'The mind of a chef': Underwood puts personal stamp on food at Beautiful Rainbow
Chris Underwood can cook anything on Beautiful Rainbow Café’s vegetarian and organic menu. That’s no big deal, according to Chip Rowan, the program’s director. So can most of his fellow students.
It’s the creativity and ingenuity he’s shown while preparing and serving that food, however, that has made Underwood a standout in the program that instructs cognitively disabled students in Gadsden City Schools in skills they can use to become productive members of the workforce. (More than 30 of its students have gone on to jobs.)
Underwood recently was selected for admission to Auburn University’s exclusive EAGLES program, which offers special needs students an opportunity to experience postsecondary education.
How does he describe his knack for the kitchen? “I have the mind of a chef,” he said. “I try to mix the ingredients, add new stuff to the ingredients.”
Rowan put it more bluntly: “He changes my recipes for the better!”
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Take one of the most popular items on Beautiful Rainbow’s dessert menu, the carrot cake. It’s a unique version that features caramel rather than cream cheese frosting, and blood orange olive oil in the batter.
Rowan said Underwood has taken that cake over as “his specialty,” and added some tweaks to the recipe.
“I added orange zest and squeezed oranges (into the batter),” Underwood said.
Rowan said Underwood also has his own way of frosting a cake. “I taught him how to do it, but very quickly he was doing it far better than I could do,” he said. “It’s much smoother. Then I noticed him decorating it differently than I told him to, because he wanted to try a different way.”
He also steps outside the box as far as serving food. Rowan said one of Underwood’s former teachers came by Beautiful Rainbow for lunch. “Normally, he’d have used one of the plates we use for customers,” he said. “But I turned around and he’s gotten one of the fancy plates we use for catering.
“That’s another thing he does that other students don’t think to do,” Rowan said. “He’s always artistically judging how the plate looks, and doing some plate decorating or food design.”
Underwood also takes on a leadership role at busy times, directing his fellow students as to what they need to be doing as he takes care of his own tasks.
“They listen very well,” he said. “They understand.”
Underwood is one of two Beautiful Rainbow students (the other is Candido Lucas) with National Restaurant Association ServSafe certification.
Rowan said the test to earn that is challenging, requires much memorization and has a high fail rate. The questions cover things like the proper cooking time and serving temperatures for food, foodborne illnesses (people are required to know scientific names of various bacteria) and what should be done if there’s a power failure or water main break.
“Chris passed very easily,” he said, with a score in the 80s.
In addition to his job at Beautiful Rainbow, Underwood worked for a while in the breakfast area at Holiday Inn Express. Former owner Nanda Patel, a booster of Beautiful Rainbow, remembered him as “a fine young man” and said his selection for the Auburn program “is an honor not just for Beautiful Rainbow, but for the Gadsden education system and for Chip.”
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Chris Underwood changes recipes for better at Beautiful Rainbow Cafe
