THE KITCHEN

Restaurants can have the best equipment, friendliest staff and freshest ingredients, but without a top-notch chef and a good menu, people aren’t going to keep coming back.

Jennifer Hill Booker knows this. Almost three decades into her career as a world-class chef, instructor and author, Booker understands the important role food has had for people and culture throughout history.

Booker grew up watching Julia Child on TV and quickly became infatuated with French cuisine. She even took French language classes in school. Her family moved to Tulsa when she was a teenager and she graduated from Booker T. Washington High School and following that, the University of Tulsa.

Knowing she wanted to be a chef, the recently married 20-something enrolled in culinary school at OSUIT.

Back then, it was known as OSU-Okmulgee. Booker remembers it as the place that taught her everything she needed to know about running a kitchen.

“I called it soup to nuts,” Booker said. “Our knife skills, our sauces and stock. Of course, you learned salads. We had ice carving, we learned how to make sushi and baking and pastry, American cuisine, French cuisine. We did everything.”

Booker earned an associate degree in occupational science from OSUIT in 1995.

After an externship in Hot Springs, Virginia, Booker moved to Germany with her husband, who was in the military. She cooked for members of the German community who lived around the military bases, preparing them American cuisine like fried chicken with gravy or string beans with bacon and onions. In the U.S., it was typical Southern homestyle cooking, but in Germany, it was a delicacy.

After a few years in Germany, Booker applied to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the pinnacle of French culinary institutions.

It was extremely rigorous, but the foundation Booker had built at OSUIT (and her background in French) paid off. She went on to graduate at the top of her class as one of only two American women to finish that year.

Booker was ready to start her own restaurant, but life had other plans. She had two daughters, moved back to the states and eventually settled in Georgia. She got back into the cooking business a few years later, becoming an instructor at the Le Cordon Bleu branch in Atlanta. Along with that, she expanded her portfolio by opening a catering business, restaurants and writing two cookbooks: Field Peas to Foie Gras: Southern Recipes with a French Accent and Dinner Déjà Vu: Southern Tonight, French Tomorrow

It is a busy slate for Booker, who is currently overseeing her newest venture: Bauhaus Biergarten in Springdale, Arkansas, but she enjoys it. Despite all her success, she still thinks about her training at OSUIT. In 2019, she established the Jennifer Hill Booker Culinary Arts Scholarship for students in the culinary arts program to help students in the same position she was in 30 years ago.

“For me, as an educator, teaching someone cooking is absolutely a life skill,” said Booker, who is also a fellow on the James Beard Foundation. “I know that no matter what, they can cook a hot meal for themselves and for their family. And that’s empowering. If you can do that for yourself, then you already are building a sense of pride, you started your day out right.”

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