Being Brigaid: Reinventing School Lunch

Being Brigaid: Reinventing School Lunch

by Dan Salisbury

Winter Caplanson photos

There’s an indescribable and hectic fervor that buzzes in and around restaurant kitchens.

What arguably unites them all, however, is the passion of the teams that run these businesses, which often are manifested through the mantras within the kitchen walls. The famed American chef, Thomas Keller, and his acclaimed Californian restaurant, The French Laundry, lays out an ever-changing inspirational quote in the kitchen - in perfectly cut painter’s tape – to inspire the back-of-house staff. New York’s Eleven Madison Park, which took the top spot in the restaurant guide World’s 50 Best in 2017, is widely known for the phrase, “Make it Nice,” which hangs framed in the restaurant and has evolved into the name and ethos of the multifaceted restaurant group itself. Kitchen lingo often beckons those cooking and serving food to push hard, keep one’s head down, and find excitement and fulfillment in getting through another busy night in the kitchen, day in, day out.

In New London, Connecticut, there are a team of chefs bringing that same passion and energy to changing the face of school food in the United States.

Brigaid, founded by Chef Daniel Giusti, has focused on recruiting chefs to work in school kitchens. The American-born Giusti established his name leading one of the world’s top restaurants for years; he helmed the kitchen of Noma, the Scandinavian fine-dining mecca, from 2013-2016. His departure from the restaurant was spurred on by his self-admitted desire to “feed a lot of people,” and in February 2016, Brigaid was established, choosing New London, CT as the first district to pilot the model. There are currently five chefs that work in five schools in the New London School District, with the goal of transitioning from heat and serve kitchens to more involved, hands-on scratch cooking.

It’s 6:45 a.m. inside the kitchen at Winthrop STEM Elementary Magnet School, and things are in full swing. On any given day, Chef John Thompson and I tackle breakfast, lunch, and supper for roughly five hundred students who will enter the halls within the next forty-five minutes - and who will stay until roughly 4:00 p.m. It’s no easy task, but we both have appropriate training. John is an accomplished Michelin-starred chef, and as the lead cook for the school, my training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York,

“[We] tackle breakfast, lunch, has provided a strong foundation and supper for roughly for successfully producing breakfast five hundred students.” and lunch in a presentable and timely fashion. With a rotating music playlist blaring in the background – our staff varies in age from the early twenties to late seventies - we start the day. Fresh eggs are cracked, strained, and seasoned. John pours a gentle stream of the egg mixture into waiting four-inch hotel pans; at the same time, I’m pulling out whole wheat chocolate-chip muffins that are made fresh daily. Temperatures and holding times are recorded and logged, the mass of students are served in a half-hour period, and we clean, breakdown, and reset for lunch prep.

At Winthrop, there are six lunch “waves” consisting of a quick twentyfive minutes, the first starting at 10:40 a.m., and the sixth wave of students leaving the cafeteria at 1:40 p.m. This time frame is specific only to Winthrop; the other elementary schools, the middle school, and the high school in the New London School District all have their own iterations of lunch waves, but the principle of serving a lot of kids in a very short amount of time remains the same.

The USDA’s National School Lunch Program is the driving factor behind the structure of lunch in most American school cafeterias, with Brigaid being no exception. The program, originally funded as part of the National School Lunch Act of 1946, allows schools to be reimbursed for each lunch meal sold – a grand total of $ 3.39 per lunch for the 2018-2019 school year - but only if the meal is nutritionally compliant in a wide variety of categories. Following the Offer Vs Serve (OVS) subset of the program - with the goal being to offer a variety of meal components and eliminate unnecessary waste, rather than just serve the entire meal - each reimbursable meal must include at least three out of five defined components. Students must take a fruit or a vegetable, and are given a choice to take at least one - but not more than three – of the other components: a meat or meat alternate, a grain, and milk.

Got the basics? Good, but we’ve barely scratched the surface.

There are more complex nutritional guidelines to follow as well: minimum serving size, sodium limits, caloric intake, the subgroup of vegetable credited, saturated fat percentage…the list goes on and on. That $3.39 reimbursement rate must cover food, labor, and equipment, among other costs; in all, Brigaid’s target food cost for each dish is $1.25, including milk.

With different limits for the three age groups (elementary, middle, and high school), there’s some variation in serving size and flexibility between each school; however, with a fairly low return on investment, Brigaid is forced to be extremely creative in menu development. Take chicken souvlaki, for example: fresh chicken is processed into bitesize pieces; marinated with fresh lemon, herbs, and spices; skewered; and roasted in the oven. We then present the chicken with a madeto-order naan flatbread. We have plenty of other menu items that rotate on a monthly basis; with each school running a hot entrée daily and a pasta that changes weekly, there’s plenty of variation and exposure to new foods and ideas.

There’s always a silver lining to be found, though. We roast kale chips with a pinch of salt and a touch of oil, and we can hardly keep up with the demand. For a few of our dishes, we bake warm pans of cornbread for each wave of students, and serve slow-roasted, thyme-glazed carrots on the side. At the core of things, the act of preparing something so simple as our in-house, three-day fermented whole wheat pizza dough, or handseventies

- we start the day.”

There are days when the entrée doesn’t go over too well with the kids, even though we’ve put our heart and soul into developing it. There are times when older equipment fails and lunch must be produced for at least five hundred kids. There are moments when the staff have mentioned that it was easier before Brigaid took over: New London cafeteria staff are paid the same as before Brigaid stepped in, and we’re pushing them to learn, grow, and produce more and more every day. Transitioning from a heat-and-serve operation, to one producing scratchmade food daily, simply has challenges. I want everyone on my staff to be the best versions of themselves that they can be, but I’m not going to push my employees to overexert themselves, either. Head down, adapt, and move on.

rolled enchiladas served with beans simmered with sofrito and served with seasoned rice - and showing the kids that we care - is hopefully beneficial to these students in the long-run.

We also try to do what we can for New London and the surrounding community at large. Almost every Wednesday night during the school year, the Brigaid chefs in New London host a Community Meal at Bennie Dover Jackson Middle School. For $5, you’ll get a solid meal and a chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones. Come down and say hi.

Brigaid chefs, cooks, and personnel - myself included - try our best to navigate the mysterious waters of the industrial food complex. It’s not easy; we all place a serious amount of pressure on ourselves to do the best job we can with the given resources, to work within nutritional and financial constraints, and to produce the sheer volume of quality food needed in the limited hours allotted during the school day. Exposing kids to thoughtful, nutritious, and filling food - when some students might not receive anything of this sort outside of the school cafeteria – is an incredibly rewarding and humbling feeling. I was fortunate enough to land a position with this organization that is completely applicable to my Applied Food Studies degree from the Culinary Institute of America; a bit cliché, but I fell in love with using food as a vehicle to make a difference, and I’ve been fortunate to find like-minded people who are just as invested in the ride as I am.

Instead of inspirational quotes on our line, we have taped-up thank you notes and cards from the students. I always keep a rotating collection of cookbooks to draw inspiration from in the kitchen office, but this is counterbalanced with stacks of the newest government nutritional guidelines or Excel spreadsheets of newly developed Brigaid recipes we’re going to test that day. At Winthrop and the other schools where chefs run the kitchen, we try our best to “Make it Nice,” but perhaps we can be known for something similar - we’re really just trying to cook with a purpose.