By Scott Cronick
My mind was blown by a kitchen I just toured. And I have toured a lot of kitchens.
Stainless steel, six-burner stations with built-in ovens priced at $6,500 each. Check.
A $9,000 Simply Bread Oven capable of reaching 500 degrees and baking 12 loaves at a time. Check.
An awesome, $10,000 automated dishwasher that sure beats a three-bin sink. Check. (By the way, they have a three-bin sink, too.)
Four Turbo Air, stainless steel refrigerators at about 2 grand each. Check.
How about a ChefTop programmable oven? You know, the ones that cook everything from cookies to eggs to hams to an exact temperature and then hold temperature like you see in WaWa? They are about $20,000. Check.
A washer/dryer set in here for all the linens? Yep, check on that, too.
So, where is this awesome kitchen that would be the envy of any restaurant owner? Is it Per Se in New York? Vetri in Philadelphia? Gordon Ramsay’s in Atlantic City?
Nope … how about Absegami High School?
“We are so very lucky here,” said Chef Christina Martin, one of three culinary educators at the school. “Our kitchen is better than some tech schools and restaurants, and we are a public school! It’s an incredible opportunity for our students.”
A Culinary Education
If you are one of the many students out there worried how A.I. is going to transform the world and take all of the white-collar jobs out there, you might want to consider a profession that will never go away: food and beverage, particularly being a cook/chef.
Four years ago, Absegami High School took a major plunge – and about a $100,000 investment, plus tens of thousands of dollars since then – when it transformed a former sewing room (adios Home Ec!) into a working educational kitchen in hopes of grooming students to be the future of the culinary industry.
Ask any casino executive or area restaurant owner in Atlantic City – or, for that matter, anywhere around the country – and they will tell you one of their hardest jobs is finding talented and reliable people to work in the kitchen despite the fact that they can be high-paying jobs that can last forever.
Have a conversation with Academy of Culinary Arts Director Joseph Sheridan and he will tell you he has a list of places looking for quality workers. If you’re good, he can get you a good job tomorrow.
Why? Well, it’s hard work. But, if you don’t mind the work and you like working with food, culinary could be your track. And the Great Egg Harbor Board of Education, and administrators, led by Culinary Supervisor Ron Schmid, are hoping Greater Egg Harbor Regional School District students will strap on an apron.
Right now, there are three culinary instructors – Christina Martin, Erin Adasczik and Amanda Kirby – overseeing a four-year program that will equip students with major tools to prepare them for entry-level kitchen work and, more importantly, an easier path if they choose to go to the Academy of Culinary Arts in Mays Landing or another culinary school after graduating high school. More on that later.
The curriculum features 15 courses with students taking one, 48-minute course per day if they choose it as an elective or as a four-year commitment taken in order of difficulty. But even if a student doesn’t start the courses as a freshman, they can take the entry-level course even as a senior. There are currently more than 300 students enrolled in the classes.
“There are some students who don’t realize how much work is involved,” Adasczik said. “I have a class of 24, and maybe 10 want to move on. They find out it’s not what they really want, but that’s the whole point of high school … to test academics and electives. Your mind changes as you grow. This is like the seed. They learn what to do and what not to do and not to cut their fingers off, but it is blossoming for them and us as professionals.”
The four levels, in order, include “Art of Cooking,” “Creative Cuisine,” “Honors Culinary” and “Baking and Pastry.”
One of those students who is destined to be in the industry is Jacob Bishoff, 18, a junior, who like some of his peers uses his study halls and stays afterschool to do get involved in anything and everything he can when it comes to the culinary side of things at the high school.
“It’s been life changing for me,” Bishoff said. “Originally, I was thinking about business, and then I said, ‘Let me try culinary and see how good I can do?’ I took the ‘Art of Cooking,’ and I fell in love with it. I said, ‘Maybe, some day, I can have my own restaurant or business.’”
Practice Makes Perfect
What good is making all that great food if no one is eating it, right?
Absegami has that side covered, too.
It starts at the Snack Shack, a student-run café the culinary department collaborates with the special education department, offering breakfast sandwiches, hash browns, pastries and their famous homemade cookies.
There’s also the Braves Bistro, which is open all day for teachers and administrators, that offers everything from breakfast staples to $5 salads, $5 sandwiches and $3 soups, including a stellar beef stew on the day I was there. There’s even Takeout Thursdays, when teachers and admins can leave with $12 to $15 family dinners that change weekly with offerings ranging from chicken parm with veggies to fajitas and all the trimmings and pizza kits.
Wanna be more impressed? Under the guidance of Kerry Flukey, an urban farming instructor and science teacher, Absegami boasts a flourishing garden system that provides great ingredients, and the culinary students assist with that when possible.
It features two greenhouses, two outdoor gardens and a fruit tree area that grow strawberries, herbs, lettuces, kale, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, blackberries, figs and much more. You will also find a bunch of egg-laying chickens, and the department once had beehives with fresh honey, but the bees left. Flukey hopes to restart that project in the future.
Oh, and if you like BBQ, there’s an awesome outdoor smoker, too.
The culinary students also assist – along with other students, staff and admins – in Thursday’s pantry day for those in need. In collaboration with the Commnity Food Bank of New Jersey, Southern Branch, and Beacon Church, the pantry feeds hundreds of people annually.
Looking Ahead
The big news is that starting in the fall, the culinary program at Absegami will be made available as a Culinary Magnet to the other two high schools in the district: Cedar Creek and Oakcrest.
It will be available to those districts at Level 1 and then other levels will be added each year.
“In the Magnet, students will be required to wear chef jackets, hats and aprons,” Martin said. “They will be hands-on with the Braves Bistro, as well as events we cater in school for other departments as well as cooking for the Board of Education meeting dinners. They will be making the cookies daily for Snack Shack. It’s exciting!”
Students from the other high schools have been invited to apply for the 24 Magnet openings for the 2024-25 school year. Once they are approved and the class is full, they will be paired with other students and an instructor, who will get to know each other very well over the next four years.
“They are stuck with each other for four years,” Adasczik said with a laugh. “But there is an alternative (for students) where they can take classes like the ‘Art of Cooking’ as a trial test to see if they really like it. Then, if they get good grades and show a real interest, we recommend them for the next class.”
The school also has a yearly budget to continue to add equipment and other necessities ranging from pots and pans to food processors to major capital investments, which may have to include expanding the kitchen if the Magnet program succeeds.
“It’s amazing to walk into a state-of-the-art kitchen every day,” Martin added. “Every year, we get more and more to teach them on. Restaurants don’t have the equipment these kids are getting experience on. I try to translate that to them. We have a great advisory board made mostly of people in the industry who come in and guide us and the students as to what is needed and the direction we should go in with equipment and curriculum. They help us mold what the students need if they are going to go straight from high school to a job or go into culinary school.”
Adasczik added: “The goal is to keep adding classes, so long term, you are looking at more kitchen equipment and space, more instructors as you grow.”
Martin said walking into school every day is the best job she ever had.
“There has never been a job I have had that has been as rewarding as being around these children and mentoring them and watching them grow into the real world after graduation,” Martin said. “It’s just a great feeling knowing you made a difference.”
But in the end, it’s all about the students making the right choice for their future.
“Because of our experience in the culinary industry, we are showing them what the real-world exposure is to be in a restaurant scenario,” Adasczik said. “You are going to put on an apron and clean up after yourself and build an experience, so that when they leave this school, they have many of the tools they will need when they go out and get a job or continue their education. We want to get them to the point where they can walk into any restaurant and get a job wherever they would like.”
(For more information on the culinary program, go to GEHRHSD.net)
Scott Cronick is an award-winning journalist who has written about entertainment, food, news and more in South Jersey for nearly three decades. He hosts a daily radio show – “Off The Press with Scott Cronick” – 4 to 6 p.m. weekdays on Newstalk WOND 1400-AM, 92.3-FM, and WONDRadio.com, and he also co-owns Tennessee Avenue Beer Hall in Atlantic City, while working on various projects, including charitable efforts, throughout the area. He can be reached at scronick@comcast.net.
