There’s a Future for Chefs Outside of the Restaurant Industry, and It’s in School Lunches

Thanks to Brigaid, institutional dining is becoming a whole lot tastier.

“If you’re on this earth and you’re a person, then you should have access to a good meal,” says Dan Giusti. Since stepping down from his head chef position at Copenhagen’s Noma (one of the world’s most lauded and exclusive restaurants) in 2016, Giusti has done everything in his power to make that statement a reality. Most significantly, he founded Brigaid, a company that marries the skills of professional chefs with institutional food-service programs, making sure that schoolchildren, seniors, hospital patients, and incarcerated people have consistent access to delicious, nourishing food. To Giusti, there’s not much of a difference between the work he was doing at Noma and crafting dishes to feed society’s most vulnerable people. All it took was a shift in perception.

Here’s how Brigaid works: A school district or institution contracts the company to assess current systems and then make recommendations, train existing staff, place trained chefs, or any combination of the three. The budgets and resources are typically tight, and there are fundamental hurdles Giusti has butted up against. First, there’s the tendency for the public to assume that “chef” equals “fancy.” (He recalls a parent’s comment, “Why don’t we just send our kids to school in limousines?” in response to an article about his presentation to the New London, Connecticut, school board. In reality, the meal he was proposing cost around $1.25.) There’s also the matter of chefs’ egos.

“When you work in restaurants, you really are cooking for yourself,” says Giusti. “You’re cooking your own vision, and people pay for that. You’re probably not really thinking about the guest.” But when Giusti considered that a guest could be an 8-year-old schoolkid who opted to go hungry rather than eat unfamiliar food, he swallowed his chef pride and quickly replaced it with something more substantial: a purpose.

Brigaid focuses on institutions in which food service is secondary to the main function — education, rehabilitation, or health. That can be a tough transition for chefs used to prioritizing culinary perfection, but Giusti has seen firsthand how changing the negative connotations around prison and hospital food brings dignity and well-being to both the people being served and those who are serving it. In terms of prisons, the group Impact Justice provided Brigaid with a comprehensive report on food and prison, including documentation of incarcerated people seeing packages of food that were clearly labeled as not fit for human consumption. “It’s the difference between that and making a decent meal,” Giusti says.

This mission has meant that Brigaid chefs — more than 50 so far — receive something that was never on the menu for them before. They get to have a long future in a business notorious for burnout, plus an 8 to 10 hour workday; fully paid health insurance; paid sick days, vacation, and holidays; a 401k match; and a generous salary (recent school-based positions have advertised salaries around $90k and relocation assistance).

Related: How to Make a Living After You Walk Away From Being a Restaurant Chef

“I can see their lives changing in front of my eyes,” says Giusti. “It really is a big factor in what we do, this idea of creating real careers for chefs."

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