Preparing a French omelet just so, the eggs moist yet firm, is not an easy feat. Same with kneading challah dough at the right speed. Or cutting vegetables to size, based on how you plan to cook them.
It’s the first week of a new school year, and these kitchen skills and many more will be on the menu at John O’Connell High as the school’s culinary program fires back up.
Formally known as the Entrepreneurship and Culinary Arts Pathway — one of five vocational tracks at O’Connell — the program goes way beyond chopping, kneading, and flipping.
The students take regular math, science, and foreign language classes, but their English and social science courses are part of the specialized pathway, integrating literature, history, politics, and business.
Students gain deeper knowledge about the origins of the food they eat, the economics of restaurants in their neighborhoods, and as the class poetry book shows, an emotional connection to what goes into their stomachs.
In “Ode to Tamales,” M. Montoya-Perez writes about losing a baseball game after playing “with all our might”:
I remember
holding back
a full
tsunami
Coming from my face
On the way back home
My mom had tamales waiting for me
Challah’s a hit
This will be the program’s second full year in O’Connell’s gleaming stainless steel kitchen, which was overhauled and tricked out with five workstations — three cooktops, a baking station, and a plating station — while the students were home for the first year-plus of the pandemic. Funds for the renovation came from a $744 million bond that voters passed in 2016.
Upon return, the program’s leader Alexandria Brooks wasn’t sure how the students or the staff would adapt to being back in person. For the transition, “my focus was feeding the community,” Brooks says.
To christen the new kitchen a year ago, the class made 150 loaves of challah from 50 pounds of dough — kneaded and braided just so — and handed them out on a Friday for students to take home.
“We had to make sure that every part of the bread was coated [with flour], then we had to knead it faster to make it softer,” says Samoa Filivaa, who is a senior this year. “It turned out pretty good.”
The challah was a hit and led to more “community days.” Empanadas were a popular handout.
By the end of the year, however, the students had taken their education beyond the school. They dipped a toe into entrepreneurship with a visit to La Cocina, a Tenderloin restaurant incubator and food hall, and on May 10, they cooked a full dinner for the SF school board to eat before its regular meeting.
Board members gave the meal (braised chicken with mushrooms and asparagus, mashed potatoes, apple turnovers for dessert) a big thumbs-up for taste and presentation. Lainie Motamedi was especially happy that the students whipped up a tofu and vegetable entree “with a very yummy sauce” for her and another vegetarian on the board. What board member Matt Alexander remembers most was “the pride on the students’ faces.”
On May 25, as O’Connell seniors watched a nostalgic slide show in the auditorium, the culinary students scrambled to make them a breakfast send-off: French toast, bacon, fresh cut fruit, cupcakes from scratch, and more.
Express yourself
The field trip last year to La Cocina, which featured a chat with chef Nafy Flatley and lunch, was just an appetizer. This year, entrepreneurship will be more of a focus, with English teacher Sabeena Shah taking the lead. “I want students to know how to express themselves, talk with confidence with investors, write a business plan,” says Shah.
Shah has been brainstorming with La Cocina community program and policy manager Naomi Maisel: Perhaps students can use Instagram as part of a marketing program for La Cocina businesses, or take a one-day cooking class, Maisel says.
The most important thing with this age group, she adds, is that the students can see themselves reflected in the business owners, through immmigration experience, language, or other connections. “These are all small family businesses,” according to Maisel.
English class isn’t all business. Shah also requires her students’ attention to art and expression. In her class last year, exposure to poet Kevin Young spurred the students to explore their own relationship to food, eventually collecting poems in a chapbook.
In Christian Escobar’s social science class, food becomes a connection to politics, history, and sociology. For Black History Month, they watched the documentary High on the Hog. (Tag line: “How African American Cuisine Transformed America.”)
Cupcake confidential
On the morning of the senior breakfast in May, amid the noise of the vent fans, frying bacon, pan clatter, and Brooks’s interjections (“Hey, you’re supposed to be working on your paper!”), several students were focused like young iron chefs. Jennifer Navarette Chan worked on cupcakes from scratch, stacking them in a tidy pyramid, Edgar Bautista was patiently churning honey butter, and Elias Caal was assembling cut fruit on platters.
Not everyone was on board, and Brooks, easy to spot with her magenta hair, interrupted her interview now and then to shout at students checking their phones or wandering around. “I try to be flexible, but I yell at them a little bit,” she admits, “because this is our time.” If laggards don’t respond, however, she doesn’t go full Gordon Ramsay: “I’m moving on to the next thing.” (Some of the students do indeed call her “chef,” but it’s not mandatory.)
Brooks seemed to know or sense everything happening at any moment in the kitchen. She has been a teacher for 15 years, including time in preschool while working toward her education degree in college. This is her sixth year at O’Connell, and she previously ran a catering business with her sisters off and on for seven years: “I’ve always loved teaching but I’ve also always loved cooking, so I kind of do both.”
The school district is dealing with budget woes, and funding is a constant concern, exacerbated by weird rules about what Brooks can buy with state money (butter, yes; forks and paper towels, no), and of course, the problem that all restaurateurs face: having enough to keep the pantry full, but not so much that food gets wasted.
“The funding for supplies like pots, pans, and bowls is stable, but we are limited on funding for ingredients,” says Brooks. “That changes yearly, and in years past, I would have no funds for ingredients and would need to source from donations that I would need to collect myself.”
The first year back in person, local businesses such as Chefs Toys, a restaurant equipment supplier, and Divisadero Street Italian hot spot Che Fico, pitched in.
‘Butchered a pig’
With the new school year, Brooks is waiting to see if the program’s 60 students will be up for another big project like cooking dinner for the school board. The program could also ramp up other pre-COVID practices: visits to restaurants for meals, chef Q&As, and more.
“Once they went to A16 and butchered a pig,” recalls Gary Freund, who chairs SFUSD’s career technical education (CTE) advisory committee and is a big booster of the city’s dozens of CTE programs. Freund was a longtime hotel manager in the Bay Area, and his hospitality connections have come in handy. He’d like to revive the board dinners, which were a regular event under Brooks’s predecessor, and perhaps students in the city’s other high school culinary programs, at Thurgood Marshall and Ida B. Wells, could take turns as well. (Marshall has a new commercial kitchen to rival O’Connell’s.)
The flip side to what the high schoolers are doing is that, with the right skills, it’s a pretty good time to look for restaurant work. The worker shortage is dire. “Industry realizes they need employees,” says Freund, and local restaurateurs should be eager to give talks, host visits, anything they can to pique the interest of high schoolers.
The hot stoves, sharp knives, and frenetic pace won’t be a career choice for everyone, but everything Brooks and her colleagues pass along to their students — including appreciation for the connections between food, language, and history — are tools for a richer life.
Back in the O’Connell kitchen, as the seniors laugh and cry and eat their celebratory breakfast across the hall, Elias Caal describes how he finally cracked the code on the perfect omelet: “You’ve got to be patient with it.” Then he pauses for a moment when asked about doing this for a living. “I can’t see myself in a kitchen as a career,” he says, “but I can see myself cooking for friends and family.”
