Chef Jonathan Cambra oversees the creation of approximately 25,000 meals per week when school is in session at Roger Williams University. It’s a daunting challenge in an industry in which the school’s director of culinary operations said consistency in food quality “is everything.” He joined the university and Bon Appétit Management Co. in 2014 after more than 30 years of experience in the hospitality industry.
You came to Roger Williams University in 2014 with more than 30 years of experience in hospitality. Why shift from a career track working as a top executive chef to leading culinary operations for a local university? I wasn’t looking for a career change. I had already spent 10 years at Castle Hill Inn, and then I had shifted over to the Boat House Waterfront Dining in Tiverton, and I highly respected, and still do, Newport Restaurant Group. It just so happened that a friend who worked at Roger Williams University mentioned that Roger Williams and Bon Appétit Management Co. were going to be making some changes, and I know that their ideals are in line with my culinary career. They share the same core values as I do in terms of working with local farmers and top-notch food vendors that supply us with high-quality ingredients. We’re talking about sustainability, the local food movement, engaging in conversations with farmers and becoming lifelong friends with partners through the hospitality industry.
How does the food quality, and challenges making it each day, compare to the competitive restaurant industry you worked in? The biggest challenge we face with our dining program is the daily changes to our menus. It’s difficult to become consistent as a chef when one day we’re serving a roasted leg of lamb with a rosemary demi sauce for dinner, and the next day we’re serving a grilled local swordfish. Consistency is everything in our industry.
Our main comfort food station is called Classics, and that menu changes for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week. It means the cook working at those stations needs to understand technique. For example, once you understand the roasting technique, you can roast a leg of lamb, a bone-in pork loin, or a beef round – and that helps our staff dial in constantly changing menus.
Our second challenge is the volume and trying to recognize how to get things done in a timely manner while also reducing waste. We’re making on average 25,000 meals per week. Those are big, big numbers. For certain meals, we’re ordering upwards of 160 pounds of fish. Producing food at that volume is pretty wild.
The great thing is our food stays extremely fresh because, with those menus constantly changing on a daily basis, all that food is gone after the meal is served. It’s done. There may be a little bit that’s left over, but typically, we’ll serve that through continuous service.
Your department employs nearly 140 union workers and nearly as many students. For those looking for a career in the industry, what kind of opportunities do you offer? At Roger Williams University, we cook great food from scratch, which provides a great opportunity for people who join our dining team at whatever level they’re at in their culinary or hospitality journey. A lot of people think working for college food service is just opening up frozen pizza boxes, but that’s not what we do at Roger Williams and Bon Appétit.
Our employees gain great knowledge and have the opportunity to work with experienced chefs who care about food, technique and industry standards. Having chefs in our kitchen enables our dining team to learn how to work with high-quality ingredients and cooking from scratch, with a little bit of creative freedom.
Not everything is a specific recipe, we want our cooks to cook food. Similar to high-end restaurant dining, it’s all about embracing the concept of preparation through technique, passion and understanding the quality of ingredients.
Working in a university setting, our staff are exposed to different parts of the hospitality industry. For example, we do high-volume cooking from scratch, making our own stocks, soups and sauces. Those basic culinary principles are the foundation of our menus. We provide catering to our clients on campus and for VIP clients.
Once they learn to work in this setting, they can transfer their culinary skills to any high-end dining restaurant or residential dining facilities that cook meals at scale. And of course, we encourage our team members to stay with us and promote our employees to rise in the ranks, including to chef and supervisory positions.
How do pay and benefits stack up with private industry? The pay and benefits are fantastic and on par with the industry – with the added bonus of being able to earn a college degree at the university as part of the employee benefit package.
What are the top-paying jobs in your department and what type of experience would you recommend for candidates for those union jobs? Typically, the management team positions are the top-paying jobs. We also have supervisory positions in our kitchen that are in line with the industry pay scale. We have several entry-level prep cook, line cook, baker positions, and then you move up from there. Lead positions are members of our team who take on a supervisory role. And then, of course, there’s management. We have culinary managers who work directly for Roger Williams University and some that work for Bon Appétit Management Co., excellent career opportunities that are very similar to the restaurant world and the traditional hospitality world.
What kind of on-the-job training can students who work in the department get and how many current employees are former students you helped train? We offer the opportunity to learn from skilled chefs who care about food and want to teach what they have learned throughout their career. We’re also teaching the fundamentals and techniques of the traditional culinary world: knife skills, sanitation, safety, all of those real basic fundamentals that you learn at the beginning of your culinary career. We have a bake shop, a catering department, residential dining, and retail. We have a lot of facets of the operation where people within our department can gain different experiences that they can bring with them wherever they go.
Beyond the daily feeding of a large campus community, do you feel a responsibility in training and advancing the next-generation of Rhode Island’s culinary workforce? Yes, absolutely. I try to pass on the knowledge and experiences I have been through over the years. Teaching someone how to look at food from a holistic point of view rather than just putting a product on the plate. I want to help them understand where the food came from, who grew it, caught it or raised it – I believe those core values are an important part of why we do what we do at RWU and Bon Appétit.
