High school students take over Town resto in “pop-up” fundraiser
Originally filed at roneade.com
Longfields-Davidson Heights students serve a four-course dinner and raise about $3,000 towards a skateboard park.
Archive note. This page preserves work first published on roneade.com between 2014 and 2016. Ron Eade died in August 2015; nothing on this site is new writing in his voice, and the reporting below is presented as a dated record rather than as current coverage. Restaurants, prices and staffing described here reflect the moment the piece was filed.
The night
Six graduating Grade 12 students from the culinary programme at Longfields-Davidson Heights Secondary School took over the kitchen of a forty-eight-seat restaurant on Elgin Street on the Monday and served a four-course pop-up dinner for about thirty-five paying guests.
Tickets were $65, or $85 with wine pairings. The menu: halibut ceviche, a home-made herbed ricotta stuffed raviolo, arugula-pesto marinated chicken, and a dark chocolate lava cake with rhubarb sorbet. Every component was made from scratch. The evening raised roughly $3,000 towards a $400,000 skateboard park, a community association project due to begin construction within weeks at a park in Ottawa's Centretown.
Eade's framing was warm and unfussy: he wrote that he was always heartened to see young people develop real kitchen skills, as proof that good food is not always found in a pizza box.
How it was built
The menu was a collaboration. "This was a collaborative effort between students, the restaurant's owner-chef, and myself," said school instructor Kent Van Dyk, a Red Seal chef who had set up the high-school culinary arts programme four years earlier when the school opened in suburban Barrhaven.
"We went through the menu to see what the restaurant does, then the chef came down to the school and talked to the kids about dinner plans. We worked together to see what was possible."
The first course had a direct lineage. "The first course, halibut ceviche with chilled spring pea soup, was inspired by a meal we had during a recent field trip to Toronto where we were served ceviche by a chef at a downtown restaurant," Van Dyk said. "The chef showed us the technique, and the kids thought we could do that at our fundraising dinner. They wanted to pair it with something seasonal, so that's how we came up with chilled pea soup."
The teaching argument
Tony Christoforatos, who had recently joined the programme as a second chef-instructor, made the strongest claim in the piece. He said he had never seen such a comprehensive curriculum for that age group — one that covered food, hygiene and nutrition rather than cooking alone.
"It challenges their notions about where food really comes from," he said. "We demystify the cooking process and get them thinking away from the notion that food comes from a box. So we give them the basic building blocks to prepare food. Here almost all the culinary theory comes through hands-on work. Some of the kids are really amazing, while others are still developing menu skills and motor dexterity. The dinner exposes them to the reality of restaurant service."
And then the line that carries the piece: "There's nothing more pressure-bound than restaurant service. And these kids have enormous pride in their work."
The restaurant's side
The restaurant's owners had been regular contributors to the school programme, taking part each year in its annual gala dinner. This was the second graduating class; in four years the course had taken about 250 students, of whom thirty-six had graduated from the programme at that point. Two of the students were photographed doing prep work in cramped quarters and then plating the ceviche and pea soup course alongside the chef-owner.
Why this piece is in the archive
Culinary training was one of Eade's standing beats, and he made a point of following it at every level — secondary school here, and a college teaching restaurant in Niagara a few months earlier, where a comparable programme ran a student-staffed dining room in front of paying guests. The post-secondary end of the same pipeline runs through Algonquin College, which appears repeatedly across these pages as the training ground for chefs who later turn up in competition results.
Read against the closure interviews from the same month, in which one owner worried aloud that the talent pool was eroding, this piece is the other half of the argument.