Hey, what’s for lunch today? This question is heard almost daily in the halls and classrooms of Visitation, and eventually, often after a WAAG search, someone will have an answer. Here’s another question though. Who’s making our lunch today? You’ve probably heard the names, “Chef Tyler,” or, “FLIK Dining,” at least once during your time at Vis. But how much have you actually thought about who makes our lunches?
Vis lunches are prepared by FLIK Independent School Dining, a company based in New York, whose mission is “to empower a community of kindness through great food, with respect for each other and our amazing planet.” The FLIK website explains how their menus are made up of fresh, healthy, locally sourced food. Chefs and managers at FLIK are taught how to safely prepare meals by ServSafe™, a companywide program designed to better serve and protect students with food allergies. FLIK has partnered with the Green Restaurant Association in an effort to decrease food waste and take part in sustainable practices, and they prioritize purchasing ingredients from smaller local farms.
If you’d like to learn more about FLIK Independent School Dining, here is their website: https://www.flikisd.com/connect.html. They also have a blog that you can follow!
Now that you’ve heard a bit about FLIK Dining as a whole, let’s take a closer look at Vis specifically. Here is information from an interview I got to have with our very own Chef Tyler.
1. Where have you worked before working with FLIK Independent School Dining?
Chef Tyler has worked all over the country. He worked in New York City and then in Palm Desert, California, for a bit. He was also employed as a chef in Houston, Texas. When his first son was born, Tyler moved to Minnesota to be closer to home (since he grew up in Wisconsin).
2. How did you decide that you wanted to become a chef?
When Chef Tyler was 13-years-old, he started working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He discovered that he really enjoyed working in kitchens, and he liked the people he worked with. He decided that he wanted opportunities to continue to learn and grow in this area of work, so he pursued a career as a chef.
3. What drew you to work with FLIK?
Chef Tyler was employed as the Executive Chef of the Graduate Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, when a recruiter reached out to him, asking if he would be interested in applying to work at FLIK. Chef Tyler likes that FLIK believes in small batch cooking and making all of their food from scratch. He started working as an executive chef at FLIK in Minnesota.
4. What is your favorite part of your job?
Chef Tyler says that his favorite part is serving his guests and seeing smiling faces come down to the dining hall. He enjoys seeing people excited to eat food because it means that people are appreciating his work.
5. Could you walk me through the process of how lunch is made?
The menu is developed based on student feedback and FLIK standards. Chef Tyler assigns tasks to each worker. Everyone has a station and is cooking through the lunch hours to ensure that all of the food is fresh. After lunch, Chef Tyler and the rest of the staff work hard to clean, organize, and prepare for the next day.
6. Where do the ingredients for our lunches come from?
Most of the ingredients come from local providers, and Chef Tyler says that local produce is prioritized by FLIK Dining. Any other ingredients that can’t be locally bought come from national vendors.
Fun fact: every fall, Chef Tyler handpicks apples from Minnetonka apple orchards to fill the Vis fruit baskets.
7. How do you decide which lunch to make on a given day?
Part of the decision is based on feedback from the students, and the lunch staff always makes an effort to accommodate requests. FLIK runs promotions throughout the month based on holidays and points of interest. For example, in April (the month containing Earth Day), students will see items such as ‘zero waste recipe,’ which recognize FLIK’s ongoing effort to be more green.
8. What is your favorite lunch to make?
Chef Tyler says that Taco Tuesdays will always be near and dear to his heart.
