Catering with conscience

Let's say you are a do-gooder. You volunteer at a homeless shelter. Perhaps you mentor a refugee child or give money to a battered women's shelter. You care about your community and have a social conscience.

Now let's say you're planning your daughter's wedding. It may be the most important event you will ever plan and you want everything just right - the flowers, the décor, the catering.

Ah, the catering. Now, here's the question: Would you consider using a nonprofit catering service that trains and employs homeless and formerly homeless men and women?

It's a good thing to do - giving a real hand to the needy so they don't have to live on handouts. On the other hand, what's racing through your mind are images of clean-cut waiters passing around plates of ginger-beef satays with spicy peanut sauce. Charity, you could argue, has its time and place.

Then again, maybe if you knew a little more, it might not seem a tough question at all.

A growing number of successful programs around the country are helping to train and employ the homeless or formerly homeless in the culinary arts. Moreover, as quickly as you can say caprese crostini with roma tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, they are breaking down stereotypes and changing the perceptions - and misperceptions - people continue to have about the homeless.

"Sure, sometimes we get remarks like 'Should I hide the silverware when they come over?' " says Ann Nix, the no-nonsense director of Washington's Fresh Start Catering, as she clicks through the packed February/March event schedule on her office computer. "It's a concept some people have to take time getting used to."

* * *

Four years ago, Linda Watson, a single mother of four and a recovering addict, was living in a shelter and feeling low. "My life was not going right," she says. "I lost the respect of my family, and I realized I did not want to die like this. I wanted to turn my life around."

Referred by the shelter to the 12-week culinary program at DC Central Kitchen - the parent organization of Fresh Start catering - she enrolled, graduated at the top of her class, and found a job at the Grand Hyatt hotel. There, she started as a prep assistant chopping onions, ended as a banquet chef, and a year later was lured back by Fresh Start to be the sous-chef of the catering service.

"I gave myself a present when I got that job," says Ms. Watson as she moves around the cramped kitchen space. "I took a one-week cruise to Mexico and Grand Cayman."

It's noon, and the seven-person catering team has been here in a corner of the DC Central Kitchen since 6 a.m. preparing for the evening's event, a buffet dinner party for 400 guests. Someone is cutting flank steak. Another person is dipping strawberries in rich milk chocolate. Watson is helping arrange sushi rolls on a platter.

"I had never taken a vacation before," she says, smiling as she peels off thin plastic gloves. "But I really felt I had earned it."

Her eldest son, also a recovering addict, has been clean for almost a year. "He told me, 'Mom, look at you - you did it.... So can I,' " she says.

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