Meet the chef who feeds the Sixers

Chef Eli Collins, 32, executive director of culinary nutrition for the Sixers, is peering at me through the screen on our Zoom call from his office. There are stacks of paper towels, boxes of food prep gloves, and jugs of kitchen cleaning chemicals behind him. “My office doubles as a storage room,” he laughs.

It is a significant departure from courtside at the Wells Fargo center, where I’ve usually seen him. Several times, Collins has led me and my husband, chef Ari Miller, through the warren of rooms surrounding the basketball court as we pushed stacks of pans filled with food destined for players’ bellies past burly security guards and down hallways decorated with photos of the Sixers’ most famous players.

Collins, with a team of three, feeds the Sixers from September through June, and at various points during the off-season. It’s his third season as executive chef but his sixth with the Sixers overall. He thinks in seasons, not years, and he speaks in sports jargon.

“We talk about position-less basketball and two-man games,” he says. “These are analogies we use to describe what we do in the kitchen, too.” In explaining how he builds menus, he breaks dishes down according to type: “Three to four proteins, two starches, three to four veggies of varying degrees of cookedness, a giant salad, maybe a sweet treat, maybe a soup.”

He is easily the most exuberant chef, or even person, I’ve ever met. Equal parts chef, diehard sports fanatic, administrator, and I daresay, cheerleader, Collins positively crows over the quality of local ingredients he personally renders into elaborate breakfast and lunch buffets for 45 to 70 people every day.

“Say it’s an 11 o’clock practice. From 8 to 8:30 a.m., we set up a full hotel-style breakfast spread of scrambled eggs, chicken sausage, bacon, spinach, hash browns. We’ll do a toast bar with avocado mash, pickles, tomatoes, bread from Lost Bread – the milk bread and sourdough — butter. Oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar, nuts, and seeds. We have a whole cereal station, and we brew coffee. I’m from Bucks County so we use Calm Waters Coffee Roasters from Bristol, they’re the best.”

From 9 to 9:30 a.m., the players start texting him and Julie Cushing, his associate director of culinary nutrition, about their custom meals. He tells me this and I stare at him, slack-jawed. “They need more food than that?” I ask, incredulous. “People want their nice omelets and their pancakes,” he responds.

Collins is as unfailingly loyal to his basketball team as he is to his favorite foods and coffee. An avid childhood athlete, he grew up in Fallsington and went to college in upstate New York where he got into basketball.

Collins works with Emily Werner, the team’s dietitian, who gives him suggestions on menus and advises on a slew of personalized smoothies for Collins to whip up with his staff, which also includes sous chef Brandon Medley and kitchen porter Harouna Zida. Lunch is far more elaborate than breakfast, and made entirely from scratch using ingredients from Philadelphia’s top purveyors.

“I’m not a clipboard chef,” he practically sings. Collins is hands-on, doing the actual cooking, and not just assigning prep tasks posted on a clipboard. Fish comes from Samuels Seafood, is broken down and portioned by Collins and his team (as is every other ingredient): Chickens are from Griggstown Farms, and produce is from Zone 7 (though they’re also trialing a project with FarmerJawn’s Christa Barfield, who has specially planted seeds for the Sixers). Menus rotate frequently according to Collins’ whims, ranging from pizza night — “I’ll make 35 Neapolitan pies!” — to an upcoming taco bar featuring brisket carnitas, ropa vieja, freshly made tortillas, and so much more.

I ask him if there are any no-no ingredients or dishes. There aren’t. “I like to push people. I like to show people things I’m excited about,” he replies. “There are guys who are creatures of habit. They want the same thing every day, like shrimp pesto or a chicken sandwich.”

Collins accommodates singular requests with a fridge full of mise en place that doesn’t go to waste even if the players are traveling for games. The leftovers are prepped into meal kits that staff can grab whenever there isn’t a players’ buffet. Collins does travel with the team, but doesn’t cook for them on the road, rather he uses those opportunities to observe how the players interact with food when he isn’t the one feeding them.

“It’s hard work but it’s fun work. I love it so much. Feeding our athletes is amazing. We have such an incredible staff. Everyone is working hard, working towards the goal of winning, trying to be champions. The whole building [the Sixers’ training facility in Camden] has that championship mentality,” says Collins. An unseen perk of his job compared to other chef jobs, not counting his season tickets, is “if I strain my back or tweak something [in the kitchen], we have an incredibly talented physical therapy team, and I am not afraid to ask them questions.”

While Collins and his team make all the food for the players and staff while the team is in Camden, it’s a different story when the team is at the Wells Fargo center for games, which is how I went “backstage” to feed the players, post-game. Earlier this season, I occupied one slot in a roster of chefs and restaurants brought in to feed players.

“Philadelphia is such a great food town, man! There are so many good restaurants in the city. I get so excited about the food here and so much of our staff is not from Philly. They’re coaches who have been around the league. Philly is new to them and all our players as well. We use post-game to showcase talented people and businesses in the city.” Pre-game catering comes from Strother Enterprises and feature custom pastas, stir-fry, individualized smoothies. But “everyone loves variety,” so for post-game, Collins leans on essentially the entire Philadelphia food scene.

Collins raves about the food he’s ordered recently: Angelo’s pizza and cheesesteaks and the spicy numbing whole fish from E-Mei.

“Rob of Sauce Boy – that was killer! He came in and mixed up all the pastas and brought rondos down and emulsified the sauces! I was able to bring you out of retirement for Spam musubi! That was a victory – I loved when Poi Dog [my restaurant] was open!”

I had also hauled in trays laden with kalua pig, huli huli chicken, lu’au stew, fresh salmon poke, and bottles of Poi Dog Chili Peppah Water when I cooked for the team last November. I have photographic evidence that Collins dug into the pile of Spam musubi before the players finished playing. Collins had ordered a staggering quantity of food, though I suspect 30 of those musubi were for his own private consumption. I had wheeled in the trays of food with my little hand-pulled wagon – the kind you wheel toddlers around in – through the players’ parking lot, full of Porsches and Maybachs and into the bowels of the Wells Fargo Center. I believe I was feeding 40 people, but Collins requested enough food for about 120normal humans.

Names of upcoming guest chefs and restaurants tumble out of his mouth, interspersed with “they are killer!”: Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate of Honeysuckle Provisions, Kurt Evans, Machine Shop, Middle Child (“They provide all our morning shootaround breakfast sandwiches and hash browns, which they send us raw…we have a little fryer”). He rattles off his favorites, barely taking a breath in between sentences.

“Jesse Ito is going to make some sushi platters for us at the end of the month. He goes out of his way on his day off. We use Ms Heaven’s wings in Woodbury for pre-flight. The guys love her food, especially her fat boy wings which have a sweet spicy glaze. One of our directors of security will pick it up and bring it onto the airplane. Oh, and there are always Crumbl cookies on the airplane.” The post-game catering program was born out of necessity: The Sixers players gather in a glorified kitchenette, which has limited cooking capabilities. The room is dominated by a row of induction warmers, suitable for keeping food warm but not for food prep.

And how does Collins feel about not being the only notable chef Eli Collins in this town?

“Eli Collins [of a. kitchen] and I have known each other for 10 years. One of the first times I went to Pub & Kitchen, when Eli was the chef there, I called to make a reservation and my caller ID came up as ‘Eli Collins.’ They were like ‘oh my God, we’ll take care of you.’ They thought I was calling from upstairs, then I came in and I obviously wasn’t Eli.”

Since then, the two Eli Collins talk and stay in touch. “He’s amazing and his food is so freaking good. My Instagram handle is @therealEliCollins but I made it when I was like 23 and had no reasoning skills, and I hope he’s not too offended.” As a person who is married to a Chef Ari Miller and whose sauce company is represented by another Ari Miller, my re-distributor, I am familiar with mix-ups between name doppelgangers.

Despite being surrounded by basketball, Collins doesn’t tire of the sport. “I watch basketball games in my free time. I love playing pick-up basketball with the staff.” But he clarifies, “The players do not join in. It would not be fun for anyone. For them or for us.”

Kiki Aranita is a writer, owner of the late Poi Dog Philly restaurant, and purveyor of Poi Dog sauces.