The CRLS/RSTA culinary arts competition team is off to the ProStart Nationals in Baltimore after placing first in the Massachusetts ProStart invitational competition on February 27th.
The odds were against them: no one on the team had ever seen the setup before, and Cambridge was one of the few public schools to enter. “We were thinking we wouldn’t place at all,” Julia Barriga Cortez ’25, the team’s dessert chef, told the Register Forum. “Even afterwards, it didn’t kick in. We kept telling each other on the drive home ‘we won, we won’ because everything felt so surreal.”
With only two electric burners and one hour on the clock, the five-member team prepared Anjou and endive salad with pan-seared duck breast, Porterhouse lamb chops, and petit gâteau fondant au chocolate. “We were trying to challenge ourselves with ingredients that we’d never cooked with,” Mali Asnake ’25, who cooked the entrées, told the Register Forum. “That made it harder to remember everything—how heavy to go with seasoning and flavoring, how high and how long to cook.”
ProStart is sponsored by the Massachusetts Restaurant Association Educational Foundation and was held in Gillette Stadium this year. First-place teams have the opportunity to compete at the national competition in Baltimore, Maryland, which is hosted by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation.
RSTA instructors and teammates suggested that a number of factors contributed to the win. Chef Richard McKinney credited the team’s hard work: “We met before school, during school, after school, over vacation. They showed their dedication and what they wanted to do,” he told the Register Forum.
Asnake had another theory: “We were all singing during the competition. Keeping it lowkey, obviously, since the other teams were right there. But we were singing and dancing the whole time.” The team normally sings during practice, she explained: Marvin Gaye, Gloria Gaynor, and other Motown artists. During the competition, another song was added to the setlist: “We were singing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ Because, you know, there’s no mountain that’s high enough to keep us from competing,” Asnake described.
2024 marks the first time in four years that Cambridge’s culinary team has competed in the ProStart competition and the first time the school has won the state-level competition. The last time CRLS entered was in 2020, just a week before the pandemic forced everyone home from school.
“We’re not a technical school in the way these others are, since we only spend two blocks a day in culinary. So we thought for a while that our school wasn’t fit for competing,” Asnake told the Register Forum. “But then
we were like, screw it. We’ll have fun.”
However you slice it, the win is a triumph for Cambridge Culinary. “I wanted us to go and compete and be happy with what we did,” said Chef Rick. “They exceeded the expectations. They blew it away.”
This article also appears in our March 2024 print edition.
