Cross Culinary Champs Bring Home The Gold

Punchy restaurant pitches and smoke from searing scallops filled Wilbur Cross Friday morning as students showed off lessons learned from participating in a nationwide youth culinary competition — and from living in a small city as culturally rich as the meals served up by the school’s award-winning cooking crew.

Students whisked, chopped, and stirred during a three-course press conference held inside Cross’ culinary classroom by city officials hungry to celebrate the high schoolers’ recent success in the National ProStart Invitational, a culinary arts championship which drew nearly 50 teams from across the country to an intensive contest in Washington D.C. last week.

Two different teams from Cross were chosen to represent the state of Connecticut in that competition: A culinary crew tasked with presenting a three-course, fine-dining menu to judges over the course of an hour, and a culinary management collective who presented a business model for an imaginary restaurant informed by New Haven’s real-life dining scene. 

The culinary management team brought home gold for their first-prize idea of ​“Nafas Kitchen,” a casual restaurant serving dishes from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the Levant region while offering support services for refugee staff. The project drew inspiration from New Haven’s own self-starter immigrant employment models, like Havenly and Sanctuary Kitchen, both of which produce some of the city’s tastiest eats while providing refugees not only with a source of income but with services such as English as a second language and digital literacy classes — and, as bakers and chefs for those nonprofits have put it in the past, opportunity to share personal stories through the art of cooking. 

On Friday, members of the student team recapitulated their presentation — which spanned marketing strategy, interior design plans, and menu details — for that fictive restaurant not for critics, but for local fans like New Haven Public Schools Supt. Iline Tracey and Mayor Justin Elicker. That was the symbolic entrée of a presser that offered praise from teachers and city leaders as appetizers and concluded with the plating of pan-roasted beef tenderloin and chocolate joconde cake with passionfruit mousse.

“It’s important for us to find different pathways for our students,” Tracey said. ​“Even if you don’t choose a culinary pathway,” she said to the students calmly dicing daikon, pureeing parsnips, and toasting pecans in a cramped corner of the room, ​“the collaborative skills you’ve learned here will carry you through life.” 

Mayor Elicker jumped in with a city-wide takeaway. ​“We have a recipe that works in our city: We welcome every single person no matter what they look like, no matter what their background is,” he said to his captive audience. ​“I have to imagine you relied on your personal experience to help guide how you formed your pitch,” he inquired of the students fresh off their success.

Three students then took to the podium to answer Elicker’s ask and give a taste of how they made their case to a national panel of restaurateurs. 

“As-salamu alaykum, my name is Adam!” junior Adam Sharqawe introduced himself. Peers Charlotte Buterbaugh and Paulette Jara joined him in declaring in unison: ​“We are Nafas Kitchen!” 

“Our restaurant name embodies the heart of our mission, as Nafas in Arabic means breath and spirit,” Buterbaugh said. ​“It symbolizes how we hope to create a safe haven for refugees as they open a new chapter in their journey.”

“Our dishes reflect West Asian cuisine from across the region, but specifically from the countries where our refugees come from. This includes the Levant, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Jara continued.

“Nafas is a mission-oriented concept for a receptive customer base of educated, professional and global-minded individuals that live and work in the downtown area,” Sharqawe added.

“We hope you join us as we become one around the table!” the group cheered in conclusion.

Off stage, Sharqawe told the Independent that the group originally wanted to put forward a project that followed in the footsteps of their hometown community, merging the impressive advocacy efforts of organizations like Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) while contributing to the city’s ever-growing, diverse food landscape. ​“Restaurants like Havenly and Sanctuary Kitchen have similar ideas,” to Nafas, he said. ​“If I’m not mistaken, both are nonprofits,” he noted. Nafas would still be unique if it were to join New Haven’s array of restaurants, he qualified, due to its for-profit model.

He said Nafas would create its own refugee employment program offering training ​“in understanding cultural nuances, like tipping culture,” in addition to broader services like language classes. Nafas restaurant could then hire from that pool of candidates alongside other local food and hospitality businesses. 

Sharqawe, who was born in Palestine and moved to New Haven with his parents as a young child, jumped onto the culinary management team after the crew had already formulated their preliminary concept for the restaurant. He said the group was receptive to his ideas, despite the fact that he joined late in the game. For example, he revised their original description of the cuisine from ​“Middle Eastern” to ​“West Asian,” arguing that ​“When you say ​‘East,’ you’re positioning the speaker as someone from the West, which is an inherently Eurocentric view.”

“That renaming clarified the menu for me. West Asia is much more defined as a geographic region with real boundaries.”

Sharqawe was tasked, among other responsibilities, with drawing up a theoretical menu for the restaurant. He included dishes like Moghrabieh, a type of couscous that he said his mom often prepares for his family.

“Cooking is a large part of my culture,” he said, recalling how after watching his dad prepare hummus and his mom make up some labneh, he practiced translating their home-spun methods into measured recipes that would be replicable by a wider audience and legible to the competition’s judges. 

“My family’s had lots of conversations about how it would be really good to start a restaurant,” he said, as one way to share their culture with their new community. ​“Now I actually know what it would mean to do that.”

That said, while he might consider a future as a restauranteur, he said he’s hoping to start an academic career studying postcolonial theory once he graduates high school. He’s interested in another kind of ​“boiling point,” the sociological phenomenon in his field of choice that he defined as when ​“some structural change takes place but the realities of people who are oppressed stays the same.” 

His own parents studied law before moving to America. His mom used to work as a judge, he said, and got a degree in architecture in the States and now works as an interior designer.

But, he said, she didn’t have any say when it came to drawing up the imagined interior of Nafas. ​“I told her, I don’t want you to help me!” Sharqawe laughed. He and his teammates were helping one another figure it out from scratch.

Then he spotted his peers plating scallops atop pea puree with snap peas, beet microgreens, pomegranate and citrus aioli. 

“Oh, the scallops are my favorite dish of theirs!” he declared. ​“They’re delicious. They’re amazing. They’re the best — because you can’t get them anywhere else.”

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