After graduating from the Chicago City Colleges’ Washburne Culinary Institute in 2009, Clarence Robinson was determined to start his own restaurant.
Robinson lives in Englewood, where Washburne opened a facility three years ago to provide career training for low-income residents. But Robinson, whose car was stolen outside Washburne as he filled out paperwork for his diploma, knew Englewood wasn’t a viable area to open his first place. The impoverished South Side neighborhood is losing residents, and “people have no jobs–going to a restaurant is the last thing on their mind,” Robinson said. “The gas and light bills come before a Philly cheese steak.”
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He also knew outsiders were unlikely to patronize a restaurant in Englewood because of its high crime rate. “It’s still a pretty rough area – the type of people I wanted to attract were the type who wouldn’t go to Englewood at this moment,” Robinson said.
Last month he opened Reecee’s Café next to the Morse Avenue L stop in Rogers Park on the far North Side. The casual atmosphere – hand-drawn magic marker signs in the windows, simple glass tables, a big chalkboard menu – belie the gourmet ambitions of dishes such as wild mushroom chowder and Robinson’s signature Philly cheese steak with Mornay sauce made from fresh béchamel and locally sourced cheese.
Investing in Englewood and providing job opportunities for low-income residents were the reasons Washburne provost William Reynolds left his job as vice president for continuing education at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America to open Washburne’s new facility on Kennedy-King College’s new campus.
Originally a trade school, Washburne started its culinary program in 1937 on the Southwest Side. In the late 1990s, city officials sought to revitalize the school by folding it into the City Colleges and hired the Culinary Institute of America, based in New York state, as a consultant. The CIA was looking to open a satellite campus in Chicago at the time and it sent Reynolds to consult on the Washburne project while also exploring partnership options.
He found a dilapidated school “with about 40 cooking students and four welding students.
“The kitchen was in such bad shape – burners didn’t work, pots and pans didn’t have flat bottoms because they were so overused,” Reynolds said. “But what amazed me was nobody was complaining. Here I was working at CIA where they have the best of everything, and the students were always complaining. Washburne staff had somehow built a mystique–that not having all you need makes you stronger.”
The CIA ultimately decided against the Chicago satellite school. But Reynolds was intrigued by the idea of an affordable inner-city cooking school. When the City Colleges offered him a job as Washburne’s new provost, he accepted.
Eleven years after he made that jump and three years after the school moved to Englewood, the results are mixed. About three quarters of the school’s 320 students live on the South Side. Many area residents who could not afford more expensive culinary schools have attended Washburne and gotten good jobs or opened their own businesses. But graduates haven’t gotten much traction in Englewood, where the economic climate has not improved since the school’s opening there. Last winter, Washburne’s on-site fine-dining restaurant, Sikia, closed to the public because of lack of customers.
“Unfortunately Englewood is nowhere near in the condition it was supposed to be 11 years later,” Reynolds said.
Robinson is among the school’s success stories. He and his wife, whose nickname is Reecee, support eight children, so he couldn’t afford to attend some schools he considered. At Washburne, financial aid and student loans covered almost the entire cost of the two-year program’s $15,000 tuition. About 70 percent of Washburne students receive financial assistance.
Other Washburne students describe similar experiences. South Shore resident Shakira Robinson (no relation to Clarence) said she had given up on the idea of culinary school until she found Washburne, where financial aid helped her complete her studies “virtually for free.”
She now works at the Buckingham Fountain Cafe, which serves housemade baked goods, sandwiches and snacks in a quaint green building near the downtown landmark. The cafe, which is staffed by Washburne students and alumni, opened for its third summer of business over Memorial Day weekend — making it another example of the school’s success outside of Englewood.
Washburne is looking to expand with a second campus elsewhere in the city, Reynolds said. And menu items from the Parrot Cage, the white tablecloth restaurant in the South Shore Cultural Center staffed by Washburne students, will be featured at the Taste of Chicago.
Yet Reynolds remains determined that Washburne work to improve the restaurant options in ailing South Side neighborhoods. The school rents affordable kitchen space to small catering businesses. Soul Vegetarian, a popular vegan restaurant in the nearby Park Manor neighborhood, prepares its catering orders there.
And though it is closed to the public, Sikia, which serves African-influenced fare, still hosts special events several times a week, including a series called Young Natives where local high school band members jam with professional musicians. In the fall, Sikia plans to resume lunch service with a twice-weekly buffet.
In the meantime, Englewood has been left with no sit-down restaurant options besides fast-food joints.
“We’re not giving up,” Reynolds said.
