On Wednesday afternoon, long after the last student has left the WCC, Chef Van Rooyen and his team fill the kitchen with sounds of chopping, searing, and mixing, as they prepare roughly 200 pounds of chicken and 15 gallons of sauce in preparation of the entree for lunch service the following day: Sauteed Coconut Chicken Curry.
On Thursday, I arrived in Chef Michael Van Rooyen’s office in the kitchen of the Wright Community Center, and I was surrounded by the sounds of cooks wrapping up their stations and entering his office to sign out for the day. From his stint as a 16 year-old washing dishes at a local Italian restaurant to receiving two degrees from the New England Culinary Institute (NECI), Chef Van Rooyen has had quite the journey to become the SAGE food services director at Lakeside.
Hailing from Brisbane, Australia, Chef Van Rooyen recalls that his first experience in the culinary industry (working as a dishwasher) wasn’t much of a dream, but rather something that he spontaneously fell into. “I needed some money to have some fun on the weekends,” he said, “[and so] I got a part-time job a couple of days a week.” Having finished school with relatively poor grades, Chef Van Rooyen remembers that — after being promoted from dishwasher to pizza cook — he decided to simply “keep on cooking and stay in the industry.”
Chef Van Rooyen went on to attend the New England Culinary Institute from 1999–2002, earning an associate’s degree in culinary arts, and a bachelor’s degree in food and beverage management, which entailed roughly three years of coursework and internships.
“I had a good time,” he reflected. “I was in my early 20s, I enjoyed the cooking part of it and learning, but I also enjoyed just the college experience.”
Later in his career, while working as a banquet chef for a hotel in New Hampshire in 2013, Chef Van Rooyen decided to answer a job advertisement for a position at the Kimball Union Academy, and he’s stayed in school kitchens ever since — spending time first at New Hampshire’s Kimball Union Academy before joining Washington’s St. Thomas School and then Lakeside. He fondly recollects his experiences at all three: “The mission [at each school] is to find out what the community likes and what the community needs, and then to provide it. They’re all similar in the way that there’s just a nice vibe working with a school versus working with a hotel or a corporation or a restaurant, because you see the customers all the time.”
As the manager of the kitchen, Chef Van Rooyen is tasked with a “general overseeing of everybody else’s work.” He remarks that although it varies from manager to manager due to preference, he prefers to have a cooking role in addition to his managerial duties. He reveals, “I like to get my hands on things; it’s just the way I am.” In addition to cooking and overseeing the kitchen on a daily basis, Chef Van Rooyen is also tasked with ordering the necessary supplies and ingredients for each meal service, scheduling, menu planning, resolving human resources issues, hiring/recruiting, and being a point of contact between the SAGE staff and the school community.
Having gone to a boarding school, Chef Van Rooyen admits that he never really thought about what was happening back in the kitchen while he proceeded through the line to receive his meals each day. As a young Chef Van Rooyen—and likely many of us Lakeside students—thought, “There’s the food. It just showed up.” He now emphasizes, “It takes a lot of work [for the food to be there]. I don’t think anyone realized that … but I think it’s appreciated.”
Chef Van Rooyen details that working in a school kitchen isn’t any easier than working in a restaurant. “I think people have an expectation that when they answer a job for a school kitchen, it’s going to be a pretty easy job,” he explained. “And then when they get here, they find that they’re running around as much as they would in any other restaurant.” The summer break also poses significant challenges to his hiring process due to the prospect of getting laid off for two months. “You want to have a good crew and you want to keep them,” he emphasized. “But I can’t pay people to stand around and do nothing.”
Another core aspect of managing a kitchen is curating the menu each day. Chef Van Rooyen describes this process as “complicated” as SAGE requires numerous nutritional standards and procedural requirements to be met. In addition to the standards that SAGE enforces, having variety is another factor to consider: “I don’t want to have chicken here and chicken there and chicken here all the same day.” Chef Van Rooyen also insists that the menu should cater to the wants and needs of the community. “You learn what their favorites are,” he noted. “I watch when kids go through the line; sometimes we have something that wasn’t a good meal. Other times, we got to do this one again.”
I couldn’t help but ask whether we’d have another ice cream sundae bar again, and Chef Van Rooyen responded with a laugh. “We’ll do that again,” he said. “It just needs to be set up so that you guys can get it faster and not have a big rugby scrum in the middle of the dining room.” Besides having a “big rugby scrum” in the dining hall, Chef Van Rooyen reflects that his only other fear is not being able to get the food ready on time. “It’s actually a common thing among chefs to talk about dreams where they’re in a kitchen and they’ve got 20 people out in the dining room waiting for their dinner and no matter what they do, they just can’t seem to get the food on the plate.”
From scrubbing dishes at 16 to overseeing a bustling school kitchen, Chef Van Rooyen has channeled countless hours of hard work, a passion for food, and a deep desire to serve the community to create the everyday meals we take for granted.
Quotes have been edited for clarity.
