counter, exhibition kitchen, and a cold bar, where we’ll offer sushi, sashimi, oysters and more—again, featuring the finest ingredients and experiences,” Cordeiro says. “The kitchen flows seamlessly into the dining room, where members can see and experience the culinary team at work. We’ll be dry-aging our own meats, making our own sausages, making pastas from scratch—a true quality and chef-driven dining experience.”
C+RC: Can you talk about Chef Romstadt’s involvement in the renovation?
Frank Cordeiro (FC): The entire process has been very collaborative. We don’t have a top-down philosophy here; we work for each other, and ultimately, we work for our members.
Chef [Romstadt] and her team have been an integral part of this process, starting from the beginning, in the conceptual phase, to now, boots on the ground as construction is happening.
She and her team are working directly with our project managers, our design team, and our contractors, making sure what we’ve conceptualized is executed in the way we envision it. The concepts, the ingredients, and the menus are 100% driven by [Romstadt] and her team.
C+RC: Chef joined the club three years ago. She started as Executive Sous Chef and then became Executive Chef a year later. Can you talk a little bit about that process and why she was the right fit?
FC: When I first came on board, our Assistant General Manager, John Hurt, who oversees all clubhouse operations, said to me, “We have a very talented chef who comes to assist us with the execution of the Charles Schwab Challenge. I want you to meet her and help me convince her to join our team year-round.” My first year here, we were unsuccessful. But, lucky for us, we convinced her to make the move to Texas the year after.
As we grew the culinary program and started to conceptualize this campus plan and the two new restaurants, we wanted to make sure we utilized her talents and continued to move her up through the organization for greater impact.
We promoted the then-Executive Chef to Director of Culinary Operations, which gave us an opportunity to promote [Romstadt] Executive Chef. She now oversees all culinary at the club.
C+RC: How would you characterize her impact on culinary, and on her team, so far?
FC: I believe it starts with the team. She’s incredibly dedicated to her team. She gets to know what inspires them, what’s important to them. She works to ensure she is facilitating that success across the board at every level of her organization. As such, she gets the most out of them, and she enables her team to innovate and to shine.
We immediately saw how her commitment to her team manifested itself in terms of member experience, the quality of the product, and the innovation that was coming out of the kitchen. And it continues improving in exciting ways daily.
[Our founder’s] philosophy was that innovation and excellence know no completion. And we utilize that principle in everything we do. [Romstadt] has full rein to change whatever she wants, whenever she wants. She can source ingredients at will. There are no restrictions whatsoever.
Her philosophy is, if she can find it locally, and it’s fresh, and it’s high-quality, then she’s going to source it locally. Most everything we have is sourced locally. If there’s a better product that’s not available locally, we search for the finest available elsewhere to ensure our team has the best ingredients at the disposal. It’s very much a chef-driven, ingredient-driven program.
C+RC: Chef Romstadt’s also very involved in the greater club chef community. She was on C+RC’s 2024 40 Under 40 list, for example, and she attends Chef to Chef. Can you talk about the value of that involvement for her and for the club?
FC: She’s a star. When that star is shining outside of our four walls, that’s a great benefit to our club, to our brand, for others to see her talent and her passion for this industry. It also allows her to continue to grow, to learn, and to be inspired.
It’s very easy in our industry to be consumed by the urgency of day-to-day operations. We have to make time to step outside of these four walls and reflect on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. This makes us a stronger and better organization. We have a saying at Colonial: Excellence is the default.
