Amy Greenberg in one of Citi’s Manhattan sites(Photo by John Lawn)

What ’s on Greenberg’s Plate ?

ANNUAL BUDGET: $19 million ANNUAL MEALS SERVED: 554,100 STAFF: 143 (incl. 130 full-time) LOCATIONS: 8

Senior Vice President
Citi
New York City, NY

The name of the game in corporate dining these days is adding value for the host organization. That is what Amy Greenberg excels at in her role as head of executive dining conferencing and operations for Citi.

She cut her teeth in the B&I world with Wall Street investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert during its 1980s heyday, then went on to manage dining operations for the various iterations of the Shearson/Lehman/American Express financial firm in New York for most of the last two decades.

In that time, she has led both painful cutbacks and dramatic expansions, overseen everything from employee cafeterias for thousands to executive dining rooms for a select few. Her performance in such a multitude of different environments, and in the pressure cooker that is onsite dining in the Big Apple's financial district, has earned her the 2008 IFMA Silver Plate Award in the Corporate Dining category.

Currently, Greenberg oversees eight executive conference locations for Citi (formerly Smith Barney, then Salomon Smith Barney, then Citigroup) — six in the New York metro area, one in San Francisco and one in Chicago — and manages a $19 million budget. Her staff of 143 (130 full-time) is responsible for anywhere from 200 to more than 1,500 meals a day, depending on the conference schedule. Each of the conference sites she manages includes a 300-seat auditorium. In addition to the dining-related operations, Greenberg also oversees multi media services supporting all operations, a department that processed nearly 10,500 work orders in the most recent fiscal year.

Her department's mission, as Greenberg sees it, is supporting Citi's business inititaives and operations by providing end-to-end meeting and dining services for employees and guests in a cost-effective way. “Expense management is always a challenge,” she notes. “We serve the leadership of the company but we want to do it in responsible way.”

Amy Greenberg came to a food-related career late. Though she grew up helping her parents cater corporate picnics at their day camp property, she majored in English in college and only decided on culinary school a few years after getting her BA.

After graduating from the CIA, she took a job with Saga Corp. to manage a corporate dining room for then-little-known Drexel Burnham Lambert.

“They were looking for somebody to really update the menus, bring some fresh ideas,” she recalls.

“It was 1980 and food was just starting to get sexy, and they felt that they needed to breathe some life into the program. It was a great opportunity and we were able to execute some really interesting changes. One dish I remember introducing was chilled chicken with peanut sauce.”

It was a fairly limited operation at first, one where 50 lunches was considered a heavy day, but Drexel was growing. In 1983 the company hired Greenberg away from Saga and put her in charge of its expanding in-house dining operations. These eventually encompassed three more satellite cafes, foodservice for traders on the trading floor and a new executive dining room on the top floor of Drexel's building. One of Greenberg's most vivid memories is a gala dinner there celebrating the reopening of the restored Statue of Liberty on July 4, 1986.