National Culinary Review Jan/Feb 2024

Competition Corner

Meet the new ACF Competition Committee Chair!

ACF Chef Frank C. Costantino, Ed.D., CEC, CCE, CEPC, CCA, AAC, is the assistant vice president of academic affairs and dean of the School of Hospitality Management and the Culinary Institute of New York at Monroe College. He also serves as executive chef of The Dining Lab at Monroe College. Chef Costantino coached the winning 2022 and 2023 ACF National Student Team champions.

Q: What’s your background in competitions?

A: I’ve been coaching college students for 23 years now. More recently, in the last 15 years since I’ve been at the Culinary Institute of New York at Monroe College, we’ve won over 1,200 medals in competitions. We’ve won multiple regional championships, and our team was the Northeast regional champion and the ACF National Student Team champions the last two years. After 20 years as a judge and 25 years as a competitor, it’s been my ultimate goal to become chair of the competition committee. I am so blessed to have that opportunity.

Q: What are some of the benefits of competing?

A: Competition is critical for any [culinary school] program, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they bring pride and passion to the campus. When other students see the students on the competition team practicing and training, they get a sense of the value of the program, whether they compete or not. But for me, [competitions] are a way to accelerate culinary students’ growth and trajectory in the industry. I believe in this so much that I actually wrote my dissertation about it; I talked to 10 coaches across the nation and about 250 students and came up with the conclusion that competitions accelerate students’ movement in the industry up to an average 1.2 years faster than students who have not had competition experience.

Q: What’s in store for ACF competitions this year?

A: We want to get people interested. Right now [at press time] we’re in the application process for regional qualifiers for all five of our categories. So that’s Chef of the Year, Pastry Chef of the Year, Student Chef of the Year, Student Pastry Chef of the Year and Student Team National Championship, which is the new

official name for that award. For those, the competitions are going to be around the country in the different regions — the winners will advance to the national competitions at convention. The military qualifiers are happening at Fort Lee in March, and the top five will compete for national titles. We settled on one qualifier competition last year because we weren’t sure about attendance still after the pandemic, but I’m happy to say that we are fully back and competitions are booming. And that includes not just the regional qualifiers, but also other local competitions around the country.

Q: Where can we find more information about and guidelines for competitions?

A: We haven’t updated the competition manual since 2019. So now we actually have five manuals coming out, including a student competition manual, a professional competition manual, an ice carving manual, a judges manual and a show chair manual for people interested in hosting a competition. Those are available at acfchefs.org/competitions. We also introduced a couple of student categories to get students involved who may not be ready for traditional competition — so we have a knife skills and fabrication category, a pastry skills category and a classical category where students can recreate a dish with their own spin — these will qualify for ACF medals.

Q: Why might you encourage students and professional chefs to enter competitions?

A: Everything we do in the industry is time-sensitive. Competitions teach that sense of urgency that you don’t typically get in the culinary lab setting or cooking at home. I think students benefit from so many aspects of it, not just time management, but also honing skills in cleanliness and sanitation and understanding the discipline that it takes to be successful as a competitor. There’s also that competitive edge you get. Every day we have to ask ourselves: What sets us apart? We compete every day for guests to come back to our restaurant [The Dining Lab at Monroe College]. Many of the students working in our restaurant were or are on our competition team, and they tend to excel and maximize their potential in those classes because of being part of our competition program. For a full list of upcoming competitions, visit acfchefs.org/competitions