Profiles: South Florida Chefs at Work

November 12, 2018
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Kitchen to Farm: Chantelle Sookram

At 28, Chantelle Sookram’s work experience has taken her across the country. Born and raised in Trinidad, she got her degree in culinary arts from Johnson and Wales and got an internship at BLT Steak during her sophomore year, and met Sam Gorenstein, who hired her full-time. She helped with the launch of MyCeviche locations, making sure the staff was trained, but eventually missed the kitchen work. So she traveled around, staging at restaurants along the way, and ended up at the Dirty Girl Farm in California. “I fell in love with produce,” she says, learning about mulching, harvesting tomatoes and apricots, pluots and plums. After that, she went east to New Jersey, where her mother lives, and worked at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, an experience that “was really intense, but made me a stronger cook.” For three months, she commuted, leaving work at 3am, taking the No. 1 train to Penn Station, catching the next train at 5am, arriving in New Jersey at 5:30am, waking up at 10:30am to get back to work. “But I was really happy to be there.”

Chantelle Sookram at Arsht Center farmers market
Chantelle Sookram at Arsht Center farmers market

Sookram found her way back to Miami and started working for Urban Oasis Project, running the Monday night farmers market at the Arsht Center. Her routine now includes going to Homestead every Friday to pick up eggs and produce from Redland farms, and explaining tropical fruits like wax jambu and longans to market visitors. To keep her hand in cooking, she is part of the monthly series of pop-up vegan dinners called Love and Vegetables at Earth N Us Farm. And she’s putting all those experiences to work with a fresh perspective. “Fresh food should be available for all,” she says. “I want to get people woke and keep cooking my food, reaching more people.”

Find out about Love and Vegetables pop-ups here


Feeding the Multitudes: Karla Hoyos

If you want to see a young chef leading the world into the future, look into the level gaze of Karla Hoyos.

As chef de cuisine at South Beach's chic The Bazaar by José Andrés, the 30-year-old Hoyos oversees the kitchen and dishes like Cuban coffee-rubbed churrasco and secreto iberico de bellota. She works with four sous chefs and a pastry chef, all male. Every morning, she gives her prep ladies a hug.  

Her career path was paved early on in an unwavering path to the professional kitchen at stratospheric levels. As a high school student in Veracruz, Mexico, Hoyos baked pastries and sold them to restaurants. After culinary school, she staged at the three-Michelin-star restaurant, Martin Berastegui in San Sebastian, Spain, the only woman in a kitchen of 70 men. She worked at a trattoria in Florence, Italy; then at El Rekondo in San Sebastian; and came back to the US to open a Spanish and Latin American restaurant in Indiana. From there, she went to Bon Appetit Management Company, a huge firm that does foodservice management for businesses, universities, museums and specialty venues, and worked her way up to an executive chef position.  

“I was doing everything – budgeting, recruiting, creating systems, food costs,” she recalls. Then, one year ago, company CEO Fedele Bauccio got a call from his friend, José Andrés. He needed chefs to send to Puerto Rico and feed people who were reeling after Hurricane Maria tore through the island, completely destroying its power grid and leveling neighborhoods.

Karla Hoyos, The Bazaar at SLS South Beach
Karla Hoyos, The Bazaar at SLS South Beach

Immediately, Hoyos was on a flight to the storm-ravaged island, where she got to work: “I started setting up systems, remote kitchens and ordering up 140,000 meals a day. There was a 7pm curfew. No clean water. No electricity.” The mission was to feed everyone a good meal: “José was very thoughtful about what he wanted: substantial protein, starch, vegetables. We made pastelón, a kind of shepherd’s pie with plantain, yuca, pork and rice, plus fruit. We ran out of ham on the island, so we had to be creative. Then we were out of cheese, but we had canned [cheese] that was actually very good. To José, it was very important that the sandwiches not be dry.”

Hoyos was supposed to be in Puerto Rico for six days. She stayed for a month and a half, returning because her sister was getting married. The experience on the island was life-changing. “It humbled me. How can I adapt after this?” she says. Helping Andrés also opened her eyes to her professional path. “I need to work with him,” she says. The feeling was mutual – a job offer for the position at The Bazaar came shortly afterward. She began work at February’s South Beach Wine and Food Festival. Since then, she has joined a group of local chefs, Recipes for Change, providing meals every month at Camillus House.

Hoyos with José Andrés serving meals in Puerto Rico
Hoyos with José Andrés serving meals in Puerto Rico (Photo courtesy of Karla Hoyos)

In his book, We Fed an Island, Andrés writes about Hoyos: “She quickly helped establish order and structure out of the chaos of the first days at El Choli, where we had no power and little cooperation from the people on-site. She is humble but she also isn’t fazed by people, rich or poor.”
Read We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time by José Andrés with Richard Wolffe. Andrés will be at the Miami Book Fair Nov. 18.


Finding Niches: Paulette Bilsky

When Bilsky decided make a career change and go to culinary school at nearly 40, she was older than most of the students and even some professors. What drove her was a need to educate people about healthy eating. After graduating from Johnson and Wales University, she found a diverse range of ways to showcase her skills. She created Superfoods for Superkids, an interactive cooking demo and helped 250 Girl Scouts get their cooking badges. She created culinary experiences – live demos – for the Home Shows four times a year, the annual Coconut Grove Arts Festival and Kiwanis Little Havana.

Paulette Bilsky
Paulette Bilsky

A charismatic performer, Bilsky is corporate chef for ElectriChef and, with fellow Les Dames d’Escoffier South Florida, cooked at Aegean Secrets at the James Beard House in New York City earlier this year (above). “The future is about diversity in the kitchen,” she says. “When you get a woman, you get the full package. We are the culinary world of tomorrow.”  

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