Top chef goes back to school – to serve lunch

After serving as Noma’s chef de cuisine for three years and maintaining standards that earned it a top spot among the world’s best restaurants, former Washingtonian Daniel Giusti will leave the Copenhagen fine-dining destination at the end of the year and return to the District of Columbia to launch his next project.

The big reveal: It won’t be a restaurant.

Back in Washington in January, Giusti, 31, plans to make a radical turn into school food service. Consider that for a moment: The chef who has fed the world’s elite some of the most meticulously prepared dishes anywhere — at a restaurant where the tab can top $800 for two diners — now hopes to feed schoolchildren for $3.07 each, which is the amount the U.S. Department of Agriculture reimburses schools for every free lunch served. It’s an abrupt about-face for Giusti, who credits his boss, Noma chef and owner Rene Redzepi, for daring him to think big.

“This place has shown me you can do anything. I know that’s a cliche,” says Giusti from Copenhagen. “But for me to be here now and to have the job that I have now … I have made myself believe that anything is possible.”

Giusti understands that his career change might sound naive: A fine-dining chef launches a company to tackle an area of food service that is tied up not only in politics but also in limited budgets, tough nutritional standards, finicky kids and long-term contracts with established providers.

“There’s a whole host of challenges that make it very, very difficult” to change the system, says Sam Kass, former White House senior policy adviser for nutrition policy and a chef himself.

“But at the same time, there’s a culture of thinking in the school nutrition world that is a problem in itself,” adds Kass, now a senior food analyst for NBC News.

If anyone has the fearlessness to face the formidable task of improving public school meals, it’s Giusti. This is the guy who in 2011 abruptly left 1789, the fine-dining flagship of the Clyde’s Restaurant Group where he had become executive chef at 24, to take an unpaid apprenticeship at Noma with no promise of a full-time gig. By January 2013, Giusti was running Noma, replacing another American, Matt Orlando, as the chef de cuisine.

“He’s young, but he has sort of this old soul in him. He’s way too mature for his age,” Redzepi said. “He’s just a very natural leader (who) is not afraid of making decisions.”

Giusti assumed chef de cuisine duties while Noma was the No. 1 restaurant in the world, according to the arbitrary but influential list compiled by San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Noma would fall to No. 2 later in 2013 but regain the top spot in 2014. Noma now sits at No. 3 on the list, which makes Giusti a high-profile target for investors who want to open a restaurant with him. But for better or worse, the chef has little interest in his own place, partly because he has worked at one of the best.

For years, even as famous chefs and celebrities angled for reservations at Noma, Giusti has had other ambitions. One has been to figure out a way to provide good-quality food to the masses at prices they can afford. Ultimately, he determined that unless a restaurant chain could compete with McDonald’s on price point, it would just be adding more calories to the marketplace without improving the American diet much.

Then Giusti started looking into the National School Lunch Program, that surreal battleground where pizza sauce is considered a vegetable and the School Nutrition Association advocates against reducing salt levels in the students’ diet. This is the arena, Giusti thought, where someone could have real impact: He could feed American schoolchildren higher-quality food, teach them something about cooking and food, and perhaps even set them up for a lifetime of better dietary choices.

Giusti has been researching the people and organizations already committed to improving school meals. He has talked repeatedly with Kass, who has become something of a mentor. Giusti has also investigated the pioneering work of Betti Wiggins in Detroit, Ann Cooper in Boulder, Colo., and Revolution Foods, a group that started with just one charter school in Oakland, Calif., and now serves more than 1 million meals per week in 15 states.

Although Giusti says he respects the work of those who aim to fix the system, he wants to take a different approach. His company, Brigaid, would build whole new kitchens or improve existing ones at schools and then hire professional chefs to work full-time in them.

“One of the biggest problems is that there are no kitchens in schools, and all food is prepared elsewhere,” Giusti says.

Such a model, of course, would require serious capital investment. Neither kitchen equipment nor experienced chefs come cheap. Giusti says he has investors interested in Brigaid. Plus, he says, he wants to start small, just as Revolution Foods did. He hopes to have a pilot program in place with a school district by fall 2016. It could even be with the D.C. Public Schools system, which is soliciting for new vendors after the embattled Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality decided this year to withdraw from its contract following allegations of mismanagement and a whistleblower settlement.

Giusti doesn’t pretend he has the solution to the problem of providing better-quality school meals at dirt-cheap prices. Nor is he naive about his chances of fixing the system.

“This is a huge undertaking and a risky undertaking, but for me this is worth it,” Giusti says. “I have no problem giving it all I’ve got, and if I fail, I fail.”