Wagyu steaks, ‘lucky’ scallops, and ground bison: How to feed the hottest team in baseball

During the seventh inning of almost any Phillies home game, smoke billows from the right-field corner. Somebody’s cooking steaks.

It’s the Phillies’ team chef, Keith Rudolf, and his crew working the grill in a kitchen deep beneath the stands. They’re preparing the postgame meal for as many as 80 people, including players, coaches, clubhouse attendants, and medical staff.

After the final out, as fans head home and camera crews pack their gear, the players shower and dress, then head into the dining room. Rudolf says some take their food, plus extras, home to eat with their families, “which we love that they do.”

Now in his eighth season of ensuring that the players eat like kings and perform like front-runners, Rudolf, 47, leads a team of four staffers to provide the kind of food you’d find at the region’s better restaurants — think grilled branzino with olives and sun-dried tomato tapenade — supplemented by an enviable roster of snacks: beef jerky, dried fruit, organic gummy bears, fridges packed with drinks, and a freezer filled entirely with ice cream. There are not one, but two self-service panini presses above the salad bar.

The 2024 Phillies have the best record in the National League. At Citizens Bank Park, where home attendance is up over last year, all eyes are on the field. It’s worth wondering if at least some credit for the magic could be directed to what’s happening in the cinder-block dining room off the clubhouse, where the players bond when they are not in meetings, practices, or games.

Even by professional kitchen standards, the days as a chef for the Phillies can run long, with as many as four meals served on game day. For a 1:05 p.m. start, Rudolf and his crew report as early as 5:30 a.m. to have breakfast ready by 8, and with the postgame meal and prep for the next day, don’t wrap until 6 or 6:30 p.m. — “just in time to get stuck in rush-hour traffic if it’s not a Sunday,” said Rudolf, who lives in Havertown.

Rudolf starts the team’s mornings off with standard fare — omelets, bacon, grits. Players will also find organic oatmeal, avocado toast topped with fried egg, ground bison with scrambled egg, and a favorite of the five Dominican players: tres golpes, a combo of salami, fried cheese, and fried egg, served with mangú, or mashed plantains.

If that spread is insufficient, one shelf is lined with a Seinfeldian collection of 22 breakfast cereals with the traditional sugar rushes of Apple Jacks, Lucky Charms, Golden Grahams, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, balanced by four varieties of good(ish)-for-you Kashi, Sunrise Crunchy Vanilla, and instant oatmeal. Gluten-free waffles are the default — regular waffles, requested by second baseman Bryson Stott, are known as “Stott Waffles” — while baker Brittany Smith puts out gluten-free baked goods each morning.

For night games, lunch starts at noon. Last Friday, before the game against the St. Louis Cardinals, lunch included chili, everything-spiced salmon, barbecue chicken drumsticks, grilled pork chops with caramelized apple, maple-glazed yams, charred Brussels sprouts, roasted beets with beet-green pesto, pollo asado, bean stew, yucca with onion, and white rice. (There is always white rice.)

After lunch, there’s a pregame meal, which starts at 4 p.m. On that Friday, there was a tri-tip sandwich with slaw, grilled flank steak with guava barbecue sauce, mahi mahi katsu, grilled chicken breast, lentil stew, grilled pattypan squash, and sautéed mixed vegetables.

Following that game, which the Phillies won, 4-2, the spread included bourbon- and cola-braised beef ribs, Greek-spiced bone-in chicken breast, lamb porterhouse with mint and black garlic, pasta Bolognese, seared asparagus, lemon green beans, cheesy polenta, pork chuleta, yucca with onion, and bean stew. For dessert, there were chocolate chip cookies, s’mores banana bread, berry oat cups, and funfetti protein cookie dough. Sometimes, a favorite spot like Angelo’s will drop off pizzas and steak sandwiches. Later that night, workers prepped for the next day’s lunch.

The idea of a major-league baseball team chef is fairly new. At the end of the 2016 season, a collective bargaining agreement required teams to hire chefs and provide access to dietitians. Previously, players paid dues to the union for meals and a Phillies employee arranged deliveries. Relatively little thought was paid to nutrition or variety. The team’s dietitian at the time, Katie Cavuto, recommended Rudolf — whom she met at events for Unite for HER, a nonprofit that provides free services and support for breast cancer patients — for the job.

Rudolf joined the Phillies on the eve of the 2017 season. He set out to balance what he calls the players’ “hunter-gatherer-type” of mindset — there are zero vegetarians on the team now — against the training regimens and nutrition required by professional athletes. “Some of them are really careful about what they put in their bodies, as you would assume most athletes would,” Rudolf said. “And some are just 24- or 25-year-old kids that are like, ‘Give me some Pop Tarts for breakfast.’”

Steaks are a major food group among the 26 roster players, but they don’t come in shrink-wrapped packages from Acme. More likely, they’re heavily marbled, 12-ounce Wagyu cuts from Margaret River, a ranch in Australia that professes “to shelter, feed, and care for each cow as though every day were Christmas.”

Working with team dietitian Stephanie MacNeill, Rudolf balances fatty cuts of beef and the occasional prime rib against dishes that hew closer to a balanced diet while remaining interesting. Before last Saturday’s game against the Cardinals, for example, Rudolf made almond-crusted halibut and chimichurri-spiced, bone-in chicken thigh.

Although younger players tend to have more voracious appetites, “they see what we’re doing and they’re constantly asking questions,” Rudolf said. “They’re maturing in their diets as well.”

Rudolf, who spent more than a decade working in places like Brandywine Prime and Le Mas Perrier, sometimes offers dishes that wouldn’t be out of place at a restaurant with a full brigade system, but he’s “not pounding [the players] with butter and cream,” he said. “Definitely not as heavy as it is in a restaurant.”

While Rudolf has toiled under fine dining legends like Georges Perrier and the late Tony Clark, he says that working as a private chef for a Main Line couple during the early 2000s was his best training for the Phillies. “It taught me more about your customer and the intimacy you have with them,” he said.

Rudolf has also found that humor helps to bond with the players. If the Atlanta Braves are in town, he may serve the bone-in rib-eye steaks popularly known as tomahawks, a mocking reference to Braves fans’ reviled “tomahawk chop.” He’s served marlin or shark when the Miami Marlins were visiting, and he’s prepared rattlesnake, a dig at the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’s not feeding opposing teams, and it’s unclear if they hear about the digs. Meals, incidentally, are self-service: Players clear their own plates and toss their own garbage.

Rudolf also looks for correlations between menu items and on-field performance — no matter how irrelevant they may seem. “If we have postgame scallops, we’re probably going to win that game,” Rudolf said. “We’ll start traying them up before the game and they’ll see them and say, ‘Oooh, scallops.’ And they’ll win.”

Flatbread pizzas, a staple of the pregame meal, had the same power last season. “Bobby, what was the pizza record last year?” Rudolf called out to sous chef Robert Burkhardt. “Was it like 18 and 4 or something?”

“Nah. We hit 20 in the postseason,” Burkhardt said. “We were 21 and 4.”

Rudolf smiled and shook his head when asked about specific player favorites: “A good chef never cooks and tells.” Under the ground rules for this article, the team offered access only on a day off, when players and coaches would not be present. The team also declined to disclose Rudolf’s food budget.

Rudolf, who grew up in Richboro, Bucks County, said his earliest childhood memory was the 1983 World Series, when he was 6. While he concedes that meeting retired star Mike Schmidt was “mind-blowing,” he says that he would not hire a “super fan” to work in his kitchen. “I want somebody that’s going to appreciate Bryce [Harper] for being Bryce, or appreciate J.T. [Realmuto] for being J.T. We have a job to do and you can’t be distracted.”

Rudolf began cooking in the late 1990s under chef Tony Clark at the old Sheraton Rittenhouse Square. After a spell in California, he reunited with Clark for the private-chef gig and then went to work as chef at Supper, Brandywine Prime, and Le Mas Perrier before his final, pre-Phillies stops at Sodexo and Whole Foods. His initial kitchen setup at Citizens Bank Park was just a flattop grill and an oven. The team provided him with new refrigerators, plus a griddle, chargrill convection oven with six burners, and a combi oven, which allows cooking with steam, convection, or a combination of both.

As a rookie, Rudolf quizzed players about their favorite dishes and started building a menu, leaning on his local culinary background for sourcing. “I get food from everywhere at this point,” he said. “Farms out of Lancaster and West Chester, meats from D’Artagnan and Baldor. Fish from Samuels & Sons. I’ll use Amazon and Whole Foods.”

Like any baseball team, Rudolf has had a letdown or two. On the night of July 24, 2018, the Phillies were down, 4-1, but scored three runs in the seventh inning to tie things up. He had begun prepping the postgame meal, but the showdown dragged into extra innings. “And now, it’s almost 1 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with this food anymore. It’s not as good as I want it to be at this point. I gave some out around the stadium.”

In the 16th inning, nearly six hours after the game started, the Phillies’ Trevor Plouffe launched a three-run home run for a 7-4 win. But it was an L for Rudolf, who had to cook the next day’s lunch to serve as the postgame meal. He called a food supplier in the middle of the night with an emergency reorder.

Since Rudolf and his crew do not travel with the team — which gets food delivered when on the road — they’ve learned to ride the rhythms of their 81 scheduled regular-season home games. The recent 10-game homestand, though, was a lot to handle. “Each meal, we’re doing eight to 10 different things,” Rudolf said. “At three meals a day, that’s close to 30 dishes a day, and we did it for 10 days in a row.”

“There were times when we’d take a step back and say, ‘Look at what we’re doing,’” Rudolf said. “When the bus leaves and they get on an airplane, we give each other a high-five.”