Chili made with OMB’s Fat Boy Baltic Porter. Chandler Owen/OMB

The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery’s menu will start looking very different next month, as will the food that’s coming out of the kitchen. The city’s oldest and biggest brewery has hired executive chef Michael Rayfield, who most recently worked at the White Water Center for three years, to run its kitchen. Rayfield started just after Labor Day, and will implement a new menu in January that is a near complete overhaul of the existing one.

Rayfield came into OMB with a pretty large task. He needed to streamline the kitchen, making it more efficient, finding staff, and minimizing ticket times. Diners have long complained about the wait for food, especially outside on the biergarten, where a food truck served pretzels and brats that could take 30 minutes to be ready. The biergarten was Rayfield’s first change; he asked owner John Marino to build a small kitchen hut to make service more efficient than it was in the food truck. He suggested the renovations to Marino on one of his first days in the kitchen, and it was done within a week. Now, guests can order their food and have it ready in minutes.

The food truck’s menu will change monthly, with a few dishes staying on each menu, and focus on German and American street food.

“That’s one thing we want to keep traditional, because if you go to Germany, it’s just street food everywhere,” Rayfield says.

Smoked trout dip with malted barley flatbread, made using spent grains from the brewery. Chandler Owen/OMB

As for the full-service menu, its new dishes will have a German influence but also some of Rayfield’s personality.

“The first time we ever met, (Marino) goes, ‘I’m an Italian-American that makes damn good German beer.’ So I take that into play with me; take German style food but put my twist on it, which is a little Southern creole flair on it.”

The menu will change every three months, but there will be some mainstays. The restaurant will still serve pretzels from Queen City Pretzel, and the wurste plates will also remain, though with a few additional proteins. A new dish that Rayfield hopes will become a signature is the roasted pork knuckle, a traditional German dish that will be served until it runs out each day. Other things we’re looking forward to are the pork schnitzel, the Hungarian goulash, and the cheese and charcuterie board, which will rotate meat and cheeses to pair with the seasonal beer selection.

Many of the dishes will use beer, including the smoked chicken wings, which are brined with Captain Jack; the Fat Boy pulled pork sandwich; the drunken vegetables; the beer cheese made with the brewery’s Copper; and even the pizza dough, which uses Captain Jack. The menu, Rayfield says, will be 30 percent traditional, and 70 percent reflective of him.

OMB chef Michael Rayfield. Photo courtesy.

Rayfield is a Catawba, South Carolina, native who attended Rock Hill high school. Raised by a single mom, he learned to cook as a way to help her out as she worked to raise a family on her own. He went to college for public relations, hated it, and moved to New Orleans, where he learned to be a chef. He moved back to Charlotte around 2008, when he worked at Quail Hollow opening the new Pavilion being built for the Wells Fargo Championship.

Rayfield plans to launch the new menu on January 14, after new kitchen equipment is installed. However, the kitchen overhauls isn’t all that’s happening at OMB; Rayfield is also working on changes at the airport location and the upcoming Cornelius location, expected to open in November. There is also a massive banquet space in the works, and new menus to go along with it, in addition to off-site catering.

All that sounds a little overwhelming, but it’s exactly why Rayfield took the job in the first place.

“I can’t stand working in like a 40-seat restaurant doing frou-frou crap,” he says. “I’ve already done all that my whole life. I like volume. I like to work with different people, different staffs. I like to see them come and go and grow. I’m just hands on.” —Kristen Wile