Celebrity chefs take over the Refectory

The SJU Refectory will feature celebrity guest chef takeovers in the coming months, facilitated by the new Director of SJU Culinary Services Tony Finnestad.

As part of his first few months in his new role, Finnestad has organized three celebrity chefs to come to the Reef at SJU. The three chefs include Yia Vang scheduled for Nov. 1, Pedro Wolcott scheduled for Nov. 13 and Gustavo Romero scheduled for Dec. 5. All three chefs are of the BIPOC community and own restaurants in Minneapolis that they built from the ground up.

Finnestad is friends with the chefs and they have all worked with him in the past, which is why they agreed to participate in their Reef takeovers. For their respective menus, Vang is expected to serve Hmong food, Wolcott is expected to serve Latin and Caribbean food and Romero is expected to serve Mexican food.

Finnestad himself has prior experience in culinary arts as an executive chef at Hormel Foods for eight years, overseeing brands like Spam, Skippy Peanut Butter, Justin’s nut butter and Planters Nuts, among others.

Finnestad said that a good meal is a great way to express love and care to someone.

“Food is really important. It’s one of the languages you can speak without having to speak the same language, and others would still understand,” Finnestad said.

Finnestad said each celebrity chef brings their own cultural influence to their food and will feature it during their takeovers.

“For someone like Chef Yia, taking this gig means a lot because Minnesota has the second largest Hmong Community in the U.S., and it’s not well reflected in the cuisine options in Minneapolis and St. Paul,” Finnestad said.

Vang was a contestant on “Iron Chef,” hosted a show on the Outdoor Network called “Feral” and has had a booth at the Minnesota State Fair for three years. Finnestad said Vang mentioned there are a lot of meat and potato eaters in this region and wanted to showcase some other options for students during his showcase.

Wolcott, who was raised in both Panama and Lousiana, worked at Tulane University in New Orleans before moving to Minneapolis and running his restaurant, Guacaya Bistreaux.

Romero, originally from a small town in Mexico, has brought back a 3,500-year-old method called nixtamalization, where corn is turned into tortillas in his restaurant Nixta in Minneapolis.

SJU Culinary Services will be covering the chefs’ food costs and their gas money, along with giving them a stipend.

“The stipend is enough to make it worth them spending their days off up here,” Finnestad said.

Finnestad said that his main motivation for bringing the celebrity chefs to CSB+SJU was to bring some excitement to campus after seeing some of the lingering effects of COVID. He said he wants to restore the dining experience for students and give them the opportunity to experience food and cultures they never would have.

“We went through a really strange phase where people weren’t going out to eat and people had to have food delivered,” Finnestad said. “We have never done anything like this before, and this is an experience that students will not have a chance to get unless they go to the cities and go to these restaurants. These chefs aren’t going to other college campuses.”

Art Martinez has been a chef at SJU for 10 years and said his philosophy is that food is life, and that enhancing food experiences through activities like these takeovers contributes to students’ well-being. He said he wants SJU Culinary Services to continue to stay ahead of food trends and continue to create food around CSB+SJU’s Benedictine values of family and togetherness.

“We feed excellence here at St. John’s, and the better we feed our students, the better our students can be,” Martinez said.

Adria Gillitzer, dietician and administrative manager at SJU for 13 years, views food as medicine and believes that cultural identities are wrapped up in food. Gillitzer is most excited for the coming of the celebrity chefs because it will expose students to those cultural identities while also allowing for a one-of-a-kind experience.

“It’s cool to bring something so big to little Collegeville,” Gillitzer said.

Guests from outside CSB+SJU are invited to come to these takeovers as well as students. Chefs will be preparing for 500-700 people between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m, and current staff at SJU will begin some of the prep work the night before for the chefs.

The event will be done on a first come first served basis, and Finnestad said the food is expected to run out fairly quickly, so he encouraged students to take advantage of this opportunity by arriving as early as they can.