The tennis professionals aren’t the only ones who’ve spent the past few months getting in peak shape for the U.S. Open. Every day for several months, Long Island native Michael Lockard has been at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens fine-tuning his game, too.

“We’ve been modifying a lot of items, like the shrimp and arugula pizzetta with fennel and poached shrimp on cracker bread,” Mr. Lockard, who is overseeing all the tournament’s restaurants and concessions this year, said. “We decided we wanted to add Parmesan and put it on a thin crust.”

Whether he’s produced an ace is for the crowds to decide starting when the U.S. Open begins today. Mr. Lockard has been planning for the event since March. Six tons of fruit, 9.5 tons of steak, and nine tons of salad are now being prepped to feed the more than half a million fans who are expected at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in the coming weeks. Stadium-goers in other parts of the country might be content with peanuts and Cracker Jacks and overpriced soda, but the U.S. Open is considered by many to be New York City’s annual opportunity to show visitors from around the world how sophisticated stadium food can be.

“We’ve found that people have very high expectations for the food they’ll get here,” a spokesman for the United States Tennis Association, Chris Widmaier, said. “You go to a baseball game or a basketball game and you’re there for three, maybe four hours. But we have people coming for entire days where they’ll be having three meals at least, and we have the physical space to give them very varied food and beverage offerings.”

Mr. Lockard, formerly the executive chef at Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur at Grand Central, was brought on by Levy Restaurants, the firm that manages the cuisine at many major American stadiums, including Wrigley Field in Chicago and the Staples Center in Los Angeles. It is Levy’s first year working on the U.S. Open. Mr. Lockard said his goal for this year’s event is to create a decadent culinary experience — whether the fans are up for finger food or for a sit-down meal. He’s also been making an effort to have this year’s event be the most environmentally friendly U.S. Open to date.

That means if you seat yourself at Aces, one of the more high-end restaurants (plates run between $19 and $34), you’ll find mostly fresh fish as opposed to farmed varieties, and yellowfin instead of endangered bluefin tuna. Aces is promising standouts from its crab cakes and filet mignon, which is paired with buttermilk onions (made with fryer oil that, in weeks after the U.S. Open, will be recycled into renewable biodiesel).

The real steak epicenter, however, is the other Club Level eatery, Champions Bar & Grill, home of 3-pound Porterhouses and 16-ounce New York Strips. Meats will also be a major draw at the U.S. Open Club, which for the first time is going to have a wide variety of Brazilian churrascaria meat on sticks — and we’re not talking corndogs.

For food of that ilk, match-goers can head to the Food Village, which will be serving up relatively low-priced concessions, though hot dogs at the Food Village start at $4.50. (The U.S. Open presents a rare occasion in which getting comparable food in Manhattan could actually be cheaper than in Queens).

According to Mr. Lockard, while the players are fed mostly carbohydrates, fans traditionally have gravitated toward burgers. Despite the wide selection of filling foods that can be easily transported back to the seats — everything from Carnegie Deli sandwiches to stuffed sushi rolls to cheese steaks to Nutella crepes — one out of three U.S. Open attendees will be consuming a burger at this year’s tournament. That is a total of 4,500 burgers a day. Taking this into consideration, Mr. Lockard spent 10 days developing a new “special sauce” of ketchup, mayonnaise, scallions, and chile sauce for the acclaimed U.S. Open Double Burger.

Those who are on restricted diets — or just don’t want to pay a markup — can bring in a limited, if unspecified, amount of their own food, and plastic water bottles. No glass bottles, coolers, or alcohol are permitted. And to ease the hassle of getting through security, the USTA recommends carrying food, drinks, and other belongings in clear plastic bags.

As for alcohol, this year there will be a wine bar near the fountains and a vodka bar featuring the requisite cutesy-named cocktail, the Honey Deuce. The concoction is a mix of Grey Goose vodka, lemonade, and Chambord, and is presented with honeydew melon balls in a U.S. Open souvenir cup decorated with the names of four decades’ worth of tournament winners. One has to believe that even John McEnroe would approve.