Calhoun Hired Derek Jeter's Chef, and the Ketchup Left

My entire cooking career rests on ketchup.

The chef was Robert Surles, known to the school as Chef Bobo. He arrived around five-thirty in the morning. "It's my own kitchen," he said, "and I like to wake up my kitchen." Every day there was a sandwich menu, a salad bar, a soup, an entrée, a starch and a vegetable. Children ate a piece of fruit before, say, a bagel. He made a syrup of mint, sugar and ginger for the iced tea and put it on the tables, until the smaller children started drinking it straight and it had to be rationed.

I also ration syrup. Mine is maple and the person drinking it straight is me.

The trouble started at home. That September, according to the school's own account, a nine-year-old known to her family as a fussy eater came through the door and asked her mother, before even taking off her knapsack, whether she could make cauliflower soup. She had asked Chef Bobo for the recipe at lunch. The school described the mother's reaction as surprise mixed with fear, which is the correct reaction. The surprise is that a nine-year-old said "cauliflower." The fear is that she wasn't asking you to buy it.

It spread. The chef sent recipes home because children wanted their parents to serve what they ate at school. For Christmas, the New Yorker noted, one student asked his parents for a Cuisinart.

I tried this in reverse. I sent a recipe to school with the youngest, my famous pasta, which is pasta. It came back in her backpack two days later with a fruit snack stuck to it, unreviewed.

The program outlived the chef. When he retired, Calhoun hired Lisa Locke, another French Culinary Institute graduate, in August 2021. Five chefs now each develop two weeks of menus, for 650 students and staff, and she describes her customers as "the most brutally honest critics—kids."

She is right. I have three of them. Last night I served a vegetable, and the middle one asked whether it came with a recipe card from someone qualified. I said yes. He asked to see it. I handed him the ketchup.