To preserve suspense, we will not reveal who won the first challenge in the pilot episode of “A Plate Apart,” a proposed reality TV show featuring a culinary competition among Chicago Public Schools students.
The audience at a recent screening at Kendall College knows. “That’s my baby!” a family member of the winning student shouted when the moment played onscreen.
From a seat nearby, her 20-year-old baby groaned: “I told you not to do that.”
Who won? If the show is picked up for production, you will find out.
The producers of “A Plate Apart” fervently hope that you do. Having made the pilot, in which six CPS students vie for a $25,000 scholarship, they are now trying to sell the show.
Executive producer Michael Dolan said he conceived “A Plate Apart” out of horror over recent shootings of Chicago teenagers. A former creative producer for a video production company, he decided to make a TV show that would also serve as a mentorship program for at-risk youths.
And it isn’t just the students who are getting an opportunity through the show. Each high schooler is teamed with a mentor, a culinary student at Kendall College. The culinary students are competing for their own prize: a paid apprenticeship at mk restaurant, whose owner, Michael Kornick, is a judge for the show.
The project seeks to do good but also to be good television. Dolan and co-executive producer Brian Dinsmore interviewed about 30 students — participants in the culinary program at Washington High School run by Gloria Hafer — before choosing six they thought had compelling stories and a certain presence.
Five of the students, some of whom have graduated from high school, were in the screening audience, contending with jitters. “I just hope I didn’t say anything stupid,” said Samanta Sokolovic, 16, a junior at Brooks College Preparatory Academy.
“I hope I didn’t sweat as much as I think I did,” said Semaj Thomas, 20, who is now attending Washington College. “That kitchen was so hot.”
The audience listened as, onscreen, the students told their stories. Sokolovic described being one of five children raised by a single mother after her father “chose drugs over us.” Thomas reported that the only time he saw his father, who had been in prison for murder, the man was in a casket.
Though “A Plate Apart” is a competition and only one student will win the scholarship, unless additional sponsors allow the show to add more, the show is designed to be positive.
“There are no eliminations; it’s a point system,” Dolan said. “We’re not discouraging anyone, we’re trying to encourage everyone.”
“I come from the same place” as the CPS kids, said Erick Williams, executive chef at mk, who is the show’s host. “I live in North Lawndale. It’s a pleasure for me to work with kids who want to do this.”
Befitting its credo that “life skills are as important as knife skills,” the show also provides two mentor/coaches — Hafer and Taylorr Taylor, an addictions psychotherapist and doctoral student whose rise to success from a violence-plagued neighborhood Dolan read about in the Tribune.
Still, knife skills count. The pilot shows the students chopping and sauteing their way through the likes of porcini and braised rabbit ravioli with brown butter walnut sauce and curried lamb chops with ginger spinach and red wine reduction, the signature dishes of their Kendall partners.
“They did great,” said Bob McGinn, 24, one of the Kendall students.
At the post-screening reception, some family members still seemed amazed at the young chefs. “This came out of nowhere, absolutely nowhere,” said Danielle Honeywood, who had previously viewed her brother, Carnell, 20, mainly as a football and basketball jock.
Actually, Carnell Honeywood confessed, it had come out of hunger. He had passed by Hafer’s kitchen in high school at lunchtime; she was baking cookies.
Now his interest in cooking had brought him into a kitchen bristling with cameras and a shot at being on TV. Dolan and Dinsmore are hoping the show gets that shot.
“We have 13 episodes ready to rock ‘n’ roll,” Dinsmore said.
