What’s Cooking?

Director of Dining Services Alex Levin ensures that two hungry campuses are fed, and occasionally drops a sweet surprise into the mix.

A stomach can only hold so much food and one of the toughest choices at Sidwell Friends School can be deciding which of many hot and cold dishes to have for lunch. Depending on the day, favorite dishes might include Peruvian chicken with green sauce, vegan mushroom stroganoff, tortilla soup, ramen bar, arugula and fennel salad, homemade yogurt and granola, or, well, the list goes on.

Director of Dining Operations Alex Levin orchestrates daily lunches on the Upper School campus for 1,300 students and faculty. And whether that means making 850 grilled burgers every 20 minutes, using the industrial kitchen’s new, high-capacity tilting skillet braising pan to produce 60 gallons of stock for soup, or creating and packaging 1,500 two-ounce portions of dark-chocolate buttercrunch toffee for a special Valentine’s Day treat, there’s no such thing as a boring day. (Fun fact: that toffee treat required 94 pounds of dark chocolate, 47 pounds of sugar, and 47 pounds of butter.)

Levin emphasizes that he could not do what he does without his team at Meriwether-Godsey, which took over Sidwell’s dining operations in 2007. That team includes Executive Chef Andre Spurgeon, Assistant Director of Dining Services Claudia Villibord, and Sous Chef Chaz Rollins.

In addition to Dining Services on the Upper School, Levin also oversees the Lower School operations headed by Sous Chef Cecille Dematera, who creates a different set of menus and manages the food orders.

Levin’s love of food and hospitality started early. Levin remembers being surrounded by celebrations and events at a young age—always with food at hand. Starting when he was only 5, his grandmother—wife of a New York City rabbi—would pick him up from school and he would help her as she cooked, baked, and prepared for whatever celebration was forthcoming. “I caught the excitement about food and hospitality from her,” says Levin, who still bakes many of his grandmother’s traditional Jewish pastries and desserts.

But as is the case with good food, his ultimate career needed some time to develop. After earning a BA degree in applied mathematics and economics in 2000 at Yale, Levin started a career in finance and event planning. Nearly a decade later, he found his way back to his first passion and enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America.

Fast forward through serving as an executive pastry chef in restaurants and hotels, opening a pastry program in a top restaurant, serving as pastry director for a large restaurant group, winning awards and being written up in national media, Levin now feels he has found his home working at Sidwell Friends School in collaboration with Meriwether-Godsey.

“The partnership between Meriwether-Godsey and Sidwell is fantastic,” he says. “Here, I get to combine food, hospitality, operations, business, education, and—most of all—the importance and joy of community. At the end of the day, our work is about people and making them happy.” 

One reason the relationship works, he says, is that Meriwether-Godsey emphasizes community, quality, ingredients, support, and emotional intelligence, he notes. “Meriwether-Godsey’s values align perfectly with those of Sidwell. We are intentional about how we teach and learn from each other, start meetings, and how we treat each other with care and respect. That’s not often the case in restaurants, where egos can be big and tensions can run high.” At Sidwell, he adds, “It’s meaningful to have colleagues develop new recipes or bring special dishes from their cultures or heritages. We could not offer the high-caliber meals we do without the creativity, flexibility, and spirit of our team.”

This fall—his second year at Sidwell—meant transferring into the new kitchen and communal dining hall in the new Upper School. “This is the best kitchen I have ever worked in,” he says. “It surpasses even some of those in fancy NYC hotels or Michelin-star restaurants.” Though the team is still tweaking their processes in the new space, Levin says that the layout, top-tier equipment, flow, and bigger spaces in the kitchen and the dining hall offer more opportunities to take their operations to even higher levels.  “It’s exciting to see the communal spaces being used outside of lunchtime with evening events, faculty meetings, and student clubs and activities.” As it is in many homes, he thinks of the Sidwell kitchen as the heart of the school.

Levin’s favorite parts of his job? “Food gives people an unusual way to connect with each other and we love to listen to what students and staff like, don’t like, suggest, and rave about long after their last mouthful,” he says. Although sweet desserts are not part of the regular menu, Levin loves to treat the community to morning muffins hot out of the oven, afternoon snacks, a special chocolate-making class, or his award-winning poppy cake, pain au chocolate, or crème brûlée. “The kids, especially, love hanging out with our staff in the kitchen. They have ideas and opinions and know that we always have a little something for them if they are hungry. It’s the small moments of engagement that makes working at a school special.”