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Last Updated: Feb 13, 2017 - 1:45:37 AM |
World-renowned Chocolatier Chef Erika Davis is sure that students at The College of The Bahamas Culinary and Hospitality Management Institute (CHMI) have learned at least one lesson from her – the culinary hustle.
An alumna of the “Bravo!” television network’s popular ‘Top Chef’ franchise, Chef Davis is the creator of the three-day Minority Chef Summit, launched at CHMI on Friday, May 2nd, 2014.
“The culinary hustle is, [the students] watch me fly from Nassau to Vegas, or from Vegas back to Nassau, or to Miami or New York, and they follow me on Facebook,” she said. “They should see what culinary hustle is, because the culinary industry has changed. You can’t just graduate out of college and expect to make a decent living. It doesn’t work that way.”
“You have to be on your hustle, you have to be multi-tasking. You have to know how to work social media. You have to work your career.”
The Minority Chef Summit came about as a result of Chef Davis’ interaction with the CHMI students while she was working at Graycliff Chocolatier as Creative Director a few years ago.
“You can walk into an all-Black college in the United States, but you can’t walk into an all-Black culinary school, and the feeling that overcame me was just such pride, and my heart filled up with such amazement,” she recalled. “I [wondered] how I could just keep it to myself… I wanted to do something that would be good for them.”
Those early encounters with COB students grew from Chef Davis’ initial interaction with Chef Addiemae Farrington, a faculty member at CHMI. Chef Farrington remembered those initial meetings well. She was excited about the opportunity for COB students to meet and form relationships with expert chefs.
“Our students were exposed to the exciting foods of the world, and the new trends,” she said.
This exposure of the students was an important motivator for Chef Davis.
“My passion is even more for our future culinarians, because if we don’t invest in our future, what will we have from our history of working so hard? The people before us made these big footsteps for us to fill, and we’re making footprints for them to fill, but we have to teach them to fill [those footsteps] the proper way,” she said.
“That’s what Minority Chef Summit is about: reaching out to our young ones, being able to inspire, to motivate, to educate, to have an ear open.”
The summit provided an opportunity for top chefs to be a part of educational seminars, demonstrations, and specialty dining events. Among the line-up of world renowned chefs were Bryant Terry, Ron Duprat, Asha Gomez and Addiemae Farrington. Chef Keith Rhodes, a James Beard Semifinalist for Best Chef Southeast (2011), also participated in the event. Chef Rhodes has been voted the city of Wilmington, North Carolina’s best chef for three consecutive years.
“We are very flattered to be here,” he said. “We, unfortunately, are not involved in many minority gatherings, and being here today is a solidification of what we do just on a culinary level and what we stand for on the other side of that as well, in community, in community inspiration.”
Chef Rhodes is used to being the sole minority chef at many of the events in which he participates, a state of affairs he refers to as “very polarizing, and very lonely at times.”
“But I know that God has put us there for a reason: to be there,” he said. “And we hope that we can continually inspire people, and have people that are brave, that are strong and that are willing to share. That’s one of the reasons we are here, to share our story with a lot of the youth.”
Chef Rhodes said that being in The Bahamas was not so far removed from being in the United States: black Bahamians and African Americans, he said, are ‘leaves on the same tree.’ He spoke to a common experience, whether it be distractions that keep one from maximizing potential or simply the size of the task at hand.
© Copyright 2014 by thebahamasweekly.com
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