The team at Santa Barbara Middle School has long had a vision of creating a true Community Kitchen that would be an industrial teaching kitchen to prepare school meals and provide cooking classes to students, as well as a place for community collaborations.
Under the leadership of Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay (Chef PA) that vision has finally come to life. We caught up with Chef PA recently to get an update on the Community Kitchen project.
When we last spoke about this, the SBMS Community Kitchen was still in the visioning phase, but now you have an industrial kitchen on campus, right? Yes. We launched our campaign to build this kitchen right before COVID. Then it hit, and obviously all our funding possibilities got swept right out underneath us. So we put the project on pause until the second year of COVID. And, just sort of out of a whim, we felt like it was the right time. So we reopened the campaign, and literally, in four months, finished raising the funds. … We opened it in November last year.
