That's about to change as she takes on a food-service job of Olympian proportions: the Summer Games.
Working for Aramark Corp., McCrary, 31, will oversee the athletes-village and media-center dining areas, where more than 3.5 million meals are expected to be served to thousands from around the world. That makes the corporate conventions she's handled, where fewer than 10,000 meals are cooked and served, seem like a small dinner party.
Aramark, an international catering company based in Philadelphia, has handled food at the 13 previous Olympics, beginning with the 1968 summer games in Mexico City.
''I'll have countless employees working for me,'' said McCrary, who was Aramark's general manager at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and also helped cater big events for Microsoft.
In Beijing, Aramark will bring in more than 200 managers from its operations around the world, and they will work in tandem with the Chinese catering companies involved. ''We'll be a 24/7 operation, feeding the athletes, coaches, support staff and media.''
Areas will be set up for round-the-clock breakfasts, fresh fruit and salad bars, special dessert areas, hot foods and quick snacks.
The company has spent three years planning the event. ''We've constructed what amounts to a small village just for dining,'' said David Freireich, Aramark spokesman. The company plans to cook for more than 60,000 people - coaches, athletes, support staff and all media from around the world who come through the dining facilities during the Summer Games and the Paralympics that immediately follow.
''It's an international menu,'' McCrary said. ''We can't give specifics, because of contract agreements with the Beijing Olympic Games Committee. But we'll be sourcing products from around the world.''
Freireich said the goal for the variety on the menus is to provide a ''taste of home'' - wherever that might be -for the athletes and their staffs.
The special food requests they receive aren't looked at as unusual. ''What we may think is an unusual food is normal fare for another diner.''
A core 800 dishes will rotate on the menus every eight days. ''Eight is a lucky number in China,'' McCrary said. (That's why the Games are starting on the eighth day of the eighth month, in the eighth year of the new millennium.) The dishes were tested at a facility in the states, though Aramark has been operating in China for some time.
Some menu choices will be brought back from other Games, where they were popular. McCrary couldn't say which will be on that ''best of'' list. But a spectrum of international cuisines - Mexican, Greek, African and Asian - are represented in dishes such as Moroccan chicken with lemons, a Senegalese chicken stew, a phyllo pastry, and noodles with a spicy peanut sauce.
