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Kings & queens of fine dining
WBN09 - Dine - Kings & queens of fine dining
Kings & queens of fine dining
Master chefs teach a new generation
It’s only 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, but culinary students at The College of The Bahamas (COB) are already beginning to prepare a four-course meal for paying customers at the on-campus eatery, Choices Restaurant. Chef-for-a-day Joel Johnson has planned a meal from soup and Caesar salad to a choice of desserts: a strawberry sabayon fruit salad or a miniature cheesecake topped with fresh berries.
Under Johnson’s direction, 10 tyro chefs will be offering their guests two entrées: Bahamian stew’ beef with flavoured rice or chicken stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese, covered with a mushroom sauce.
It’s an ambitious menu considering that Johnson is only a second-year student with the Bahamas Culinary and Hospitality Management Institute (CHMI) at COB. The dinner has to be a success, because his final grade depends on it.
“Joel, taste this,” says Caroline Pickering, a classmate. She offers him a spoon dipped in the homemade salad dressing.
“Yes! That’s it!” Johnson exclaims.
He moves on to assure himself that his culinary team is on track—baking bread, blanching spinach and braising beef, among other things.
Many hours later, Johnson emerges from the kitchen with a huge smile. One patron has just described the soup as “an explosion of flavour.” That just about clinches the verdict of an A grade from his teacher, Chef Eldred “Ellie” Saunders.
Teaching culinary artists
According to Kendal Johnson, head of food and beverage at CHMI, students learn their trade via a mix of academic courses and on-the-job training.
Johnson [no relation to Joel] has been with the school since it began operations under a different name, the Bahamas Hotel Training College, more than 30 years ago. He recalls that there were 15 students in the chef apprenticeship programme in 1974.
“In that first class of apprentices were Chef Christopher Chea, who worked at the Radisson Cable Beach, Chef Edwin Johnson, who is also the executive chef at the Wyndham Nassau Resort and Crystal Palace Casino and Chef Charlie Missick, the only Bahamian to become a member of the US-based Master Chef Society,” says Johnson. “All of them are certified executive chefs… All are very highly skilled.”
The original training college was amalgamated into COB in 2000 and renamed the School of Hospitality and Tourism Studies, which then became CHMI.
Today the institute has more than 300 full- and part-time students. Although many are fresh out of high school, there are others in their 40s. Many of the older ones are working on a second or even a third career.
CHMI offers several programmes: Culinary Skills—similar to a one-year college prep—and two different two-year programmes: Culinary Arts and Hospitality Operations. BAs are offered in Tourism Management and Hospitality and Tourism.
There is also a three-year apprentice chef programme in which graduates become certified culinarians—that is, able to work in any part of the kitchen and ready to specialize.
The school is affiliated with the American Culinary Federation, World Association Chefs, the Bahamas Culinary Association, the Bahamas Hotel Association and the US-based National Restaurant Association.
Best of the best
“We’re not training students to be employees. We want them to be managers—no less than a sous chef, the second in command,” says Chef Addiemae Farrington.
“We are training the next generation of chefs to be their own bosses and not just relying on the industry to hire them. We are not training line cooks. Line cooks I can turn out in a week. We are training managers. That’s why they are here doing long-term classes.”
Students are taken “from the ground up,” says Johnson. “In class they acquire the basic skills they need to function in a kitchen. At the next level they are given more leeway to perform. They come up with their own menus, recipes [and] method of cooking. They go from being students to applying what they’ve learned.”
According to one student, Joseph Walker, delivering top-notch performance in the kitchen is not difficult because the teachers make learning so easy.
“It’s a small classroom setting, probably about 15 students. You really don’t understand what you’re learning until it comes down to the hands-on [sessions]. There’s no lecturer in the classroom, and you’re just doing your work,” says Walker.
“You remember all that training and guidance, and it just comes to you naturally. You didn’t even know what you knew, because you were having so much fun.”
Chef Farrington notes that students also learn menu planning, food and nutrition, calorie counting, purchasing and storeroom keeping, among other things. It’s knowledge that allows students to compete anywhere in the world.
World class chefs
In 2008, Team Bahamas captured a bronze medal in the Culinary Olympics, hot food category, held in Germany. CHMI students helped with the prep work.
Twenty percent of everything had to be prepared and taken to the site, says Farrington, who attended the Olympics as an observer for COB and also as a member of the executive committee for the Bahamas Culinary Association, which will host the 2012 Olympics in Nassau.
In 2008, CHMI students came in third overall in the Southeast Region of the American Culinary Federation’s Super Challenge, held in Orlando.
The previous year, when only 15 universities competed, CHMI placed first. In 2008 there were 20 participants.
Says Johnson: “When we go to these types of competitions we tend to be the only non-American team, which means they will not be judging us gently.”
Farrington, past president of the Bahamas Culinary Association, believes that, in the past 30 years, students have really excelled.
“We have to keep up with the new trends, so we are growing along with them,” says this master chef, who began cooking competitively in 1980. She thinks one of the events that helps working chefs continue to challenge themselves is the Culinary Classics, typically held in mid-November. The ultimate challenge is to create a gourmet meal from a box of meats, seafood and produce that is kept secret until the day of the competition.“It brings together the best and the greatest minds in the culinary field,” says Farrington of the four days of competition, which sees scores of chefs from across The Bahamas and from all the major hotels square off.
A night of good food
For those hungering for a taste of gourmet cooking at a nominal price, COB’s Choices Restaurant hosts a “fine dining” experience every Friday from 6:30-9pm.
For $35 patrons receive a five-course meal prepared by the institution’s budding chefs.
“Fine dining is the final class for graduates, designed to encompass everything they have learned over the years that they were here,” says Chef Saunders.
“It’s an opportunity for patrons to go through this fine-dining experience with our students.”
The dinner is served from February to April and October to December. Visitors to The Bahamas are welcome. For further details contact the Culinary and Hospitality Management Institute at 323-6804 or 323-5804.
Sidebar:
Jason’s road to culinary success
Fresh out of Government High School back in 1995, 15-year-old Jason Rolle worked as a kitchen boy, washing dishes and mopping floors at the Best Western British Colonial hotel (now a Hilton).
If you told him then that he would have a gold-medal career as a chef before moving on to become the food and beverage manager at an ultra-swanky Out Island retreat, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
Then again, maybe he would. The lifetime mantra of this 30-year-old father of three is, “Be determined, know what you want and go after it.”
It was that go-getter mentality, along with a large helping of culinary talent, that landed him his present position as assistant food and beverage manager at the Abaco Club on Winding Bay, managed by Ritz Carlton.
“Somebody had recommended me,” Rolle recalls. “I got a call from the general manager. They were looking for food and beverage managers, and somehow my name came up.”
It really wasn’t such a big surprise.
At the top of his game
Today, Rolle oversees two restaurants at the golf club and sporting retreat, caters special events for members and manages a staff of 40. He loves every aspect of the job.
“Nothing brings me greater joy than to make somebody else happy. You have to have passion. That’s what keeps you going. It’s what gets you up in the morning,” he says. “When I’m at work I’m thinking, ‘How can I fulfil my guests’ lives today? What can I do for them differently? How can I bring happiness to them?’ For my team, I think, ‘How can I make their jobs easier? What can I do to fulfil them, too?’”
Another driver of his career is a promise he made to himself long ago—not to get trapped “on the line”—as ordinary kitchen jobs are called in the culinary trade. “When I entered the hotel industry I saw a lot of Bahamians working for 20-plus years, and they were still line cooks. That discouraged me,” says Rolle.
“A few colleagues and I agreed that we would do whatever it took to become the best, whether it was studying, working or just learning more.”
A culinary love affair
Rolle says it was his mother who first encouraged his love affair with food when he was still a young boy.
“I loved the way she cooked. She brought out the life in food with different types of seasoning and the way she prepared meals,” he says.
At the British Colonial as a teenager, Rolle worked in maintenance and housekeeping but says he always gravitated toward the kitchen.
Deciding in 1996 that cooking would be his career, Rolle entered the apprentice chef programme at the Bahamas Hotel Training College (now known as the Culinary and Hospitality Management Institute).
Fast forward to the late 1990s, when Sun International (now Kerzner International) was getting ready to open its spectacular $450-million Royal Towers at Atlantis.
As a sponsored apprentice chef at Atlantis, Rolle worked in most of the resort’s restaurants, about 40 in all. At the same time, he began entering cooking competitions—locally at first and then abroad—winning several bronze, silver and gold medals.
Rolle says the Kerzner organization broadened his horizons, even though he didn’t make much money at first. However, he’s grateful that the hotel paid his tuition and gave him a stipend.
After graduation, still only 20, Rolle took a job as head chef at the Sea Spray Resort in Hope Town, Abaco. He stayed there for only a few months before moving on to earn a baccalaureate at the New England Culinary Institute in Burlington, Vermont. He recalls that as a rigorous year of theoretical and practical course work.
Rolle chose to do his internship at the Sandals Royal Bahamian Resort on Cable Beach, where he was quickly transferred to become assistant food and beverage director at the Sandals operation in St Lucia.
From Sandals, Rolle went to the John Bull company in Nassau, helping them to introduce the Starbucks chain to The Bahamas. After completing a course in the US, Rolle returned to manage the first Starbucks—located at the Atlantis resort’s Marina Village on Paradise Island.
Rolle spent a year with John Bull before returning to what he knows best, the food and beverage business, creating culinary magic at the Abaco Club.
Although he’s cooking less and supervising and teaching more these days, Rolle says cooking will always be his first love.
What’s on the horizon? Perhaps one day a boutique resort in Mangrove Cay, Andros.
“Stay tuned,” he says.
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