It's a Friday night in June and Carlos Borrero, principal of the High School for Community Leadership in Jamaica, Queens, is hunched over a flaming frying pan.
He isn't preparing a quiet dinner at home. Borrero and a few of his students are cooking meals-to-order in a food truck parked on the school's outdoor field.
Salsa music is blasting from the truck's speakers, and teens and teachers are gathered around, trying to decide between dishes like paellita, mejillones en caldo verde (mussels in a parsley broth), and calamares a la parilla (grilled squid) before they settle down to watch "The Avengers," projected on a movie screen nearby.
They have plenty of room to spread out on the grass, because this isn't McCarren Park in Williamsburg.
"The Lunch Box truck, the movie at night, how many schools provide that? It might be a small turnout now, but, like I told him, these things are going to grow," said Robert Jones, the school's dean of operations, who has come to watch the students he mentors help out in the kitchen.
The truck has two purposes. In selling concessions to students from nearby and co-located schools during sporting events, team practices and afterschool activities, the food stand will raise money for the High School for Community Leadership's study abroad program, which took students to Spain last year. The destination this year is Mexico.
"For the most part a week abroad will cost on the low end $2,500, on the high end, upwards of $4,000, and that’s just out of the reach of most of our families," said Borrero, whose 6-year-old school falls under the Title I designation. "So we’re hoping that we could at least subsidize upwards of 50 percent of those trips for larger number of kids.”
The truck's current operation also serves as a soft opening for the culinary business program the school plans on launching in September.
Ideally, a chef from the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) will instruct students in culinary and pastry skills on a part-time basis, while in-house staff covers the business administration aspect of the curriculum, Borrero explained. Students will prep ingredients in an indoor teaching space connected to the school's kitchen and take turns in groups of four practicing cooking methods in the truck.
They'll draw on the culinary traditions of their Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, Central American and Caribbean families.
Paella, served by The Lunch Box (DNAinfo/Nicole Levy)
For their principal, the Lunch Box fuses seamlessly a long career in education and a refined passion for cooking.
"I was in education first, and I went through a mid-life crisis like most teachers," said Borrero, who was teaching social studies at a Bronx high school when he decided to study the culinary arts at the ICE in the mid-aughts. His studies led him to five-days-a-week stages, or unpaid internships, at sophisticated eateries like Charlie Palmer's Aureole and Nobu offshoots Nobu Next Door and Nobu 57.
But he didn't stop teaching.
"I was killing myself," he recalled. "I was getting home at 12 or one o’clock and getting up at 6. It was an intense, short period.”
Borrero instilled an appreciation for culinary precision in his older son Che, now 22.
"Every time I’ve stepped into a kitchen, it’s always been about teaching me the proper way," said Che Borrero. "'This is the way you should prepare the food before you even cut it, and this is the way you should hold it.' Everything about it is very orderly.”
When the idea for culinary instruction in the classroom first started percolating in Carlo Borrero's mind, he imagined establishing a kitchen inside the old Jamaica High School building that now houses four small schools. The costs of installing new pipes and other appliances, he soon realized, were prohibitively expensive.
"So I’m sitting at home," Borrero said, "and I’m watching Netflix with my wife and we see the movie 'Chef,'" a film in which Jon Favreau's character quits his job at a prestigious restaurant and opens a food truck. "I’m like, why can’t we do that?"
The truck itself, not including the equipment inside, would cost the school $62,000 in grant money. But Borrero insists that investment will make the high school he founded a "culinary school."
Instead, staff members like guidance counselor Sophia Papadatos say the collaborative effort "shows the community that we’ve created for our kids: it’s very tight-knit. We’re all one, we’re all equal, we’re all on the same level, and we want them to feel comfortable here. It’s their second home.” (A 2014-2015 Department of Education school quality snapshot indicates that levels of trust among teachers, students and their principal are extremely high.)
Alumnus Teddy Sopilidis, who fondly remembers the Hawaiian button-down shirt and sandals Borrero wore on his first day as a freshman, still calls the staff his "second family." Other graduates have returned for the school's Thanksgiving dinner, a tradition that involves teachers lining the corridors with tables on which to serve their students a catered traditional turkey meal.
On the Friday night Borrero works the food truck stove among his students, many of whom work in kitchens after school to help support their families, he is just one of the cooks in the kitchen, serving his community.
