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Photo used courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Travis Brust is the Williamsburg Inn executive chef and chairman of the Colonial Williamsburg Apprenticeship program.
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“The camaraderie of the kitchen is like a slightly dysfunctional family where you love and hate each other at the same time. We fail together or we succeed together.”– Recent graduate, Juli Gutierrez
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Julia Child famously said, “Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.”
Kylie Kidder knows that feeling.
The 19-year-old is a sophomore in the Williamsburg Inn and Virginia Chefs Association’s apprentice program, designed to train interns to be proficient cooks and develop their craft. For four fortunate applicants, it’s an intensive program that takes three and a half years and involves 6,000 hours of hands-on experience to develop speed, skill retention, organization, team work, and core value skills.
“This country was built on apprenticeships, but we’ve gotten away from that,” notes Travis Brust, Williamsburg Inn executive chef and chairman of the Colonial Williamsburg Apprenticeship program.
“Apprentices are a dying breed.”
Advertised hyper-locally, the program’s requirements are clear-cut: applicants must have a high school diploma or GED, have one year of kitchen experience, and write a 300-word essay on why they want to be a chef.
“We want to see what your passion is,” Brust says, while acknowledging that fewer applicants cook at home these days, so it’s harder to find candidates. Applicants who don’t have the year of kitchen experience may be taken on as pre-apprentices and allowed to work for a year to qualify.
In return for dedication and passion, apprentices are paid an hourly rate for their time in the kitchen while tuition is paid for them to get an associate’s degree. Academics are not taken lightly and students must not only pass all classes, but also an ‘F’ in a core class will get an apprentice removed from the program.
Kidder, a New Hampshire native, had taken over cooking duties at home during high school, competing in culinary events while working at two restaurants. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after graduation, but she knew she loved cooking. “My counselor showed me that cooking could be a career, that I could make that happen.”
With her first year of apprenticeship under her belt, she’s impressed at the range of cooking opportunities available to her. “Cooking at the (Williamsburg) Lodge, we can be casual, but the (Williamsburg) Inn is very fine dining. We get more of a range here in Williamsburg, everything from barbecue to seafood. And when you work banquets here, you learn to stay committed and keep the quality up, even if it’s 600 people.”
She points to the farm-to-table movement as an example of the evolution of cooking in the new millennium. “Everything we serve here is homemade. We know the farmers who brought the food to us. People look for that now because they want their food to change with the seasons.”
As part of the Virginia Chef Association’s education goals, apprentices sell their baked goods monthly at the Williamsburg Farmers Market in Merchants Square as a fundraising event. Kidder honed her skills making English muffins for the market, but has recently moved on to focaccia and other breads.
“I’m so happy with the choice I made,” Kidder says. “The chefs are always willing to show you something new. If you ask, they’ll show because they want to share the knowledge they have.”
Senior apprentice Michael Wilkinson began participating in cooking competitions while in Boy Scouts. He sees Colonial Williamsburg as schooling, but not necessarily a job option.
“I was told if you put your heart and soul into it, you’ll get that back by the end of the program. There are so many opportunities to learn here. I love cooking here in Williamsburg but I want to branch out and try other places.”
Recent graduate Juli Gutierrez arrived in Williamsburg with a bachelor’s degree in English and a love of the fast-paced, hot and strenuous adrenaline rush of the kitchen. “The camaraderie of the kitchen is like a slightly dysfunctional family where you love and hate each other at the same time,” she says with laughter. “We fail together or we succeed together.”
After graduating the program in April, Gutierrez was hired as a lead line cook, thrilled with the opportunity to express her creativity and try new things. “Being able to consistently produce a quality product is very satisfying, but it’s constant learning because there’s no way to know everything about food.”
The Latin flavors of her father’s native Venezuela are her favorites.
“I was into molecular gastronomy. Everybody goes through a phase with modern cuisine, taking an ingredient and exploring it in different directions. When you take an apple and play with it in four or five different ways, it stretches your brain. What else can I do with this ingredient?”
She sees focusing on one food as bringing a level of simplicity to the plate, a pleasure for someone who grew up eating basic food such as lasagna and chicken soup.
The first time she was asked to make Hollandaise, she realized she’d never even tasted the classic sauce.
“Flipping an egg without breaking the yolk and temping a steak by touch took time,” Gutierrez says of being challenged every day. “The biggest thing to get over is worrying about messing up ingredients and just get comfortable with cooking.
Ryan Manning, a graduate of the program, went on to become a chef at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun. “As much as chefs have become celebrities in their own unique way, the industry is still really blue collar. It takes repetitive motions of cooking to really develop a cook into a strong chef.”
He’s convinced that of all the educational programs in the culinary field, none can provide that hands-on experience the way apprenticeship programs can.
“Even with a culinary school component of the program, the true skills of butchering or making an omelet, for example, are not fully learned until you repeat the step hundreds of times like you would on a butcher or breakfast cookery rotation during the program,” Manning says. “As a result I found myself better prepared to go out into the industry and not just be a cook but in reality, I was ready to be a leader.”
Upon graduation, Manning entered into Walt Disney World’s six-month Sous Chef Management Internship program before being placed at one of Disney’s upscale dining locations, the Flying Fish at the Boardwalk Resort.
“It was amazing to go from being a student to a sous chef in the world’s number one tourist destination within one year of being a culinary apprentice,” he says of his position before taking the job at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun, a Forbes Five Star AAA Five Diamond hotel.
“It really is all a testament to the program and the hard work I put in as an apprentice, but it’s also what the chefs and other cooks of Colonial Williamsburg put into my development. It’s why I am where I am today.”
The Virginia Chefs Association: Key to the Apprentice Program
It took three Virginia chefs – Lloyd Garrad of the Hyatt House along with Harmut Brown and Werner Muensch of the Commonwealth Club – to recognize that in order to promote professional growth and education of the culinary arts, they needed to establish a way to prepare up-and-coming culinarians for the trade.
Thus in 1975 was born the Virginia Chefs Association, an affiliation of the American Culinary Federation. By 1990 the association boasted 125 active members including restaurant chefs, caterers, institutional foodservice directors, apprentices and representatives from food distributors and manufacturers.
A major priority was establishing the Virginia Chefs Association Apprenticeship Program, chaired by Muench and co-chaired by Marcel Desaulniers. Over the years, the program grew from 12 to 30 apprentices, making it one of the most important programs in the country and one that to date, has graduated several hundred apprentices.
Chef Travis Brust knows a little something about apprenticing. After teenaged days washing pots in a small fine dining restaurant in New York, he went on to earn his culinary certification from the Balsams Apprenticeship Program in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire and an associate degree in culinary arts from New Hampshire Community Technical College before taking on a series of high- profile chef positions and winning numerous awards.
As the man responsible for the Inn’s culinary and restaurant operations, he also guides Colonial Williamsburg’s chef apprenticeship program.
“We’re not that well known, but culinarians who find us are passionate, self-seeking individuals. Our apprentices have good, close relationships with us so we can stay on top of them. I count as my greatest accomplishment the success of culinary students I’ve mentored and trained in this profession.”
For more information, visit vachefs.org.
