Heat of the Kitchen
A smart kind of food program growing at San Francisco’s Ida B. Wells Alternative High School.
I am sitting in a room marked “cafeteria” in the basement of San Francisco’s Ida B. Wells Alternative High School. The room is lit by late afternoon light as it penetrates mildly opaque industrial windows. I am speaking with food industry vet-turned high school teacher Alice Cravens when a young man, roughly sixteen years old, pops his head in and asks if she has any leftovers from today’s class. He grips a skateboard and has partially bleached, short, twisted dreadlocks. Alice replies in an almost motherly fashion, “no, not today, nothing’s ready yet.” The kid smiles politely, in tacit agreement, and continues down the hall.
Picking up our conversation, Alice turns to me and says, “You see, this whole thing is really about making connections. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m the person around all the food being cooked.”
Welcome to The Heat of The Kitchen, a work simulation class taught at one of San Francisco’s “continuation” high schools, a place where students in danger of not graduating from a “comprehensive” high school are sent to gain credits so they, too, may receive a diploma around the time of their 18th birthday.
The brainchild of Alice Cravens, a culinary extraordinaire who’s been in and around Bay Area restaurants for over three decades, the class is set up as a fully functioning professional kitchen where students learn the ins and outs of how a restaurant works, acting as both chefs and managers in a fast-paced and highly demanding environment. And Alice is someone who knows this feeling better than anyone. Her track record includes working for Chez Panisse as well as owning and acting as executive chef at Modern Tea in Hayes Valley until it closed in 2009. Her class teaches about much more than chopping vegetables — students learn how to manage ingredients and plate restaurant-quality dishes, too. The classroom serves as a place where students earn priceless job experience and even more valuable personal lessons. According to Alice, “It’s where cooking and learning intersect.”
The Heat of The Kitchen first got up and running in 2009, shortly after Alice closed Modern Tea. In order to teach in San Francisco Unified School District, Alice was sponsored by the UC Berkeley extension to obtain her credential in Career Technical Education (CTE). In fact, she’s one of approximately ten Clear-Credentialed CTE teachers in the district, which speaks volumes about the greater need for programs such as hers.
She described 2009 as a “seat of your pants year,” creatively scratching up funding wherever possible. Then, in 2010, the program received a grant from SF’s Department of Children Youth and their Families. For funding reasons, The Heat of the Kitchen needed to partner with a community-based organization and the Buchannan Family YMCA served this purpose until 2013. Currently, the program is collaborating with Jewish Vocational Services (JVS), providing a valuable job-skills training curriculum and instruction. Clearly, a great deal of fancy footwork has gone into the creation and maintenance of this project and it all speaks to a true belief in creating a place for “at-risk” students to thrive in a place (namely, school) where they have had less than positive experiences over the years.
Each day begins as it would for anyone working in a kitchen: students sign in, place their belongings in a cubby and, of course, wash their hands thoroughly. Next, comes the Line Up, which is essentially the daily huddle in the hospitality industry. Here the students (“staff”) go over any last-minute changes to the menu or any other things not discussed the day before. Afterwards, students break up into teams and get to work. During a typical week, students work up to the creation of a large, full course meal to be served, in class, on Friday. This means that every Monday they are briefed on the menu, the ingredients, techniques and equipment to be used. They also decide who they will be working with for the next few days. While menu items are for the most part determined by Alice, students identify ingredients and dishes they wish to explore and these are more often than not incorporated into the class sometime during the quarter. Additionally, students are taught much about the workplace itself, such as food production and customer service skills.
Throughout the week, young chefs snack on items they cook and then, on Friday, they all sit down and eat a meal they worked together to make. The entire process of planning, creating and enjoying something as a group very powerful and ultimately provides her students with a much-needed sense of togetherness, accomplishment and safety.
“I’m not teaching students to be chefs, although they may become chefs,” Alice says as we sip mint tea on the long metal table in the kitchen. “It’s about connecting students to their inner potential, because we all have the same potential. The class is about discovery.”
This is where we get into the loftier goals of the program. It goes without saying that a course such as Alice’s provides many tangible real-world skills to its participants: Students are empowered with a laundry list of items to put on their resume (in fact, they create their own resumes during the quarter). But the real nectar of what is happening in the basement kitchen of Ida B Wells can be found in each student’s realization that he or she is capable of much more than they thought they were beforehand. Alice helps students build connections to themselves, to one another, to food, and to the process of understanding, all through the simple act of caring deeply about food and the well-being of each person that walks through that kitchen door. That, of course, and her extraordinary knowledge of cooking and what it takes to run a restaurant.
After students have completed at least one quarter (eight weeks) of the class, many are encouraged to seek job-shadow posts in both front and back of the house positions at local restaurants, hotels and retail food establishments. Through the collaborating community based organization, currently JVS, at least 25 participants are awarded paid stipends (50 hours) for their volunteer work experiences. At their job sites, students are assigned actual tasks and responsibilities and are fully expected to maintain high levels of professionalism. Once they have completed their job shadow, students may also be invited to continue on at the restaurant as an intern. Current and former businesses that have participated in the job shadows include NOPA, Pacific Catch, La Mar Cevicheria, DeYoung Café, and 1300 on Fillmore.
All told, there is really something remarkable going on with Alice Craven’s experiment in experiential learning. It’s a work-simulation class that runs full-tilt, all the time. It’s a place where teenagers go to learn about who they are. It’s breathing proof that all students can succeed if given the right set of tools. It’s all of these things. However, in the end, the program is a place people gather together, in the heat of a very real kitchen, to cook amazing food and share it with one another.
And we can all learn a thing or two from doing that.
