According to Barry Koslow, Executive Chef of The Pendry Hotel on The Wharf in Washington, DC, it’s important for cooks to attend a culinary program.
“It’s a foundation,” he says. “You need something to build off. It’s hard to step into a kitchen that’s at full speed without that foundation. You’re still going to have a ton to learn no matter what kitchen you walk into, but having a really solid footing is going to help you exponentially.”
Two of his cooks who have worked alongside him since The Pendry opened in October 2022 laid that foundation at DC Central Kitchen. Andre graduated from the Culinary Job Training program in 2022, Dorothy in 2017.
Andre’s road from DCCK to The Pendry included a three-month stint in Silver Bay, New York before ending up just over a mile away from DC Central Kitchen’s new headquarters in Southwest DC as he accepted a role at The Pendry on The Wharf. Dorothy’s culinary journey took her from the CJT program to a number of top DC hotels before joining The Pendry more than two years ago.
What brought each cook to DC Central Kitchen was different, but they say their shared experiences as CJT alumni make the day-to-day collaboration between them even more rewarding.
“I just wanted to try something different,” Andre says. “I really wasn’t good at cooking. But once I figured out that I liked it, I just kept going and I’m still here.”
“I was just coming from getting incarcerated,” Dorothy says. “I was always interested in cooking, but I wanted more for myself and wanted to start over.”
When Dorothy signed up for the CJT program, she didn’t know about the life skills aspect of the program. “I knew that they had to give you the basic training, to get in the kitchen, but I had no idea about the self-empowerment class, classes to get you ready to get in the professional field with different people and how to express yourself.”
Some of the lessons preached by the program’s beloved self-empowerment teacher Jeffrey Rustin still stick with Dorothy. Chief among them? “Trust the process. Don’t rush the process.”
Dorothy applied that mindset to her career arc, embracing the opportunity to “learn as I go because different restaurants, different hotels have different styles and quality.” She says it paid off for her “to start small and work my way up.”
In addition to using the lessons she learned to help herself, Dorothy continues to spread the word about the Kitchen across social media. “I really want to give other people the same opportunity that I was given and let them know there’s other alternatives. Some people just need help to guide them to where they want to be.”
Speaking of the pair of valued CJT graduates on his team, Chef Koslow says that “watching their growth has been very, very rewarding.”
Though they didn’t go through the program in the same year or class, that common base of experience and teaching has clearly helped when they share a kitchen. “It’s such a sense of pride for them and it brings them camaraderie. They achieved something together,” says Chef Koslow. “They’ll always have that bond.”
“DC is such a food destination that we need talent, everyone needs talent,” he continues. “A lot of times that journey is not just picking people straight out of the best fine dining restaurants. Sometimes those people are diamonds in the rough. You watch them grow and that is almost more rewarding than hiring the person that already had all the training and all the advantages that a lot of people haven’t had.”
For more information about hiring one of our certified and skilled CJT program graduates, please contact our Chief Impact Officer, Ja’Sent Brown, at jasbrown@dccentralkitchen.org.