It's hard to take a college tour these days without hearing a lengthy speech sure to stir an appetite. The academics may be stellar, the campus beautiful and the extracurriculars vast and varied, but if the university can't give students something similar to Mom's home cooking, students are going to have serious soul-searching to do when weighing school options. Several organizations, like the Princeton Review and College Prowler, even go so far as to rank the dining options at various universities or award letter grades for different food-related aspects.
All of this makes Peter Kourafalos' job a little different than that of your typical restaurateur. Kourafalos, the chef manager at Carmichael dining hall, not only oversees an eatery that can serve upwards of 2,000 meals in a day, but also provides daily nourishment for what amounts to a small city.
Kourafalos, a self-described "townie," grew up in Medford in a restaurant family. His father, who had started as a butcher, became a chef on a cruise liner and eventually opened a local restaurant where Kourafalos often helped out. As a high-school student, he even worked at the Tufts Campus Center eateries. Later, he worked in a deli that sat in the Boston Avenue location now occupied by Boloco. In an era before the Food Network, Kourafalos often watched Jacque Pepin's and Julia Childs' PBS cooking shows
Despite this, Kourafalos never thought he would end up in the food business, much less at
"It was one of those things where I tried to shy away from it, but I truly enjoyed it," he said. "I got into it. I kept coming back."
After attending culinary school at Newbury College, Kourafalos went on to work in a wide variety of dining establishments, from an Italian restaurant — where he learned the idiosyncrasies of a brick oven — to Marriot hotels to high-end catering businesses and even a hospital. Before arriving at Tufts four years ago, Kourafalos prepared food for the scientists at the Cambridge Pfizer lab, where he prepared soups and sauces from scratch.
"It gave me a great understanding of their components," he said. And indeed, his entire range of experience seems to have constantly informed his abilities as a chef.
"I always try to take something from an experience," he said, including the time he had to learn to cook haggis for a going-away party.
"My wife laughs when we go out to eat," he said. "I'm always analyzing what I'm eating, trying to figure out what they used and how they did it."
This continual drive to learn seems to have paid off; he can now gauge the readiness of a piece of meat merely by touch.
In the kitchen, "You have to be paying attention and be willing to learn," Kourafalos said. "I once worked with a chef who told me, ‘In a kitchen, if you get to a point where you don't think you can learn anything more, you go find a new place.' Here, I learn something on a daily basis."
Kourafalos' cooking motto seems to be, "Keep things fresh." This not only refers to his ingredients but also to what he cooks and how he prepares it. He's constantly on the lookout for new ideas.
During the summer months, he attends collegiate food conferences and turns Carmichael into a test kitchen for new concepts with the summer session students as his privileged guinea pigs.
"We're always trying to keep up with restaurant trends — to stay on the cutting edge," he said. "We want to see what's popular with students. We're always looking for new stuff."
Kourafalos is an avid reader of the Carmichael suggestion board and takes students' recommendations seriously. He's even developed entire concepts, like the Carmichael street food nights, from ideas students have posted.
The epitome of his freshness mantra can perhaps best be seen in the way he approaches the specialty food nights, which happen a few times per semester.
"They're monotony breakers," he said. Some, like the Thanksgiving dinner, require more work and prep time. "We really get excited about these. We go all out. It's a blast."
Kourafalos and the staff have dressed up in everything from cowboy attire to bathing suits for specialty events and have decorated the dining hall with everything from canoes to a Sparky the Fire Dog mascot.
At the same time, he said, "We try not to overkill items. We don't want them to lose their spark."
For this reason, Kourafalos and the dining staff try to vary the specialty nights they put on from year to year. Next semester will feature a Russian food night and an Awards Dinner at which students will vote on their favorite food items and events in a manner similar to the Oscars.
This is all pretty remarkable when one considers that simply running a dining hall on a day-to-day basis has turned Kourafalos' manager, Dave Kelley, and nutritionist Julie Lampie into logistical maestros.
The quantities of food involved are tremendous: the chicken Caesar salad night alone requires 120 pounds of chicken, and a popular item like General Gao's chicken might require up to 180 pounds of meat. Carmichael can go through 150 hamburgers and 60 pizzas during one lunch period alone. Depending on the season, the dining hall might go through seven cases of bananas and six cases of apples in two days. For Thanksgiving dinner, the staff prepared nearly 300 pounds of turkey.
Because of the abundance of food prepared in Carmichael's kitchen, orders for ingredients must be placed two weeks ahead of time, using past records and a special computer program to try and predict the popularity of each item.
Menus must be planned at least six weeks in advance to allow the staff to balance the nutritional content of the meals and the time and equipment required to prepare each dish. Menus and nutritional content can then be posted online and the staff can prepare show plates to demonstrate meal balance and intended portion size to students.
This immense amount of preparation often requires Kourafalos to spend long hours in the Carmichael kitchen.
"My wife sometimes feels like I live here," he said, "but I don't look at the clock. I truly enjoy what I do, so time goes by so quickly. I'd rather stay and make sure things go off well."
When he does make it home, though, he doesn't cease cooking. He loves making Italian food — owing to an early formative experience in an Italian restaurant — as well as Cajun and Creole cuisine. During the summertime, he'll barbecue ribs or pulled pork with a homemade watermelon barbecue sauce. Sometimes, though, simple comfort food is enough. After a particularly long day in the kitchen, he might find relaxation in a bowl of pasta with freshly made marinara.
He gives huge credit to the chemistry of the dining staff.
"They really pull together," he said. "A couple of them have been here for almost 35 years. They really look out for students."
And the passion that Kourafalos brings to his cooking is immediately evident.
"I love to cook," he said. "It's definitely one thing I couldn't see myself not doing."
