She washed dishes for $11/hour. A year later, this Overtown mom is a Fontainebleau cook

Underneath the famous bow-tie floor of the Fontainebleau Miami Beach resort is a network of hallways linking the property’s four towers. Room service attendants whisk by with carts of food. Workers stop by the cafeteria for a hot meal. A wall of photos honors employees who have been with the hotel for 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50-plus years.

In 16 different kitchens, cooks work to make the food for the resort’s 12 restaurants, cafes and bars.

Michelle Phillips, 33, never thought she’d count herself among the 2,000 employees of Miami-Dade’s largest hotel. Before January she worked as a dishwasher and line cook at a breakfast restaurant making $11 an hour. Now, she’s getting ready to celebrate her one-year anniversary as a cook in the Fontainebleau banquet kitchen making $14.85 an hour with employer-provided health insurance, an upgrade that has allowed the mother of two to support herself for the first time.

“It’s not what I pictured, but at the same time it’s awesome,” she said.

In December 2018, Phillips graduated from a free eight-week pilot culinary training program for people from the City of Miami’s District Five — Overtown, Liberty City, Little Haiti and Allapattah. The Hospitality Employees Advancement and Training (HEAT) program is funded by local hotels, airport concession companies and casinos in partnership with the Overtown community redevelopment agency.

The hospitality industry in South Florida often relies on J-1 work and travel visas to bring talent from overseas to fill cook positions, leading to high turnover, hotel managers say. The HEAT program is trying to change that by training Miami residents who are in need of steady jobs. The funding properties help design the program so that when students graduate, they already know how to make some of the industry’s staples.

Fontainebleau Executive Chef Thomas Connell said the HEAT program and others like it benefit the community and the properties in need of talent.

“Michelle has been a wonderful asset to our team, and we are grateful she had the opportunity to receive the skills she needed to move forward in her career,” Connell said.

Phillips started as a Fontainebleau prep cook in January, right in the middle of the hotel’s busiest season. Her first year on the job has been chaotic, she said, and marked by personal tragedy.

Her brother-in-law, who had been helping her take care of her kids, 11 and 16, died suddenly this summer, leaving Phillips to care for them alone as her husband remains hospitalized after a heart attack in 2018. He is still working to speak and move again.

“Every day is a challenge,” Phillips said.

Every day starts with her alarm at 4:30 a.m. Phillips gets her kids up, dressed, and eating breakfast in their cramped, two-bedroom Overtown apartment before calling a shared Lyft costing her $8. She clocks in at the Fontainebleau by 6 a.m., puts on a winter hat and an extra layer, and goes directly to her station inside the banquet kitchen’s cold room to begin preparing fruit bowls, parfaits and salads for hotel cafe Chez Bon Bon, and restaurants Fresh and Vida.

She clocks out around 2 p.m. and gets a solo Lyft home for about $20. She feeds her kids an after-school snack and then visits her husband at the Jackson Plaza rehab center.

Like most service workers at Miami Beach hotels, Phillips can’t afford to live in Miami Beach, meaning a large chunk of her paycheck goes to Lyft. If Phillips were to use public transportation to get to work she would have to take two buses, extending her eight-mile commute to an hour long. Transportation proves a big financial hurdle for much of the city’s tourism workforce.

Despite her training, Phillips still felt like she had been thrown into the deep end during her 90-day probation period at the hotel. Without the help of Esi Fynn-Obeng, the program’s outreach coordinator, Phillips said she doesn’t think she would have lasted.

“I called Esi and told her I’m not going to make it,” she said.

Keeping a job can be just as tough as getting one. Overtown has a higher unemployment rate than Miami-Dade County as a whole, even for those with some college or an associate’s degree. Fynn-Obeng checks in with graduates at least once a month and helps find everything from child care to transportation.

With Fynn-Obeng’s help, Phillips is making it, one day at a time. Some days are more hectic than others, especially when the banquet kitchen is tasked with prepping a meal for thousands of people attending a meeting at the hotel. All hotel food is prepared on site from scratch. The most challenging part is making the required number of food items in her eight-hour shift.

“It’s crazy, but it’s a calming kind of crazy,” she said, chopping chicken for a packaged Caesar salad to be sold at Chez Bon Bon. “When you get thrown into it, your skills are important. All the chaos, you have to try to keep up. It’s fun.”

Phillips’ new salary means she was able to throw her daughter a 16th birthday party that she had planned with her husband before his heart attack. Her family came down from Georgia to help cook all the food, giving her a much needed break.

The HEAT program graduated its third class at the end of November. Phillips spoke at the graduation, telling the newbies how her knife skills have improved and encouraging them to rely on what they’ve learned in the program as they start their culinary careers. Of the 23 graduates from the three classes, so far 11 have been hired in better paying jobs at the Fontainebleau, the Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, Levy concessions at Marlins Stadium, and Delaware North Companies concessions at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, Fynn-Obeng said.

The next class will begin on Jan. 13, 2020. The program holds information sessions at the kitchen in the basement of the Overtown Performing Arts Center twice a month. The next info sessions are Friday, Dec. 6, at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.