CLEARLAKE — Something”s cooking at the Yuba Community College Culinary Program in Clear Lake and it”s not just the food.
Roughly six years after Yuba Community College District (YCCD) Board of Trustees approved a bond initiative, Measure J, which allocated $190 million to upgrading the school”s facilities, Chef Instructor Robert Cabreros was finally able to show off his new kitchen/lab at a fundraiser on Sept. 7.
“Basically we came from a double-wide trailer. I started with four burners, a flat-top and an oven. I would have 30 kids in the kitchen with very limited space and very limited tools,” Cabreros said. “Everything in (the new kitchen) is hotter and faster than anything I ever taught with.”
In addition to the labs and classes Cabreros teaches, in the new facilities, the Yuba culinary school also runs the Aroma Cafe. It is a fully functional, full-menu restaurant that caters to the Yuba student body and public while also providing the program with additional income for replenishing supplies. All of the food created by the students is made from scratch, offering them a chance to learn from an ever-changing menu using a wide-variety of ingredients. Each student is required to work in the Aroma Cafe, rotating duties daily, which offers them hands-on experience in all aspects of restaurant management. “It”s an open-running restaurant. That”s our lab,” Cabreros said.
Friday”s fundraiser hosted former students. Alumni were invited to come and cook for the event. On a large whiteboard in the Aroma Cafe were the names of 15 former students who are now thriving in the restaurant industry after graduating from the Yuba culinary program. “For us, that”s a huge honor. They started in the program and to go out and make it in the industry is great,” Cabreros said.
Yuba alumni Matt Young, a sous chef at the Saw Shop Gallery Bistro in Kelseyville, was on-hand to cook for the event. Working in the new kitchen was a far cry from the facilities available when he graduated in 2010. “We were crowded. We had so many people all jammed around one table. Fighting to use one little spot on the stove. This right here is state-of-the-art,” Young said. “I would have loved to have been in here when they had all these things. To learn all the new equipment. There were probably 25 of us all around one table where this has all these different stations for people to work at,” he added.
Measure J delivered Yuba College the resources it needed to remain competitive and taxpayers from around the county can now see the brick and mortar results of the initiative. Cabreros sees this as merely the beginning for his culinary program. “The program is expanding through the kitchen. Word got out that this was going to be here and my enrollment jumped and that”s just going to continue.”
