There will be plenty of baseball-type food — like hot dogs and nachos — at Aces Ballpark, but Chicago-based Levy Restaurants, which was contracted to provide concession services at the new park, is rolling out a menu unlike at any other sports venue in the area.
Regional Executive Chef Lou Bastian’s team will make their own pizzas from scratch, and smoke their own pork on site. They’re offering a juiced up hot dog — the Jalapeno cheese foot-long char dog — and an Aces Cheese Steak with barbecued onions and pepper jack cheese. There are spicy hot links and spicy carnitas tacos. Oh, and garlic parmesan french fries.
“The food that we’re doing is authentic. We make the carnitas from scratch. The rice is from scratch,” said Bastian, who manages 12 or so properties for Levy Restaurants, including Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Seattle Seahawks’ Qwest Field and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Bastian is based in Arizona, but the Aces will have a Levy chef-in-residence in Reno. He worked closely with SK Baseball, which owns the team, and made several visits here before the menu was set.
“We have a core group of menu items that work very well for us in many different sports and then we like to bring a lot of individual flare to each area, each city, each individual park if you will,” Bastian said.
His favorite item at Aces Ballpark? A triple-play barbecue sandwich.
“It’s the wow item. Three layers of grilled thick-cut white bread. The bottom layer is beef brisket, the second layer is barbecue pork, smoked in house and pulled, coleslaw and then (on top) we put together a barbecue meatball skewer.”
What follows is a sneak peek (not the complete list, and no prices yet) of what you'll see at the ballpark later this week. We're hoping there's a local brew on the menu, but so far haven't got that info:
Food:
- Garlic parmesan fries
- Pulled pork sandwich
- Smoked brisket sandwich
- Chipotle-lime chicken tacos
- Carnitas burrito grande
- Nachos grande
- Jalapeno cheese foot-long char-dog
- ‘The Works’ pizza
- Italian sausage with peppers
- Soft-serve ice cream
- Soft pretzel
- Caramel apples
Drinks:
- Coors and Coors Light
- Miller Genuine Draft and Miller Lite
- Heineken
- Amstel
- Newcastle
- Fat Tire
- Sierra Nevada
- Pyramid
- Corona
- Fresh-squeezed Lemonade (non-acoholic)
