Richard O'Donahue
When asked if he had any culinary specialties, Proctor Head Chef Richard O’Donohue was quick to set the record straight.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “I love cooking, every part of it. You sauté something, you roast something, you want it to be the best it can be, you season it the way you feel that day or in a way that compliments the rest of the menu and go from there.”
The Detroit area native, now married with three children, worked in the restaurant business through college but never had a concrete life plan in mind.
“One semester I wanted to be one thing, and the next, I wanted to be something else,” he said. “Who, at 18-years-old, knows what they want to be?”
After graduating from high school he initially hoped to move to Florida, following a chef he knew well who spent five months of each year there.
“I told him, ‘I can be-bop around, learn from you and figure out what I want to do,’” he said. “But he told me, ‘No, you need a piece of paper. You’ve gotta have a degree.’”
With this advice in mind, O’Donohue decided to apply to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY only to be faced with a year-and-a-half-long waiting list. Unfazed, he took the opportunity to further his restaurant experience in the Detroit area and enrolled in the fall of 1975.
After graduation, he moved westward and worked as a traveling chef, landing in a smattering of states including Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado to name a few. The latter move seems to epitomize his untroubled approach.
“I wanted to be in the Rocky Mountains,” he said. “Who knows why? I just wanted to be in the Rocky Mountains.”
Once tired of such frequent uprooting, O’Donohue and his wife decided to make a more lasting change and moved to Germany to work as civilians for the army. The self-described “hotel-restaurant guy” cooked in a German hotel while his wife taught in an army school. There, the couple began contemplating the best place to raise their two children. Vermont, “close enough to family but far away from family,” was always in the back of O’Donahue’s mind.
The opportunity presented itself at an army luncheon, where O’Donohue was chatting with a colonel about basketball playoffs back in the States.
“I told him, ‘When we leave here, we’re going to Vermont,’” he said. “He asked me, ‘Have you ever been to Vermont?’ and I said, ‘No, but it’s got everything I want.’”
As it turned out, the colonel and his wife owned and frequently rented out a house in Middlebury. O’Donohue, confident that he could find work in Rutland or Burlington if not Middlebury itself, decided to take advantage of the opportunity and headed west shortly thereafter.
Upon arrival in 1988, he began as a baker at the Middlebury Inn and a cook during the dinner shift at Fire & Ice. Soon after, he was hired to cook at the College. When a space opened up at the head of Proctor’s staff three months later, he applied and has been at the helm ever since.
“If you’re a cook in Middlebury,” he said, “this is the best gig in town.”
After 18 years of working in hotels and restaurants, cooking the volume of food required for a college campus was an unprecedented career transition.
“At the CIA, they never trained us for quantity cooking, and I never gave it a thought,” he said. “If you made tomato sauce in a restaurant, you’d make a couple of gallons, and it’d last you probably the night, maybe the next day.” Suddenly he found himself working to produce 40 gallons of tomato sauce each night and 27 pans of macaroni and cheese for a lunch. Still, he says, “I like quantity cooking. It’s a challenge.”
Using recipes (now in electronic form where they were once carefully preserved in plastic and wooden boxes) as loose guidelines, he and his staff continually shift their techniques and ingredients to meet students’ needs while working within financial and seasonal constraints.
For example, he said, “Tempeh stir fry is not going to look the same in February as it would in September or July.”
O’Donohue’s commitment to his craft extends well into life outside of work. Struck by the vegetarian culture on campus, he, too, gave up meat in order to understand the point of view.
“I had to,” he said matter-of-factly. “They were naming stuff that I didn’t know.”
In addition to remaining in tune with students’ needs, he also makes efforts to notice their habits in Proctor. He appreciates how certain students in particular personalize the dining experience, combining several items into creations to be mixed, microwaved or grilled in a Panini machine.
These opportunities are, of course, no accident.
“Because of the quantity we have,” he said, “we’ve taken a lot of recipes and split the ingredients, so what was once one item could be two items. If you separate it, you can take it to other parts of Proctor and make something else out of it. There are more and more students doing that. Those are the students, I think, who understand what we’re doing here at Proctor.”
To these and all other students, he encourages working hard, but not rushing through the best years of their lives.
“I don’t know how people plan, ‘In 10 years, I’m gonna do this,’” he said. “I know some employers will say, ‘Where do you want to see yourself in five years?’ You know, I look back 40 years, and I never thought I’d be wearing a double-breasted coat, black and white checkered pants and managing a food service for college students. Who thinks of this stuff?”
Christopher Laframboise
With his affable yet unassuming presence, a conversation with Christopher Laframboise feels like one with a neighbor who might have invited you over for a potluck dinner or two.
“I’m a local guy who basically grew up at the College,” he said.
Turner House on College Street was home for the first eight years of Laframboise’s life. He remembers peering through the windows at his cousins who worked in dining services during his childhood; they would often hand him Popsicles and other small treats. By the time he was old enough to work, he said, “it was sort of natural” that he follow a similar path. Starting with the dish room of what is now Freeman International Center (formerly Social Dining Units, or SDU), he worked in Middlebury dining through high school, eventually making his way into the kitchen.
After attending the University of Hartford in Connecticut, he returned to Middlebury and resumed his job, but now as a full-time cook, soon to become a supervisor at SDU. In 2002, he was selected to fill the opening as head chef at Ross.
Though his university training is actually in computer drafting, Laframboise has taken advantage of numerous opportunities to supplement his hands-on experience with additional training programs.
“I’ve gone to different colleges all over the U.S. for seminars,” he said. “It’s been really fun to see what they’re doing and how we can improve.”
Apart from the fact that he now works alongside his former supervisor, Proctor Head Chef Richard O’Donohue, Laframboise has seen a great deal of change in his 25 years at the College.
“When I first started,” he said, “we had a lot of students who worked for us, so we got to talk with students a lot more.”
These days, he feels a bit more disconnected from the student body, as the proportion of student employees in dining services has dwindled.
“I don’t think there’s as much interaction as there should be,” he said. “One thing is, students are under a lot of pressure where they need to get in, get their food and get out, so there’s not as much free time to interact. It would be nice if it was slower-paced, if the dining halls weren’t all packed as much, but we work around it.”
Still, as many students habitually visit one dining hall or the other, he often knows frequenters of Ross by face.
“You won’t always know their names unless you’ve been introduced to them,” he said. “Most of the students I do interact with have allergies or something like that where it’s best if they come right out and talk to us so we can help them.”
Particularly in the last decade, he has noticed many more students falling into this category. He has also watched the vegan and vegetarian movements pick up momentum.
“They’re a relatively small group but one of the most vocal since they sometimes have the most trouble finding food or eating healthy,” he said. As a result, “we try to cater to them.”
According to Laframboise, student frustration, partially precipitated by cut budgets and a growing student body, is one of the greatest challenges that he and his staff face.
“I don’t think the students quite understand dining services,” he said. “We want them to have the best dining experience they can have. That’s our job. What makes the job hard is the lines — seeing the frustration on students’ faces … trying to make it so that students have a pleasant time and knowing that we fall short on that is just unbearable sometimes.”
He emphasized the importance of effective communication in maximizing the relationship that does exist between staff and students.
“We love to get comment cards from students,” he said. “That’s very important, but we don’t want comment cards that say, ‘The food sucks.’ That doesn’t help us. Tell us that the chicken was overcooked … it’s important that [students] understand the pressure on the staff and that we understand the pressures on the students.”
On the flip side, he considers getting to know the students, particularly those with whom he works, one of the best parts of the job.
“You find out their backgrounds, what they do, where they’re going,” he said. “A lot of them will come back for reunion, and it’s just really interesting to see what they’re doing now.”
Another perk is the freedom to work with a flexible menu. Laframboise frequently draws inspiration from fellow artists.
“If you ever watch Top Chef,” he said, “some of that stuff is amazing. You look at it and think, how can we apply some of that to what we’re doing, or can we? It looks great, but can we make it great for 800 people?”
Like O’Donohue, Laframboise was hesitant to name any sort of favorite.
“I just like good food,” he said.
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