Grieshaber has big plans: Over the next few years, some $7 million of Goldsbury’s money will fund an additional building more than five times the size of the present one. The remainder will be spread out among all three CIA campuses, with $20 million earmarked for 150 scholarships a year, $3 million for creating an expanded CFA program in San Antonio, and $5 million going toward a new Hyde Park facility specializing in Latin American cuisine. Over time, the student body at the Center will triple from 40 to 120 a year. Other additions will include a traditional Mexican cocina, or kitchen, and a Yucatán-style underground oven for making dishes like cochinita pibil—pit-roasted pork. The CFA even hopes to eventually help open a restaurant featuring dishes from different countries—paella from Spain, black beans and rice from Costa Rica, moles from Mexico.
Just a year and a half into the experiment, the school is already beginning to hit its mark. On a typical weekday, two shifts of between 12 and 18 students rotate through the kitchens, busily whisking, chopping, and grilling, as well as sucking on the occasional burned finger. In age the students range from 18 to fifty-something. All possess some food-service experience, but they have vastly different levels of education and sophistication. All have earned high school diplomas or the equivalent; some have graduate degrees. A surprising number have never tasted anything as exotic as a radish, a leek, or an artichoke, while others have experience preparing demi-glaces and confits. The younger enrollees have little work experience; the more mature ones have risen far in the careers they are now seeking to dump. But while the student body at most other culinary schools is primarily Anglo, the Center has the opposite profile. Its classes are open to all, but thanks to San Antonio’s ethnic makeup, some 70 percent of the students are Hispanic.
If you listen to their stories, they form a composite picture of the upwardly mobile Latino in America today. Joe Saenz, who is 24, graduated from college with a degree in English. “I thought I would write, or travel and be some kind of rogue,” he says with a grin at his own naïveté. As is typical of culinary students, he has always liked to cook: “All the women in my family would make buñuelos together,” he says, referring to a type of crisp Mexican dough fritter, “so when I was twelve, I persuaded them to let me help.” Cooking was just a hobby until he went to work for prominent local restaurateur Cappy Lawton, himself a vocal advocate of a Hispanic-oriented cooking academy. Now Saenz intends to graduate from the CIA and then open a small restaurant of his own. Toward the other end of the age spectrum is Tracey Garza, 42, formerly a successful but bored medical administrator: “I could have done that job in my sleep.” After a year and a half of delivering lunches to office buildings and moonlighting as a caterer, with hardly any rest, she thought: “There has to be a better way.” Eventually she hopes to start a company to handle corporate dinners and parties for the doctors who used to be her bosses.
But the story that best illustrates the potential of the CFA to change lives is probably that of Joseph Dominguez. Stocky, with a goatee and long sideburns, the 32-year-old has learned in the school of hard knocks. “Back in my young life,” he says, “I hung out with the wrong crowd.” Before enrolling in the CFA, he was a low-paid line cook for a large hotel chain; by the time he finished the program, his skills and attitude had improved so much that he had been promoted to sous-chef. The day before graduation, he celebrated by getting an indelible diploma. Stretched out on a dental-style chair, he watched as a tattoo artist’s needle buzzed away at his burly forearm, tracing shafts of wheat and the name of his new alma mater: “Center for Foods of the Americas.”
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