Photo by Lucie Monk
“Anyone can get up on a podium,” Chef Chris Wadsworth admitted. “They’ll tell you that they fought their way to the top. They’ll say they can help kids. But I actually did it.”
Wadsworth dropped out of high school at age fifteen to permanently join the workforce, taking a full-time job at the Catfish Shack in Lafayette. His arms are tattooed. His hair is close-cropped. And, among the elite chefs of the country, he has made the uncommon choice to never attend culinary school.
Wadsworth, along with his wife Sommer, is the unpolished face of a new movement in Baton Rouge. Capital city residents: if you’ve opened a paper or scrolled through your Facebook page in the past few months, you’ve probably heard of Triumph Kitchen. And you’ll keep hearing about it.
Wadsworth is no stranger to buzz. He’s been listed among Louisiana Cookin’ magazine’s Chefs to Watch and featured on Bravo’s Top Chef. His artsy, unforgettable cuisine landed Baton Rouge’s Restaurant IPO on OpenTable’s list of Top 100 Hot Spot restaurants in the entire nation.
But he left his high-profile position as executive chef at IPO to start Triumph Kitchen. The non-profit culinary initiative is geared toward high school drop-outs in the area: kids ages sixteen to twenty-two who, like Wadsworth, aren’t primed to follow traditional career paths.
The fourteen-week program graduated its first class at the end of May. Triumph’s inaugural seven students, most recruited from the Mentorship Academy downtown, were taught a range of skills, all designed to prepare them not just for careers in the hospitality industry, but for life and adulthood in a broader sense.
“I teach them the real-life side of [the restaurant industry]—how do you get along with a difficult boss? How do you get along with the guy next to you that doesn’t carry his load?” said Wadsworth. His assessment of necessary kitchen skills comes from twenty-two active years in the business, not a cursory reading of “Chapter Two: Necessary Kitchen Skills.”
At this point, he’s seen it all; every spill and crackle of behind-the-scenes kitchen madness informs his lessons. “How do you deal with the printer going off on a Friday night that doesn’t stop printing—and you think it’s broken, but it’s not—you’re just so damn busy? Those are things they don’t teach you in culinary school. And those are the things you need to know! Those are survival skills…and that’s what I focus on.”
But even as he finds himself in an official teaching capacity, Wadsworth isn’t beholden to a curriculum. “I had this whole plan drawn out,” he said of Triumph’s first go-round, “and I thought for sure I was going to be able to stick with it. But you’ve got to be able to adjust to every single student that comes in here. The curriculum’s not as important as the inner person I’m working on with these kids.”
The program’s second class started on June 2 with twenty kids, and already the differences are showing. Because the first group consisted mostly of high school seniors who were earning a form of school credit with their time at Triumph, Wadsworth outfitted them with a broader, more basic skill set.
“Now this next group is hungry for being in the business,” said Wadsworth, his own eyes wide and eager. “So you’ve just got to be able to toggle back and forth as to what they need the most.”
Other adjustments have been made along the way. “Any students that come to us have to get a high school equivalency diploma while they’re with us. It has to happen,” said Wadsworth. “Now a lot of them can’t accomplish that in fourteen weeks, but it is taught at Triumph.”
The Wadsworths proctor the placement test at Triumph Kitchen and accompany the students to the actual GED testing site. Each student that moves through the program is required to have a mentor—a responsible party who accompanies the student to all of his or her initial interviews and acts as a support figure throughout the fourteen weeks spent at Triumph Kitchen.
But if the kids can’t supply a mentor, the Wadsworths step in. “A lot of people don’t know, but teenage and young homelessness in Baton Rouge is a problem. You don’t see it every day, but they’re out there. There are a lot of them.
“For those kids, the support system’s not there—we become their support system.”
Triumph’s second class will benefit from the school’s 3,000-square-foot kitchen, due to be completed in June. “Eighteen burners, five ovens, four fryers, an eighteen-foot line,” rattled off Wadsworth in anticipation. Mornings will be spent with half the class operating the front of Triumph Kitchen, learning the computer system as well as cash handling. The kids in the back will fuel the kitchen. In the afternoon, the two groups come together to learn life skills from both Chef Chris and Sommer.
And a program with the ambition and scope of Triumph Kitchen can’t rely on platitudes and condescension. “Sommer and I are the only people that most of them trust,” said Wadsworth.
He’s a chef who, at the top of his game, dropped everything to dash madly after a dream—to share his unlikely success with others, to set a new course for underprivileged kids, to shake up futures that might otherwise have been predictable.
Now that’s not a gamble you take lightly.
