For over 24 years, the Washington Network for Innovative Careers has provided advanced career and technical education opportunities for students across the state. Junior Anthony Gonzalez (he/him) enrolled in WaNIC’s culinary program, hosted at Bothell High School, after several years of cooking at home. He said he quickly learned that the collaboration and swiftness required in the WaNIC kitchen was not the same as cooking on his own.
“You have to do things in a certain time, and outside of the kitchen, you have your own time to do stuff,” Gonzalez said.
The culinary class, which hosts students from multiple NSD high schools, delves into month-long units on food categories like soups, breads and noodle dishes. During these units, they watch cooking demonstrations and lectures, learn related terminology and research the meals they plan to make. The class only hosts about 15
students, which Gonzalez said provides him the opportunity to connect personally with
his fellow chefs.
“I just like it,” Gonzalez said. “ I met a lot of new people in that class and made friends. That’s probably why.”
Chef Nikki Schiebel, who participated in Season 7 of the reality cooking competition show Iron Chef, teaches the program. Senior Hazel Colver (they/he) is the only other Inglemoor student in the program and said that Schiebel’s connections are an added benefit. Students in the program have been able to get jobs at high-end restaurants, which Colver said is partly due to Schiebel’s network. The program itself operates as a professional restaurant.
“We do catering jobs for Northshore School District. We are catering the WEA dinner in April, and we also do other catering jobs throughout the year,” Colver said. “It’s less stressful because we’re not always cooking for other people, but we do need to maintain proper health standards.”
Colver began cooking at a young age and has catered multiple events through the catering business they started at 15. Their friends and family wanted Colver to cater parties and dinners, so they started the catering business to ensure they would be properly compensated. After high school, they hope to become a private chef and work at private events.
“I like the fact that I’m learning the technicality of things, how things actually work, rather than just learning how to do them in the first place,” Colver said. “I do really enjoy how intensive it is and what kind of time restrictions we have, because it does force you to really get things done.”
In addition to WaNIC and their catering business, Colver recently started working at Dumpling Generation in Lake Forest Park Town Center two to three days a week on slower shifts so that they aren’t too overwhelmed. In order to balance school and work, they work two to three days a week on slower shifts so that they aren’t too overwhelmed.
“I expected it to be a little bit less stressful because I am a student, but there’s like 10-ish people who work at the Dumpling Generation, and then there’s only two people working at a time, and most of them are teenagers who are also in high school, so it’s very stressful,” Colver said. “It’s not like I get extra compassion because I’m a student. It’s very rigorous.”
Both Gonzalez and Colver joined the program to learn more about a career in culinary arts. Freshman Leo Kazakov (he/him) plans to join WaNIC in the future to potentially prepare for culinary school. He took the food and nutrition course to learn more about the requirements for a culinary career beyond simply being able to cook.
“I’m looking for a career in cooking, and I thought I might try to take as much experience as I can,” Kazakov said. “Before that, I didn’t even think it was a cooking class. I thought it was just health stuff. So I thought that it would still be useful. But it turns out it’s basically another cooking class. I just really like cooking, and I wanted the experience.”
Kazakov has accumulated culinary experience through a variety of middle school classes, including creative cooking, gourmet cooking and helping to manage the Northshore Middle School Cafe. He said that those classes and his continued cooking experience at home helped him realize a new passion for the field.
“It actually came out of nowhere. I think it was my middle school classes,” Kazakov said. “I just kind of fell in love with it, and I started baking and cooking at home, and I just kind of like the process of mixing ingredients and stuff to have come out of it.”
Similarly to Kazakov, Colver has loved cooking since they were young and are confident that it is a path they want to follow.
“During early high school I would be thinking about what I wanted to do as a career, and I would have these phases where I got really into something, and I really wanted to study something or work in a particular field, but then eventually it would fade,” Colver said. “But over the course of all of those like, ‘Oh, I want to do this, and then I want to do that,’ I was always cooking dinner for my family. And so when I decided that I wanted to pursue cooking as a career, I just thought about doing that because it was something that I’ve always loved, and I knew my love for cooking wouldn’t just fade.”
