“Gold Medal Classroom” readers who answer a survey (see link below) will receive a special code for a $200 discount on Worlds of Flavor® 2013 registration. Also, all names will be placed into a drawing for one free Worlds of Flavor registration, and three respondents will receive a choice of one of three CIA books.

By Jan Stuebing Smyth

To be a chef today means to be plugged into local communities, national networks and global conversations. Information technologies are changing foodservice in profound ways in the kitchen, dining room and classroom, particularly since the current  generation of Millennial diners grew up with an unprecedented access to 24/7 connectivity.

Any curriculum for aspiring culinarians that does not include a nod to technology in the kitchen—from immersion circulators for new cooking techniques to tablets for access to their curriculum—is incomplete. A single YouTube video, real-time webcast or even an Instagram photo can transport a chef or student to a restaurant or village kitchen thousands of miles away and alter his or her culinary aspirations in an instant, turning the world into a classroom.

Culinary philosophies are being incubated in highly personal, globally conscious ways that could only happen in this hyper-connected age of information and social-networking technologies. Chefs in Spain look to the kitchens of Japan as part of re-imagining their regional traditions. Chefs from New York to California exchange ideas over the web as they re-invent Moroccan and Southeast Asian flavors. Chefs from Lima and Lisbon, Sydney and Shanghai gather at international conferences—like MAD in Copenhagen, Mesamérica in Mexico City and Worlds of Flavor in Napa Valley—to forge new professional bonds that expand the creative space in which they work.

Whereas previously, influential food critics at city and national publications controlled the destiny of ambitious chefs and restaurants, chefs today can build their own communities of support. A four-star review from The New York Times or a top Michelin rating still yields considerable weight in a restaurant’s ability to attract and retain customers, but they are no longer the only game in town. Crowd-sourced reviews from Yelp, Zagat and others, along with social media juggernauts like Twitter and Facebook and the commenting sections of blogs, have undercut the established critics who used to have the power to make or break a restaurant. Not having to court the favor of high-profile critics means not having to skew one’s cooking or dining concepts to the expectations of a small handful of gatekeepers.

Marco Chirico, at only 25, is already moving a legacy into the next generation via his father’s restaurants—one operating for three decades and one a few years young—in Brooklyn.

By Lynn Schwartz

When a parent receives public recognition in a career, the children might prefer to run in the opposite direction, deliberately choosing a different livelihood. Then there are those offspring who desire to follow in the impressive family footsteps. With that decision is an inherited responsibility; there is a pressure to measure up.

Marco Chirico has chosen the latter path. At only 25, he is taking over Marco Polo Ristorante, his father’s legendary Italian restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn—a restaurant that has just celebrated its 30-year anniversary.

Accepting the reins requires a delicate balancing act. Chirico must maintain the quality, integrity and longevity of the famed family business, but also carefully and respectfully guide the restaurant into the future for the next generation.

Filling Some Very Big Shoes
Chirico grew up in the middle of a lively business where the whole family was involved. Chirico’s father, Joseph, immigrated to New York from San Martino, Italy, in 1964. He began with a luncheonette, serving Italian sandwiches, and in 1983 opened Marco Polo Ristorante, named for the Venetian explorer.

Joseph Chirico became recognized as a pioneer, introducing both fine Italian dining to Brooklyn and serving unfamiliar ingredients such as bufala mozzarella imported from Italy, porcini mushrooms and truffles. He also became the owner and operator of the historic Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn.

There was no expectation for Joseph’s son to make a career in the hospitality industry. “I was bussing tables since I was 12 years old,” says Marco Chirico. “We all worked there. My sisters were hostesses, but there was never any pressure for me to be in the business. I just liked it. I liked the customers and my father saw that.”

As students go to college this fall, The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) is offering them exciting new education options. These new concentrations—in beverage management, farm-to-table cooking and Latin cuisines—give students the chance to focus their studies on a particular area of interest in the food world.

Students enrolled in the bachelor’s-degree-management programs at the CIA’s Hyde Park, N.Y., campus can choose a concentration that includes 15-credit semesters at the college’s campuses in St. Helena, Calif., or San Antonio, Texas. Visitors to those campuses can reap the rewards of the students’ lessons with new and exciting dining experiences.

“The rapid pace of foodservice innovation is creating new demands for specialized skills and knowledge, and opportunities for students to get this knowledge within their broader education are critical for career success,” says CIA President Dr. Tim Ryan, CMC. “Professions develop specialties as they advance—which is very evident in medicine and law. This is also true for the culinary profession, where specialized cuisine and management knowledge are key for restaurants seeking new ways to sharpen their competitive edge and profitability.”

The concentrations expand upon the college’s bachelor’s-degree programs that pioneered culinary-management education in the 1990s.

Students in the Advanced Wine, Beverage, and Hospitality concentration spend a semester at the CIA’s Greystone campus in the heart of California's Napa Valley wine country. Throughout the program, they get an upper-level wine-and-beverage education and study the advanced principles of management as they relate to hospitality and restaurant service.

Kendall Collegeannounced in August that itsaccreditation has been reaffirmed by The Higher Learning Commission (HLC) for 10 years—the maximum amount of time allowed. In addition, Kendall’s School of Culinary Arts’A.A.S. in Baking and Pastry and A.A.S. in Culinary Arts programs’ accreditations from the AmericanCulinaryFederationEducationFoundation’sAccrediting Commission (ACFEFAC) have been renewed and awarded “exemplary” status. Exemplary status means programs meet the highest possible educational standards recognized by the ACFEFAC.

“HLC’s reaffirmation of our accreditation for 10 years is an endorsement of the quality, reputation and student-centeredness of our programs,” says Emily Williams Knight, president of Kendall College. “In commenting on the strengths of our programs, the HLC team noted, ‘the staff, leadership, advisory and executive board shared a consistent passion for how Kendall is focused on being a student centric organization.’ The team also noted that ‘since the last HLC visit in 2004, Kendall College has made significant—and in some cases exemplary—progress with its institutional and learning assessment processes.’”

Following the recommendations identified by the acronym, WARM, you can inspire students to reach for ultimate success from the moment they return to or begin their training.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, we discussed honoring and celebrating differences; this month, we will talk about ways to begin a semester by making our students feel special—not always something we think about it, given all the other tasks that face us in September, the time most U.S. colleges begin the year again. There are four major strategies: welcoming, asking, reminding and mixing it up, or WARM. Now might be a good time to consider adopting one or all of them.

Welcoming
Welcoming people has always been a fundamental principle of hospitality. As chefs, we welcome people by feeding them or otherwise offering them food. As teachers, we think about the first class of the term, and we do it well.

This year might be a useful time to think about welcoming them back to the institution, however. As your students come back to the campus after a summer break or an internship/coop/apprentice/work experience, how do you greet them? Do you look for ways to welcome them back to school? Do you invite them to notice all the changes that have been made over the summer? Do you focus on providing each of them with a compliment? Or ask about accomplishments?  Have you reviewed the organization of your office and considered rearranging it to be more welcoming to new and returning students? These and other questions will help you think about how to welcome your new and returning students to the campus.

Students in teams don’t necessarily have to like each other, says Chef Weiner. They won’t have the luxury of choosing their teammates in the real world, after all. But they do have to learn to work together to execute a successful meal. Here are proven tips to teach them how.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

At the recent CAFÉ Leadership Conference in Miami I had the privilege of attending a seminar by Paul Sorgule of Harvest America Ventures. Paul said something that was a proverbial slap in the face for me. He stated that all culinary instructors teach with teams, but we don’t really understand how teams work, nor do we specifically teach our students how to work in teams.

One of the key items he covered is that there are four phases in each team project:

Testing

Infighting

Organization

Mature Closeness

The first thing people do when assigned to a team is to test out the other team members and themselves in the team. How much do the other team members know? How much can I assert myself in the team? Will I be able to ride on other people’s coattails?

Dr. Tso-Cheng Chang was a pioneer of “no pesticides or herbicides” farming in the United States. His farm, which grows vegetables for his award-winning restaurant in Amherst, Mass., not only is one of the largest bean-spout producers in the nation, it also grows schizandra berries—which might be the ginseng of this decade.

Long before “shop local, buy local” became something Americans came to value, Dr. Tso-Cheng Chang grew his own Chinese vegetables to serve at his award-winning restaurant, Amherst Chinese Food, on Main Street in downtown Amherst, Mass. So when in 1983 he converted his farm in nearby Whatley into a small factory designed to mass-produce bean sprouts, it barely caused a ripple on the local business scene.

That same factory on Dr. Chang’s Farm recently celebrated its 30^th anniversary with the distinction of being one of the largest soybean- and mung-bean-sprout facilities in the United States.

“You would say from the success of his restaurant and the sprout farm that Dr. Chang epitomizes the American dream, but his story goes beyond that,” says Steven V. Dubin, spokesperson for Dr. Chang Naturals, which grows and wholesales the company’s certified schizandra berries. “In fact, it’s quite fitting that his farm is in a region known as Pioneer Valley because Dr. Chang has pioneered a number of things, most notably ‘no herbicides or pesticides’ farming.” 

Chang’s journey began in a small town in Shandong Province, China, where he was born in the late 1920s. He earned an undergraduate degree in agronomy from Taiwan University in 1953 and later emigrated to the United States, where he earned an M.S. in crop science from Michigan State University in 1966.

A new video from the American Meat Institute featuring a noted animal-welfare expert is part of the Glass Walls Project to increase transparency in the meat-and-poultry industry.

The American Meat Institute (AMI) recently released a video tour of a pork-slaughter plant hosted by leading animal-welfare expert Temple Grandin, Ph.D., professor of animal science at Colorado State University. The video is available on the institute’s dedicated animal-welfare website, www.AnimalHandling.org.

Also released with the video was a print companion brochure that may be downloaded. Single copies also are available upon request from the AMI. The pork-plant video tour and brochure augment the beef-plant video tour, also hosted by Grandin, which was released in August 2012. Since its release, the beef-plant video has been viewed nearly 50,000 times online and in countless classrooms and other settings.

OMNI-TV host and associate producer Lucy Zilio visited the Culinary Arts Centre at Centennial College in Toronto recently to take in the sights and aromas of a live kitchen lesson. In a video (110 seconds) on the program’s website, Zilio speaks with chef and professor Samuel Glass about the special focus Centennial’s program places on international cuisine. Visit http://www.centennialcollege.ca/successstory/omnitv-culinaryartscentre to watch the video.

Centennial’s shiny new Culinary Arts Centre is a great teaching and learning facility designed with students in mind. The kitchens are spacious and well lit to ensure the safety of all users working in what can be a busy and creative environment. The teaching is hands-on with students working side by side with instructors, while large-screen video equipment can play back instructive lessons and provide real-time feeds and access to Internet and broadcast content, as well.

Centennial College is Ontario’s first community college, established in 1966. It primarily serves the eastern portion of the greater Toronto area through four campuses and seven satellite locations.

PHOTO: Chef and professor Samuel Glass (r.) of Centennial College in Toronto discusses education best practices with other instructors during the roundtable lunch at the 2013 CAFÉ Leadership Conference in Miami in June.

Chef Reginald Martin, culinary-arts instructor at Westside High School in Houston, Texas, is the recipient of the Texas Restaurant Association Education Foundation’s 2013 Educator Excellence Award. Martin has been leading Westside’s program since 2008 and has more than 100 students enrolled in the program. 

The Educator Excellence Award is presented to an educator who has made significant contributions to culinary education through both an unwavering dedication to students and a strong presence in the community using the Texas ProStart curriculum.

“Reggie works tirelessly to provide the most rewarding culinary and hospitality education possible for his students,” says Jerry Walker, TRA Education Foundation chairman and owner of Lunada Tex-Mex Grill, Dallas. “According to his students, he has taught them professionalism, teamwork, ethics and leadership skills. These are skills that they will take with them no matter what career path they pursue.”

Martin is also a successful business owner, and his industry experience and connections with other industry leaders allows his students to engage in unique learning opportunities and gain real-world experience.

“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized by my peers in the education and restaurant industry,” Martin says. “Receiving this award really validates our students’ achievements in the Texas ProStart program. We have worked extremely hard at Westside High School to challenge our students in the classroom through the Texas ProStart curriculum to prepare them for careers in the hospitality and restaurant industry. This award is a daily reminder for me to strive for excellence as I educate the young culinarians that will be the future of our industry.”

The award was presented at the 2013 Southwest Foodservice Expo, June 24, in Dallas. Texas ProStart is an industry-based high school culinary arts and restaurant management program that prepares students for careers. Currently, the program is offered in more than 200 Texas high schools, reaching more than 15,000 students annually.

PHOTO: (l. to r.) Linda Bebee, Texas Beef Council; Don Courville, Auto-Chlor; Reginald Martin; Earl Mulley, TRA Education Foundation chairman.