I’ve just discovered a fabulous dining spot. On the menu: carrot-fennel coconut soup with lemon grass, striped bass with Thai sauce on a bed of sesame soba noodles and sauteed kohlrabi with watercress. I’d give you the phone number of the place, but it’s almost impossible to get in–unless you’re enrolling in kindergarten.
Last year, the Calhoun School, an elite private academy on the city’s Upper West Side, dropped the catering company that had been making lunches for its 650 students. Instead, it brought in Chef Bobo, a.k.a. Robert Surles, a professor at the French Culinary Institute, private chef to baseball star Derek Jeter and executive chef for Harry Connick Jr.’s New Orleans club.
Such a move might be construed as yet another uptown badge–along with the Prada bags and $1,000 digitally wired strollers that whisk up and down the street outside the school. But it’s also a solution to a problem plaguing schools here and elsewhere: meals that are neither appetizing nor nutritious.
Surles has two goals: to improve nutrition and to educate the children’s palates, because he believes both have been discarded in our gobble-down, fast-food culture. “Children develop their taste for good food early in life,” he says in his soft Southern accent. “They’ll even eat vegetables if they’re prepared the right way–using fresh ingredients and some fun.”
Eight-year-old Jessica, who has big serious brown eyes and a sprinkling of freckles along the top of her cheeks, agrees. “I grew up without vegetables–I never ate spinach, I mean neeever,” she says, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hands. “But I tried Chef Bobo’s Popeye soup, and he changed my mind forever.”
Chef Bobo is the kids’ affectionate name for Surles, a 60-year-old who seems to be a blend of indulgent grandfather and Santa Claus: white hair, jolly girth, easy smile and a gold earring. Born in Texas and raised in New Orleans, Surles spent 25 years as a human resources executive at a large airline. In 1999, he took an early retirement package to enroll in the French Culinary Institute, where he trained for a second career as a chef.
What drew Surles to Calhoun was the chance to do something meaningful and the freedom to experiment. He and his staff make everything from scratch: salad dressings, sauces, bread and chicken stock for soup. There’s not a chicken nugget in sight. Though the fare is predominantly vegetarian, each menu comprises soup, entree (meat or fish), vegetable, starch and fresh fruit. There’s also a sandwich and salad bar for the peanut-butter-and-jam holdouts, and milk, juice or iced tea.
“I like to wake up in my kitchen,” says Surles, who arrives at the school around 5:30 a.m. For kids who are dropped off early without breakfast, there’s oatmeal, fruit, bagels, homemade croissants and muffins. That’s quite a contrast to many schools where the cafeteria is usually closed in the morning, and the child who arrives hungry has little choice but to go to a vending machine stocked with soft drinks and junk food.
The public school struggle
But would the experiment at Calhoun work at other schools? It’s all very well for a private school to hire graduates of culinary institutes, but it’s quite another thing for public institutions to follow suit. Many schools outsource food services to businesses whose only goal is to make a profit. Some cafeterias even have the same fast-food kiosks usually found in shopping mall food courts: Blimpie’s, Dominoes, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
In Chicago Public Schools, private food services provide students’ meals, according to Sue Susanke, the Chicago Board of Education’s Manager of Food Services and Warehousing. The companies must follow the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s healthy menu planning recommendations, which include targets on calories, fat and saturated fat. The fries are oven-baked, and they are testing a salad entry, which has been successful in the schools where it has been offered. They are also trying to increase the number of students participating in the breakfast program: currently 93,000 Chicago children eat breakfast at school, but 300,000 eat lunch. The problem, she says, is that kids don’t arrive early enough at school, so this fall, breakfasts will be offered in the classroom instead.
At Evanston Public Schools, portion control is a key part of the school lunches. “We’re trying to make the kids aware that you can eat too much of any food, even the healthy ones,” says Toni Fisher, director of food services. “We’re issuing daily bulletins with eating tips–but you have to be subtle with kids because if they think they’re being told what to do, they’ll just do the opposite.
“And you have to offer them choice: We give our students a selection of 15 different entrees, from chicken burgers to fresh deli sandwiches. We have a scramble system where the kids can put together their own meals, including side dishes, a grain and an entree. We’re trying to give them eating habits for life, not just something they do while they’re in school.”
Fisher was able to get funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture so that she could expand the types of fresh fruit and vegetables offered. So instead of just having red apples, they now offer Granny Smith. When strawberries were in season last spring, they were delivered fresh to the schools daily.
“School lunches have a reputation for being cheap,” Fisher says. “And granted, we need to make them affordable for all students, but you can’t offer fresh fruit and vegetables for $1.50. We charge between $3 and $3.50 for lunches and this allows us to offer both variety and freshness.”
Getting out of the kitchen
Back in New York, part of the success of the Calhoun program is going beyond the lunchroom and into the classrooms.
Surles talks to the kids about where the food is grown and does demonstrations in science and social studies classes. For the Harvest Festival, a school-wide community service project, he created a Tanzanian lunch menu. By lunchtime, he’s back in the cafeteria, cutting up some vegetables or legumes for the students to sample while they’re standing in line. A particular favorite with the kids are his rutabaga fries: Seasoned and oven-baked, they’re cut like french fries, but a lot healthier.
But even ketchup was banished when Chef Bobo first arrived. “When I started here, I took away the ketchup for two months,” Surles says. “I wanted the kids to taste their food–if they kept smothering it, it wouldn’t matter what we did. Ketchup has more sugar than ice cream.” But when one student, for Halloween, dressed up as a ketchup bottle and pinned a sign to her costume that read: “Chef Bobo, please take me back,” Surles relented. The ketchup is back on the counter, though now it’s organic.
The ketchup ban illustrates just one of the challenges as parents and chefs take on the role of food police. “The only way to create change is for parents to get angry about what’s happening in school cafeterias,” says Surles. “And they need to set an example themselves at home too.”
Surles knew the program was a success when he started to run out of food: More students were choosing to eat his dishes, rather than bringing their own lunches or heading out to the nearest fast-food joint. He started off buying one case of vegetables a day; now he’s up to five. Meanwhile, the quantity of pasta has dropped from 90 pounds to 30.
Surles and his staff are continually evaluating the dishes, deciding which work and which don’t. Initially, for instance, the kids found his homemade macaroni and cheese too dry. Now he cooks the pasta and sauce separately, and combines them just as they’re served.
“Kids learn through their senses–sight, sound, touch, taste and smell–cooking involves all of them,” he says.
He also teaches an after-school cooking club. Much like Alice Waters, who started the Edible Schoolyard project in Northern California to teach kids how food is grown and cooked, Surles believes that every student should be required to take a cooking course in order to graduate: “Learning how to feed yourself and others is a life skill–one that we completely overlook with serious consequences.”
But the kids here seem to be having more fun than taking things seriously. In the lunchroom, three boys are having a “worm eating” contest with their soba noodles, and two girls talk to each other on their banana phones.
Chef Bobo is having fun too. “There aren’t many restaurants where the diners stand on their chairs and clap for you,” he says. “The kids are so honest and direct about how they feel. The best day was when a grade three student asked me for the recipe for my cauliflower soup–she wanted to take it home to her mother.”
